Читать книгу In Defense of Secrets - Anne Dufourmantelle - Страница 10

In the Crypt

From the hidden scheming of gods to “top secret” affairs, from the erotic confidence to the cover-up of a crime, truth seeds its silences straight into existence. Why is it necessary to keep it apart, aside, to make use of this chosenness for ends of power, of love, or of initiation?

Our vocabulary suggests an array of secrets. Mentally or spiritually, they range from erotic daydreams to thoughts, from feelings to sensations. In the business world, they’re present in kickbacks, in under-the-table transactions. In terms of objects, they’re found in the mechanisms of locks, hidden doors, undetectable tunnels. In the initiatory register of rituals, they take the forms of prayers, observances, sacred writings. This constellation of the secret would tend finally to relegate it to having—whereas it is fundamentally on the side of being.

It’s the psychoanalyst in me who wonders. She listens on a daily basis to hidden thoughts, to forbidden images, to asides—in conversations, to what isn’t said. What is this strange passion that makes her the one who receives a family’s intrigues, scenes from which the shame can’t be shaken, fraudulent traffickings, denunciations, hidden filiations—but also inexpressible joys, loves, and promises? Into what crypts is an analyst invited to descend in order to encounter true speech? Or is this a question of another secret? Not a question of the dissimulations that punctuate our existence, with our more or less forced consent and inherited from our childhood, but of what is, in each one of us, hidden au secret, forbidden from existing? Here we must imagine a border separating the conscious from the unconscious—or rather, since I do not like to substantify psychic spaces, a becoming-conscious and a becoming-hidden. For without knowing it we can also be custodians of our own histories. In the case of this kind of secret, it could be said that it’s the secret that keeps you.