Читать книгу In Defense of Secrets - Anne Dufourmantelle - Страница 11

Etymology

Between the sacred and the secular, Christianity has constructed a place where the one might not be separated from the other, where “our heart laid bare” would be legible to God. The space of this intimacy in which the divine is reflected allows for other intangible borders than those that govern social life, opening onto a sacred garden. In Fra Angelico’s annunciations, secret is the enclosure separating the garden from the space where the angel Gabriel speaks to Mary. Secret is the path Virgil takes in the savage forest of Dante’s Inferno. Secret is the knowledge promised only to the one who is initiated. Secret is what, out of sight, appears only obliquely: the anamorphic skull, the beloved name spelled out by the notes of a score, the seal of a union joining two beings to the exclusion of others. Secret is the grounding of an oath—and, as such, is able to be betrayed.

The Old Testament houses the book of Esther (whose name means secret). It links the medieval juridical notion of the for—which has become the for intérieur, or innermost heart ¹—to the voice of the poet and the troubadour, to the spiritual song and the subject in search of knowledge. For the Romantics, it would be the mirror of the soul, which itself reflects the world. In the twentieth century, it would be the unconscious “structured like a baggage” that would come to mark the expression of this interiority. Out of the rubble of the two world wars emerged the technologies of surveillance: digital media, media discourses—the tyranny of the right to knowledge going hand in hand with a collective resentment at feeling deceived.