Читать книгу In Defense of Secrets - Anne Dufourmantelle - Страница 12

When the Secret Appears

When the word segrada / secretus first appeared in writing, in the Middle Ages around the twelfth century, it described the separation of a harvest’s good grain from the bad and, by extension, all forms of setting aside: restroom facilities, concealed drawers, missives. From there, these parts of hidden life became whatever part of the body is hidden, eroticized. The lady’s secret is the intimacy of her “kiss” to the knight. From “seeing” to touching, the secret belongs to whatever part of desire must remain hidden. But equally, the secret is spiritualized. It designates the divine and, moreover, the vow and the sacred that contribute to its primacy though language (sacramentum). The silence of the mystic shared with God belongs to it.

The secret is neither the enigma nor the mystery toward which it still points. Enigma and mystery fall more under the Latin occulta than the setting apart of segrada. Enigma is a knowledge not yet unveiled by science or experience. And isn’t mystery that key figure which never ceases to cast its infracturable permanence ever farther away?

Going back further than segrada / sacramentum, we find the Greek word crisis and the Indo-European Sanskrit word kris. These etymologies en abyme lead to questions: Is the secret grounded on something worldly, or is it an invisible, ineffable reality? In itself, is it a figure of human interiority, as it has become for us, or is it the nature of the world to be “secret”?

For the Greeks, man was ignorant of the fate that would take hold of him in the form of contradictory passions. Through the intermediary of Tiresias the divine, it was said to Laius, the father of Oedipus, that his son would kill him. The fault would lie in the King of Thebes’s refusal of the knowledge confided by the gods, about which he could do nothing. Far from “doing” something or preparing for it—for the Greeks, saying yes to fate meant the possibility of freedom from it: Letting fatality run its course is not the same as submitting to it, as Freud would later also say—Laius distanced the child, asking his servant to remove him far from his eyes. We know the rest. Only contemplation can deliver the human being from the passions and the seductions of appearance, appeasing the one who seeks. For the Greeks, the secret is nothing other than the world itself; Heidegger would return to this in his notion of the truth. At the end of Oedipus at Colonus, it is once more a question of that secret confided to Theseus by Oedipus, which could not and must not be divulged to anyone, not even to his beloved daughter Antigone. This secret is the place (and the method) of his death, the punctum that represents the “last” secret before which every human life falters.

In his seminar on hospitality, Derrida interrogates the place of Oedipus’s death, which must not be divulged. The secret as “moment of speech” is the relation that unites Oedipus to Theseus but also—insofar as his daughters must not know where Oedipus is going to die—the unpronounce able of an inviolable and sacred space. Sophocles’s tragedy is truly “clairvoyant” in showing us, as the contents of the secret, as object of possible hold and fulfillment, the place of death itself—that is, precisely what escapes all hold, all fulfillment, the pure immanence of the instant of death, subject to exile and wandering.

Oedipus gouged his eyes out because he knew the truth but, out of pride, believed himself stronger than fate. When the cosmos makes the hero into the toy of dangerous passions, the gods will attempt to bring the one gone astray back to the place that suits them. The Greek ethic is that of rightness; it assumes a capacity to refer in oneself to an equanimity that is not a subjective dimension but a universal rule. What governs the laws of the human world also applies to the natural world. When a subject thinks themselves equal to the gods, they tumble into hybris (excessiveness), like Epimetheus opening Pandora’s box. The hidden ills of creation contained in the box spread throughout mankind—with the exception of hope, which remains shut in the box.

In the book of Genesis, man enters into finitude as punishment for having eaten from the tree of knowledge. For the Hebrews, all knowing is a secret, and its transmission assures permanence and value. This is an ethic of and a responsibility toward what must remain “hidden” (such as the name of God, unpronounceable) that commits beings to the adventure of knowledge but also to the liberating renouncement of all knowing. That totality belongs only to God.

The hermeneutic Talmudic Hebrew tradition shows the creative, nominative force that must remain hidden. In the biblical text we find the image of a double veil separating the “holy” from the “holy of holies” in the temple. For the common individual, this veil marks out an inaccessible space, a space that must be defended. In the Christian tradition, this veil is interiorized as the inviolable innermost heart. In calling themselves Marranos, the persecuted Jews perpetuated the heritage of their people in secret. Out of fear of death, this silent chosenness was not to be spoken of in broad daylight. Certain rituals even came to structure their means of perpetuation and resistance, founding their transmission on the secret.