Читать книгу In Defense of Secrets - Anne Dufourmantelle - Страница 13

Occult Force

When a word appears, a world is born with it. It was in medieval Christianity that the figure of the secret was no longer thought as the order of the world but as the subject’s interiority. This inner place was the place of the heart that only God could know. Even during the Inquisition, and under torture, anyone could invoke this inviolable place, the innermost heart, nobody’s business but God’s. This was a revolution that, little by little, would make the “intimate” a value and a subject, a being who belonged first to themselves before being part of the world. This philosophical lineage, which extends from Augustine to Abelard, from Duns Scotus and Pascal to Kierkegaard, sought to find singularity in a relationship with the other, no longer in the immateriality of being. The secret is thus a key to the dramatic action of medieval romance. It is imagined for its cathartic function. To write what must in principle be hushed, to reveal the hidden to the knowledge of all, is a form of social transgression. To break the secret is to spy on the forbidden. From the twelfth century on, the contradiction lay between the inner most heart (a zone exempt from all jurisdiction, beneath the eyes of God only) on the one hand and, on the other, the development of judicial practice that assumed the possibility of forcing a testimony or committing one’s word under the seal of truth. For example: Under what conditions can we demand the collection of the secret of confession? So many questions have fundamentally to do with the question of the individual’s autonomy, between rebellion and obedience.

From the clandestine to the intimate, from the inaccessible to the revealed, from plot to public unveiling, the secret has become a key to individual identity. In Hellenic and Roman societies, by contrast, it was the prerogative of gods and legislators, essentially reflecting nothing other than an order of the immutable world.

Also at the turn of the twelfth century, another word expressed the secret: to occult [occulter], from the Latin occullere (from ob/colere, which means against/to worship, to cultivate). In this sense, there is a fundamental distinction between the secret linked to secretum and the one linked to occulta. The secretum refers to a human knowledge that can or must be dissimulated. It concerns both the interior world and the strategies politics constructs vis-à-vis the control of information and the protection of confidentiality that a society offers to its citizens. The occulta, on the other hand, designates things that are connected to the divine, to initiatory quests. In a sense, the entire question of the separation between the sacred and the secular is posed here, in a vision of the truth as “retrenchment.” This was how it was designated by ancient wisdom: out of sight and out of common understanding, reserved for those who were ready to undertake the initiate’s journey. But what is separated when the gods no longer exist? What enclosure of what garden would make an annunciation appear?

But the idea of a sacred, obscured truth, accessed only by an initiatory trajectory, does not allow us to perceive the secret’s dimension of becoming. What is obscured is seized in a fixed intemporality. The thing is hidden for eternity. In fact, however, in the secret is a becoming.

As in every living process, this becoming is a chrysalis that, in its own temporality, integrates otherness into the heart of the same. Let us take, for example, the case of subjective interiority, the camera obscura of a being. The secret that it keeps (for example, a revelation about an adoption) does not remain fixed forever; it evolves at the same time as the subject who keeps it. This spiral by which a being, returning back through the same experiences and the same traumas, is liberated and delivered into their own history—this spiral is in fact a dynamic.

However, the secret is still the very thing we often wish to possess in another being. We want to capture what always escapes. There are two reasons for this escape: first, because in its essence the secret is not capturable, and second, because it is the unbreakable knot of a being’s becoming, their inner motor. Every secret is a becoming. What is secret is what makes itself secret.