Читать книгу In Defense of Secrets - Anne Dufourmantelle - Страница 17

A Treasure, a Poison

The secret leaves a secular shadow deposited in us. The border of a border. The word, having crossed centuries, designates the place of greatest intimacy, a place where rebirth is always possible, a place of the subject’s interiority. Above all else, though, it is essentially double: It is the bearer of life and of death.

Some secrets are toxic, while others are sources of life. This is the secret’s secret: It is poison or it is treasure. Sometimes only time can work to transform poison into treasure—for as we have seen, every secret is in the process of becoming, is a becoming. Too often we essentialize it, forgetting that it is an act (of reserve, of separation, of relegation to silence, or of divulgation) and a power.

A secret is one of the signatures of the person who holds it and who cannot be extracted from it without being altered. But we must go even further and declare this alteration itself inevitable.

In the myth of Perseus, protected by Athena’s shield and the winged sandals of Hermes, the hero cuts off Medusa’s head. From the wound flow two springs: One is deadly poison, and the other is an elixir of immortality. A toxic weapon and a remedy. Such is the essence of the secret: double. It can be an agent of destruction, slow or fast, and can become the bearer of the worst miasmas, just as it can reveal inestimable treasure, sheltering life in its regenerative power.

Sometimes secrets are slowly evolving viruses, familial dissimulations or lies of war, truncated or hidden filiations; they dig mortal furrows across several generations before they can be exposed to daylight and invited back differently. The same secret can serve life or death, depending. A secret belongs to the side of trauma as much as of jouissance. It can refer to dissimulated possessions or practices or essences. Its fundamental ambivalence makes it dangerous to handle, to express. Without doubt this is why no power can do without it—and no love life, either. It mingles with the truth and with lies but does not become them.