A philosophy of secrets

Fernando Kaskais

Jun 2

The last Marranos, a once-secret Jewish community in Belmonte, Portugal. All photos by Vlad Sokhin/Panos Pictures

Jacques Derrida was fascinated by the figure of the Marrano Jew, whose identity could barely be told even to themselves

By Peter Salmon, is an Australian writer living in the UK. His latest book is An Event Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida (2020), and his writing has appeared in the TLS, the New Humanist, the Sydney Review of Books and The Guardian, among others.

… the Marranos, with whom I have always secretly identified (but don't tell anyone) …
– from 'Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression' (1994) by Jacques Derrida

What is it to have a secret? What does it reveal about who we are?

We are used to regarding secrets as duplicitous. By hiding the truth, we are attempting to fool someone. Sometimes, the ends we are hoping to achieve may be beneficial, such as the little white lies we tell our friends or the case of various resistance movements, whose members are 'sworn to secrecy'. But, in general, we are used to viewing secrets with distaste, associating them with lies. In having a secret, in keeping a secret, we must present to the world a false face. When challenged, we must say something that is not true. To have a secret is also a form of betrayal – I know something you don't know, and I am denying you that knowledge deliberately.

To some, it is the deliberate nature of keeping our knowledge from another – be it an individual, a group, a society – that perhaps defines what a secret is. One cannot, it is generally felt, have a secret one does not know one has. One must, in some sense, deliberately and consciously decide not to tell. Thus, a secret is something that I do not put into words, but which I tell myself. One does not carry a secret inside unless one has performed this act, until one has enunciated to oneself what it is one wishes to keep secret, and made the decision to let no one else hear the words one has spoken to oneself.

For the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, best known for his idea of deconstruction, the idea of secrets exerted a huge fascination. Like all philosophers, he was always hugely interested in what we might roughly call 'consciousness', the part of our thinking of which we are aware, and to which we feel most intimately connected. This is the part of our thinking we tend to regard as 'us' – we have our opinions, our preferences, our thoughts about this and that. This idea has been central to Western philosophy. René Descartes, for instance, argued that knowing we are conscious was all we could be sure of – I think therefore I am – while Jean-Paul Sartre argued that it is both the source and the guarantor of our freedom.

Jewish men walking home after Saturday evening worship in Belmonte, Portugal

In the late 19th and throughout the 20th century, a number of philosophers, Derrida among them, have performed a radical critique of this position. The idea that we have some sort of pure access to consciousness, and indeed that consciousness is some sort of pure expression of our selfhood is, they argue, highly questionable, if not downright false. Consciousness is as constructed as our ability to count – it is learnt. The fact that we communicate with ourselves – that voice in our head – in the language we have learned from the society in which we live is a banal example of this. In another time or place, I would 'think' differently about everything. There is, the argument goes, no basic, pure 'me' underneath all the ways of thinking I have learned. The voice in my head is not my own.

Derrida's early work deconstructed the ways in which we mistake the 'voice in our head' for our 'selves'. In religious thinking, we even mistake it for our 'soul'. For Derrida, anything that has been 'constructed' can be 'deconstructed', a form of taking apart of something without destroying it. It is a method of seeing what factors have come together to make us understand something as a particular thing – be it 'God', 'truth', or 'the self'.

In the case of the self, we take a huge number of disparate factors and then give them a unifying label, in my case 'Peter Salmon'. This is what I call my 'identity' – it is the name I sign to an essay like this (also made up of disparate factors but made to appear whole), but also to legal documents, social media, and the name I give to introduce myself. My book about Derrida, An Event, Perhaps (2020), has my name on the front, I declare it to be my ideas.

But none of these identities is a full representation of myself – there is in each a degree of secrecy. Nowadays, for instance in social media, we are very aware that we keep secrets: one doesn't usually want one's boss to know about one's parties or relationships, while there are undoubtedly things we will not tell either our parents or, in some cases, the taxman...

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https://aeon.co/essays/why-jacques-derrida-was-fascinated-by-secret-jewishness