I Have A Taste For The Secret

"... naming itself would be impossible without iterability. Taking the case of Socrates, since we mentioned it a moment ago: the name Socrates has to remain the same, the same has to be repeated, but each time I say 'Socrates' the naming has to be another and to designate the same otherwise and as something other. So in naming, in nameability itself, there is iterability, or what has no name." [68]

"Why write? I always have the feeling -- at once very modest and hyperbolically presumptuous -- that I have nothing to say. I don't feel I have anything in me that's interesting enough to authorize my saying 'here's the book I planned all by myself, without anyone asking me for it'. What presumption it takes to say 'here's what I think, what I write, and it deserves to be published and launched into the world'!" [65]

"I have a taste for the secret, it clearly has to do with not-belonging; I have an impulse of fear or terror in the face of a political space, for example, a public space that makes no room for the secret. For me, the demand that everything be paraded in the public square and that there be no internal forum is a glaring sign of the totalitarianization of democracy. I can rephrase this in terms of political ethics: if a right to the secret is not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space. Belonging -- the fact of avowing one's belonging, of putting in common -- be it family, nation, tongue -- spells the loss of the secret." [59]

"... in everything I've published there are always touchstones announcing what I would like to write about later on -- even ten or twenty years later on ..." [46]

"I detest grammatical mistakes. Even when I take the liberties that some people find provocative, I do so with the feeling -- justifiable or not -- that I do in fact know the rules." [43]

"Even when I give the impression of transgressing, putting into question, displacing, it is always under their authority, with a sense of responsibility in the face of a certain philological morality, before a certain ethics of reading or of writing. In short: before the law." [43]

"Memoirs, in a form that does not correspond to what are generally called memoirs, are the general form of everything that interests me -- the wild desire to preserve everything, to gather everything together in its idiom. To gather together even that which disseminates and, by its very essence, defies all gathering." [41]

"And this is why, after that highly dialectizing first book of mine, whenever I insisted on a non-dialectizable difference, I remarked with discretion, but markedly, that it was not a question of opposing a dialectic. I have never opposed the dialectic. Be it opposition to the dialectic or war against the dialectic, it's a losing battle. What it really comes down to is thinking a dialecticity of dialectics that is itself fundamentally not dialectical." [33]

"... where there is a place for the arrivant, the text is not intelligible, the discourse bears a zone of emptiness ..." [31]

"I am tempted to say that my own experience of writing leads me to think that one does not always write with a desire to be understood -- that there is a paradoxical desire not to be understood. It's not simple, but there is a certain 'I hope that not everyone understands everything about this text', because if such a transparency of intelligibility were ensured it would destroy the text, it would show that the text has no future [avenir], that it does not overflow the present, that it is consumed immediately. Consequently a certain zone of disacquaintance, of not-understanding, is also a reserve and an excessive chance -- a chance for excess to have a future, and consequently to engender new contexts ... Thus there is a desire, which may appear a bit perverse, to write things that not everyone will be able to appropriate through immediate understanding. I have often been accused of writing things that are unnecessarily difficult, that could be simplified, and I have even been accused of doing it on purpose. I'd say that this accusation is just and unjust at the same time." [30]

"The desire to belong to any community whatsoever, the desire for belonging tout court, implies that one does not belong. I could not say 'I want to be one of the family' if in fact I was one of the family. To put it another way, I could not say 'I want to be Italian, European, to speak this language, etc.', if that were already the case. Accounting for one's belonging -- be it on national, linguistic, political or philosophical grounds -- in itself implies a not-belonging. This can have political consequences: there is no identity. There is identification, belonging is accounted for, but this itself implies that the belonging does not exist, that the people who want to be this or that -- French, European, etc. -- are not so in fact." [28]

"In a democracy, when someone asks you your name you have to answer; public space is a space in which a subject is questioned and has to answer." [26]

"I would have far fewer difficulties and reservations in accepting the image of a community that does not constitute itself on the basis of a contemporaneity of presences but rather through the opening produced by what you have called allegoresis -- that is, the interpretation of a text not given, not closed in on itself, an interpretation that itself transforms the text." [24]

"That which defies anticipation, reappropriation, calculation -- any form of predetermination -- is singularity. There can be no future as such unless there is radical otherness, and respect for this radical otherness." [21]

"Yes things do appear to look that way. But if it were really the case, then we would be dealing with two different fields, disciplines, texts or events, with philosophy on one side and literature on the other. Without mixing them up, and without reducing the one to the other, perhaps it may be said that there is always, in what we call 'philosophical', an adherence to natural language, a profound indissociability of certain philosophemes from the Greek, the German, the Latin, which is not the literary part of philosophy, but is instead something that philosophy shares with literature. And conversely, there is something translatable in literature, a promise of translation, and thus an aspect that is not extraneous to philosophy. Both philosophy and literature are bound up with natural languages: no philosophy exists that may be absolutely formalized in a reduction to a conventional or technical language. Descartes and Leibniz had their dreams, of course, but in fact the reduction is impossible, and for reasons that are not merely factual or empirical. Like literature, philosophy too is indissociably linked to idiom, to the corpora of natural languages. From this point of view, therefore, one cannot speak of language or the relation with language as a border between philosophy and literature." [11]

"It could easily be shown, in fact, in Plato as in others, that imagination has an ambiguous nature: on one hand, it is that which threatens truth and the idea -- the image is inferior to the idea; and, on the other, it has a positive function -- it is philosophically and pedagogically necessary. It is the locus of fiction, but also of a certain synthesis, a place of mediation." [5]

I Have A Taste For The Secret (1997)

Jacques Derrida & Maurizio Ferraris