How to speak of the dignity of the secret whilst respecting its secrecy? How to draw attention to the vital powers of the secret in an age obsessed with knowing everything and convinced that everything can be known?

The six sections of In Defense of Secrets offer a philosopher’s and psychoanalyst’s foray into a territory both ignored and misunderstood. Philosophically speaking, the secret is immanence, or, better, arises in the horizon of unlimited immanence (p. 5). Psychoanalysis has often ignored the secret; the ‘ineffable’ it has confined to the awkward zone between the Symbolic and the Real. But to become a psychoanalyst is to cross over to the secret’s side (p. 3), to be able to sense it as akin but irreducible to truth, silence, memory, forgetting and dreaming.

Dufourmantelle starts by inviting the reader to consider the demise of the ways of the secret in a modern world typically (mis)guided by an adherence to scientific truth, as opposed to learning to live with the shadows and the penumbras of the secret. The secret is sequestered, set apart, but can be approached by familiarising ourselves with its environs and its affinity to the sacred, the sacrifice and mystery (p. 4). In fact, our very modern unfamiliarity with the meaningful content for the three terms justifies a philosophical and psychoanalytic exploration with a view to discovering in the secret a hopeful way forward, away from the stagnant, spiralling, transparency-obsessed modes of thinking that prevail in the present.

With the deftness of an experienced analyst Dufourmantelle gradually steers the reader towards the qualities of the secret, adding, subtracting, differentiating or linking terms, while gently introducing, again and again, the premise that modern minds might find hardest to accept, namely, that some things are not to be known. At the same time, she introduces the difference between kee** secrets and being secret. She makes this clear: the secret is not dissimulation but au secret, forbidden from existing and at the border of becoming-conscious, the custodian of our histories. This kind of secret you do not keep; it keeps you (p. 7). This kind of secret ‘is neither dissimulation not that which awaits to be revealed; it is a becoming’ (pp. 6–7). She builds her case from there, subsequently turning to the subtle relation the secret has to truth, and to the lack of sophistication that renders them as opposites. As we read on we begin to see how the secret might appear in words that refrain from rendering it all-transparent. In fact, the aphoristic style of this short volume pays homage to the secret by allowing the reader to submit to the not-all, not as irritating deficiency of knowledge but as an escape from the discourse of science (and academia), which obscures the ways of becoming.

In the section entitled ‘Memories of the Secret’ Dufourmantelle explores the filiations of the secret to two aspects of the ineffable, the oath and the sacred. Human communities, she argues, are structured by these borders. Likewise, in analysis, to say everything does not amount to confession, but to avowal and pardon, is a risky wager that implies breaking out of prefabricated scenarios in order to invent new ones, more living and open, and effect metamorphosis. For that reason, when interrogating the past there are not necessarily revelations but displacements that can lift the weight of curses and the logic that perpetuates their violence. We are therefore led to an important re-evaluation: accepting the secret is the opposite of a threat; what has been sequestered can be creation, freedom, joy.

In the same section Dufourmantelle offers a genealogy of the secret by surveying its successive meanings from antiquity to Christianity, to the era after the death of God. The Greeks place the secret in the domain of the ethics of rightness (p. 12). For the Greeks, for whom man is ignorant of fate, saying yes to fate is not fatality but freedom, letting fatality run its course. Thus, Oedipus’s hubris was that he ‘knew’ and considered himself superior than fate. In the Christian tradition (Genesis), man enters the finitude of punishment for violating the secret, having eaten the fruit of knowledge. As Christianity begins to forge the subject’s interiority, the pursuit of the secret enters the philosophical tradition, from Augustine, Abelard and Dunn Scotus to Pascal and Kierkegaard, as a search for singularity. It passes through the twelfth century as secretum, which refers to human knowledge, and the occult, that designates things connected to the divine. In medieval romance it assumes a cathartic function. Eventually, the secret becomes just about individual identity (p. 15) and the divine knowledge dimension is forgotten, along with the dimension of becoming. At this point, Dufourmantelle draws the secret-as-becoming out of obscurity, advocating becoming as chrysalis (subject to metamorphosis), which has its own temporality and ‘integrates otherness to the heart of the same’ (p. 16); becoming which involves a spiral (re)turning (back) but is also dynamic; becoming in which ‘what is secret is what makes itself secret’ (p. 16). This near-tautology is not meant to baffle but to highlight the creative power of what must remain hidden – a space that must be defended.

In a civilisation of confession, full of violent segregations and ‘tools of communications’, we often forget the secret as unavowable. Secrets begin in childhood and exist in the movement of desire and fears as well as in the ambivalence of love and hate (p. 24). Thus the secret is double: life and death; poison and treasure; elixir of immortality and death. It belongs as much to the side of trauma as to jouissance (p. 25). Equally importantly for the child, it is a safe space in the first crucial steps to individuation, a space protected from the totalising gaze of mother.

Psychoanalysis has at times lost sight of the secret or unwittingly delivered it to medicine. By way of recognising its importance, then, the unconscious should be approached, once again, in such a manner that its unveiling does not violate that essential presence in us ‘which guards the intimate and protects its richness’ (p. 20). A go-between is needed, an analyst or an artist, a being whose listening allows us to risk being connected back to this out-of-time, from which flows the jouissance and the chaos of drives. Dufourmantelle exemplifies this attentive and dignified listening with a powerful example, Storia I, with which ends the second section, ‘The Secret’s Passions’.

In the next section, ‘Being and Having’, Dufourmantelle anchors the experience of the secret to jouissance and the facticity of death, or, with regards to the latter, the duration of life marked by the ignorance of the moment of our death. The secret begins within the body as jouissance, introducing the difference between being and having a body (p. 41). Our body, argues Dufourmantelle, is the archive of other bodies (p. 41). We can sense that in lived experience, especially when memories surprise us (p. 42), or in analysis, when we contemplate the ways in which the mystery of sexuality is etched in our own lives, the life of the child who gives meaning in retrospect. In that sense, the secret is not always the truth of being, but a time in itself, ‘a relation to truth and not truth itself’ (p. 50). The secret is and supports constant becoming; metamorphosis. For a surveillance society that fabricates ‘an economy based on guilt’ (p. 52), being rather than having becomes the qualitative difference of defending the body’s secret as opposed to turning the body into an asset. More important, kee** a secret to oneself assumes a psychic stability as well as taking account of the other’s capacity to respond (p. 52). Nothing is due to the other, notes Dufourmantelle, no debt is incurred when it comes to the inviolable quality of the secret. As for the secret’s relation to death, this is intimated in another case study (Storia II), a woman’s testimony of her relationship to the beloved dead in her family, ‘which cannot be smoothed over by words’ (p. 56). One gets the impression that the addressee of such a narrative has no other choice but to witness the power of the secret in silence.

In ‘Transparency and Truth’, Dufourmantelle turns to the secret’s relation to truth, and the psychosocial characteristic of the present that make both terms impossible. Today, in an Orwellian world that craves transparency, the secret is deemed as a threat to a society that decrees individuals should have no other side and should always be adaptable and predictable. However, transparency creates new opacities, such as the wholesale rejection of knowing and cynicism (p. 60). In this context, the question of truth becomes obsolete, in proportion to the subject being stripped of complexities in the panoptical space. It is only inevitable that such societies will be unable to see the secret as anything else than at attempt at dissimulation, and will continue to pursue the transparency-truth project with a growing array of surveillance practices. Societies of accelerated programmed transparency are ill-suited to accommodate the past as secret. The spiral is an apt metaphor of the prevailing norm: given to a single vanishing point, the spiral entails an anamorphosis and reactualisation of the present, a worrisome return given not to what returns but to the return itself; the same as different. As a result, it is only the fantasmatic aspects of the secret that come to the surface, exemplified by the usual indignation at the ‘hidden arrangements’ which undermine the social contract, such as the obscene making of money and incest happening discreetly. By the same token, the figures of the paranoiac and the voyeur can be considered as typical exacerbations of our epochal symptom: the paranoiac sees in every being a potential secret thief, since paranoia is obsessed with the secret, idolises it and makes a world of allies and enemies; the voyeur is a healed paranoiac, but neither of the two can stand the thought that something is hidden from their senses.

Towards the end of this section, Dufourmantelle argues that the secret is both vulnerable and powerful. It is possible to copy, attack, or despise someone’s secret, to which there is no absolute protection. However, the secret is also inappropriable by science or other forms of knowledge. It is a form of liberty and power, and the driving force of creativity that links of memory to language. It is a world of light and shadow. Neither subscribing to the split between mandatory obscenity and actual puritanism nor reducible to cynicism, the secret ‘sketches our arabesque of pleasure’ (p. 91).

In ‘The Ethics of the Secret’, Dufourmantelle places the secret beyond good and evil, and in doing so she aligns it with ethics rather than morality or moral consciousness. She discusses this alignment obliquely by referring, for example, to the juxtaposition of Kant to Constant, and the relativisation of the absolute law the latter advocates. Changing moral rules according to circumstances is dangerous, argues Dufourmantelle, given that we put ourselves as censor above the law (p. 87). By the same token, she discusses George Steiner’s critique of Freud, and how the latter fails to to see that dreams speak our being’s secret with a force that cannot be subjugated, constituting a vital dynamic dimension foreign to psychoanalysis. The philosophical and psychoanalytic scotoma is widely replicated by the dominant characteristics of consumer culture: we are entering an era of gentle glaciation and the continuous anaesthesia of organised leisure (p. 101). In this context, our difficulty in appreciating the secret emanates from the devaluation of the erotic and religious discourse (p. 96) and our poor understanding of love and its proper relationship to desire. Dufourmantelle’s example of love is Alice in Wonderland, the young girl’s magical transformations and awakening to another reality by falling out of childhood. If desire is dangerous, and one might lose sleep, identity, reason or confidence, falling in love is a way of fixing the constant revolution of desire, a turning-around, a revolt, and a turning-back, which holds and reassures one that we have not crashed into terror (p. 101). This kind of love is (a) secret.

Finally, in the section entitled ‘Toward Mystery’, Dufourmantelle returns to the secret in its relationship to truth, sacrifice and mystery. With a nod to Freud, she reintroduces the secret as integral to truth, specifically, the concealing of ‘things’ and the (repressed) concealing of concealing related to the basic difference between forgetting and disappearance by imitation, trompe l’oeil, lookalike. This is Dufourmantelle’s open invitation or challenge for each and every one of us: to open up new ways, and times, in which everything could speak to us while kee** its secret (p. 113). She explains that unveiling holds irresistible attraction – ven buried trauma comes up – but here the matter is speech, the possibility of speaking and in doing so approximating but not revealing an interior secret we always keep, will never cross our lips, is known only to us (p. 115). That secret is a native language which makes our own resonate (p. 115). It holds the power to frees us from an ancient subjection (p. 122), so long as we bear in mind that there is a crucial difference between not wanting to know as denial and not wanting to know everything (p. 123).

We can perhaps find it easy to apprehend the secret in its relation to (unconscious) truth through our familiarity with psychoanalysis. What is much more challenging is to do the same with reference to the divine and to sacrifice. Here, the evocation of the divine does not amount to a religious call, but to a call for a radically different perspective on subjectivity which brings excess (back) into the social order (p. 130). This can occur in two ways. The secret in its divine quality harks back to the relation of the initiated to a knowledge that removes one or several members of the collective from the group (p. 130). This ‘excess’ is not paranoid, conspiratorial or obscene. It may lead to a different mode of relating to the Other.

In sacrifice, the subject is detached from life and their own self to enter into another law than that which orders the values of life (p. 129). They accept that they are nothing more than a koros, a symbolic vector by which events occur. In that sense they are au secret. Sacrifice re-establishes the secular/sacred separation in the place of where it has been ignored (p. 130). Even when it is ‘monstrous’, it still expresses a demand, a cry, a prayer, or a revolt by the one who sacrifices themselves against the order of the world (p. 130). The Other is addressed, affected, changed. Dufourmantelle insists that the sacrifice is always a sacrifice to the gods. It leaves gods their divinity and resolves the human being to their finitude (p. 131). It maintains the border between the human and the divine. At this point the reader might want to ask: what kind of a relationship to the divine could be envisaged today and could such a relationship offer a way out of manic truth-chasing and transparency?

By way of an answer, Dufourmantelle turns to what is less, rather than more transparent, namely the mystery of transformation as experienced, for example, in analysis through repetition, resonating with insight, interior vision, turning towards the past and truth telling. There is turning in repetition, notes Dufourmantelle, and this turning is a fracture. Substantial healing is a becoming which is simultaneously the writing of a body and the fragmentation of self in becoming-subject (p. 135). A new life is both a beginning and constant metamorphosis. Like nature that comes to life in secret, to be fecund – able to metamorphose – needs the secret (p. 135). She adds this: mystery draws upon religion and the dimension of transcendence, the secret is more modest but no less vital; ‘it envelops, protects, and defends a necessary transformation’ (p. 135), always tending towards mystery which is an horizon (p. 137). Secret-mystery is immanence, or, in her own words, ‘a becoming-secret of the world’ (p. 137).