Abstract
This paper takes up the question of secrecy and sovereignty in Derrida’s final seminar on The Beast and the Sovereign. Focusing primarily on Derrida’s readings of Lacan and Celan in Volume I, it argues that, for Derrida, we should distinguish between the lie (or what Lacan calls ‘trickery’ or ‘feigning feint’), and the secret (or what Celan calls ‘the secret of an encounter’), and understand the sense in which the former implies an intentional and sovereign human subject, while the latter represents a limit to such a thing, and, arguably, to the concept of sovereignty as such. This explains, or helps explain, why, in his discussions of sovereignty, Derrida spends so much time examining the animal, on the one hand, and poetry, on the other. For, on his account, these both configure secrecy, and specifically what I refer to as the absolute secret.
Highlights
The publication of a thinker’s literary remains always brings the anticipation that secrets will be revealed— that something will emerge that topples established readings or canonical interpretations, and that, oddly after their death, we will somehow get to know them better or get a look into a personal life that, in life, they kept hidden or concealed
As I suggested in my introduction above, Derrida essentially proposes that we think about secrecy in two ways, or that we distinguish between two kinds of secrets: limited secrets on the one hand; and absolute secrets on the other
My suspicion is that, when they take up The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, most will be drawn to the comments Derrida makes in the ‘Eleventh Session’ on the ‘double bind’ of sovereignty and liberty—the sense in which these two concepts both presuppose and limit one another, and in which any effort to confront sovereignty with a claim to liberty is destined to reinscribe the sovereign law on another order or in another way
Summary
The publication of a thinker’s literary remains always brings the anticipation that secrets will be revealed— that something will emerge that topples established readings or canonical interpretations, and that, oddly after their death, we will somehow get to know them better or get a look into a personal life that, in life, they kept hidden or concealed. A little more precisely, I will argue that, on Derrida’s account, while a lie is always an intentional act, and implies a sovereign subject with the capacity or power to conceal, a secret is not—or, at least, not necessarily Even though it might appear banal at first glance, I think this suggests that, for Derrida, there is a secrecy that exceeds the sovereign. On Derrida’s and Celan’s account, poetry is conditioned by an absolute secrecy, which is why, no matter how much evidence we might collect, or how many interpretations we might complete, each encounter with a piece of poetry is in some sense entirely new, and it is always possible to say more While it might not seem so initially, these claims do have a relationship with the more overtly political aspects of The Beast and the Sovereign, and Derrida’s theory of sovereignty. As much as anything else, we will be looking into an abyss—one that, strange as it seems, looks back at us, or reads and provides its commentary on us even as we imagine we are reading and providing ours on it
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