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Explores the sense in which secrecy is a condition for social relations The Snowden Affair, Wikileaks, the 'lone wolf' terrorist, Clinton's private email account - the question of the secret is one of the central elements, and arguably the central element, of our contemporary political experience. And yet very few have explored this question in a fundamentally philosophical manner. Organized as a reflection on Jacques Derrida's later writings on secrecy, Charles Barbour looks at the basic ontological question 'what is a secret?' He does so in four chapters, each of which engages with a separate problematic - society and the oath, literature and testimony, philosophy and deception, and time and death. He shows that secrecy is not a negation of our relations with others, but a necessary condition of those relations, or that we can only reveal ourselves to one another, and indeed to anything other, insofar as we conceal as well. Charles Barbour is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Western Sydney University.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction:
Cauernosis Anfractibus
- Under Oath: Secrecy, Perjury, and the Social Bond
- Open Secrets: Literature, Politics, and Testimonial Truth
- Between Two Solitudes: Self-Deception, Consciousness, and the Other Mind
- Being Alone: Death, Solitude, and the End of the World
Conclusion: Secretions
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Charles Barbour is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Western Sydney University. He is the author of The Marx Machine: Politics, Polemics, Ideology (Lexington Books, 2012). He is co-editor of Action and Appearance: Ethics and the Politics of Writing in Hannah Arendt (Continuum, 2011) and After Sovereignty (Routledge, 2009). He has written numerous book chapters and journal articles on social and political theory, with a special emphasis on Karl Marx.
