Derrida's Secret ─ Perjury, Testimony, Oath

The Snowden Affair, Wikileaks, the 'lone wolf' terrorist, Clinton's private email account - the secret is arguably the central element of our contemporary political experience. Now, Charles Barbour looks at the basic ontological question 'what is a secret?'

Organised as a reflection on Jacques Derrida's later writings on secrecy, four chapters each look at a separate problematic: society and the oath, literature and testimony, philosophy and deception, and time and death.

Barbour shows that secrecy is not a negation of our relations with others, but a necessary condition of those relations. 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 University of Western Sydney. 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.