The Unsecret is Otherness

Description

For Jacques Derrida, a secret is not simply something contained that can be kept hidden or kept within itself. The unsecret is otherness. I am a secret; I am in secret like the other. Individuality is fundamentally a secret. Now, perhaps there is also a moral and political obligation to respect secrecy, a certain right to privacy, because the call for totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in the loss of this respect. There are also abuses in the use of secrecy, but the difficulty lies in the political exploitation of “state” secrets, “state rights,” police archives, and so on. Emmanuel Levinas: The secret of each person’s life is not bound by walls that would isolate a person severely deprived of a closed inner world, but rather a secret that stems from responsibility towards others and, in its moral development, is unbroken, something one is not ashamed of, and thus it is the principle of absolute individuality.