In Defense of Secrets / / Anne Dufourmantelle.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2021 English
• VerfasserIn: Dufourmantelle, Anne,
• MitwirkendeR: Turner, Lindsay,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Fordham University Press, , [2021]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (160 p.)

In an age that prizes political and personal transparency, In Defense of the Secret champions the secret as what permits relation and ensures our humanity.Psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle drowned in 2017 in an attempt to rescue two children caught in the ocean. Her work lives on, though, in this provocative and necessary book. Through etymologies and case studies, personal history and incisive commentary on contemporary society, In Defense of Secrets returns us to the fundamental psychic scene of the secret. The secret, for Dufourmantelle, is not a code to be cracked or a firewall to be penetrated but a dynamic and powerful entity that permits relation and that ensures our humanity.Tracking the secret though art and literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and sociology, from the Inquisition to the present, Dufourmantelle’s writing spirals around the question of the secret’s value. In our age, when political and personal transparency seem to be prized above all—lives posted on the Internet, information leaked, whistles blown, taboos absent except with respect to the secret itself—In Defense of Secrets champions what remains hidden, private, veiled, hushed, just out of sight. The secret is on the side of nature, not science; organic growth, not technology; love’s generosity, not knowledge’s grasp. For Dufourmantelle, the secret is a powerful and dynamic thing: deadly if unheard or misused, perhaps, but equally the source of creativity and of ethics. An ethics of the secret, we can hear her say, means listening hard and sensitively, respecting the secret in its secret essence, unafraid of it and open to what it has to say.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preamble -- I. Memories of the Secret -- Origins -- In the Crypt -- Etymology -- When the Secret Appears -- Occult Force -- II. The Secret’s Passions -- Lifting the Veil -- The Unavowable -- A Treasure, a Poison -- Genesis -- Storia I -- III. Being or Having -- The Last Secret -- The Body au secret -- Eroticism -- Storia II -- Storia III -- IV. Transparency and Truth -- Violations -- Dissimulations -- Surveillances -- Adaptations -- Mirages -- Big Data, Hyperconnection, Speed: The Spiral -- Archives -- Secret Societies -- The Unifying Secret -- V. An Ethics of the Secret -- Panopticum: Bentham, Kant, Constant -- Inappropriable -- Creative Power -- The Secret of Dreams -- Sex and Prayer -- Secret Sideration -- Jealousies -- The Conspiracy Theory -- VI. Toward Mystery -- Secret Nature -- Veils -- Legacies -- Aside -- A Part of One’s Own -- Secret of the Prophetic Voice -- Sacrifice -- Mystery’s Share -- Notes -- Bibliography