In Defense of Secrets

In an epoch when transparency, openness, and candor, are constantly enjoined on us, and in which the message 'Secrets Kill' is driven home by everything from twelve-step groups to Lifetime TV, Dufourmantelle shows the powers that secrecy continues to hold. This urgent book will open new perspectives on a world marked by the rise of Wikileaks, Big Data, and social media.-Michael Moon, Emory UniversityPsychoanalyst 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 book on 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.In our age, when political and personal transparency seems to be prized above all-lives posted on the internet, information leaked, whistles blown-In Defense of Secrets champions what remains hidden, private, veiled, hushed, just out of sight.The secret may be deadly if unheard or misused, but Dufourmantelle shows how it is equally the source of creativity and of ethics. An ethics of the secret, we can hear her to say, means listening hard and sensitively, respecting the secret in its secret essence, unafraid of what it has to say.Anne Dufourmantelle, taught at the European Graduate School. Her books include In Praise of Risk; Power of Gentleness; Blind Date; and, with Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality.Lindsay Turner is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver.