Abstract

The main focus of this article is on the unpublished seminar “The Secret”, which Derrida taught at the EHESS in 1991-1992. This seminar lays out several of the secret’s important paradoxes, that preclude any definition of the secret as such. Putting into the question the assumptions that reduce our understanding of the secret to the realms of saying and of phenomenality, of negativity, of revelation or of repression, Derrida’s absolute secret is closely related to the tropes of death, finitude and the unconscious.