Derrida and the crypt

Here is a short elaboration of several passages in "Fors," a foreword to The Wolf Man's Magic Word, an amazing study of Freud's study of the Wolf Man. At stake is nothing less than Derrida's conception of the self, which is synonymous with the crypt:

A crypt is never natural through and through, and if, as is well known, physis has a tendency to encrypt (itself), that is because it [physis, nature] overflows its own bounds and encloses, naturally, its other, all others.

What this means is that physis, nature, mourns and eats itself as the crypt and in the crypt. The space of the crypt, its gap in nature, is nature mourning itself and consuming itself (stepping outside of itself to eat itself [the entombed] so it can return to itself). Thus,

The crypt is thus not a natural place, but the striking history of an artifice, an architecture, an artifact: a place comprehended within another but rigorously separate from it.

Derrida continues, saying that this space or place is constructed so as to...

...purloin the thing from its rest.

This is a reference to Heidegger's conception of the thing, though perhaps also to Lacan's thing--the play on the two I think is mobilized here. Derrida rejects both interpretations of the thing by saying that the movement of nature out of itself into the space of the crypt steals away its own movement inside the crypt itself, erases its own trace, and thus never lets what is put to rest in the crypt (the thing) remain itself or get some rest from self-effacement.
Derrida calls this a space that is external to the forum, outside of the reach of humanity (the human) and exchange. But then he shows it is a space that is not just simply what is external--i.e. the internal, the underground--since it is also secret. What is underground is known to be under the ground, i.e. not above the ground in the forum and within the reach of exchange. The secret is exiled from exchange above ground but not simply to the underground, because it is exiled from there too:

...a secret interior within the public square, but, by the same token, outside it, external to the interior.

Derrida then moves to a logic of the secret, which will reappear crucially in The Gift of Death:

The crypt can constitute its secret only by means of its division, its fracture. "I" can save [also in the sense of "make an exception of"] an inner safe [a crypt, le for intérieur] only by putting it inside "myself," beside(s) myself, outside.

This complicated sentence means that I can save or make an exception of what is a crypt (an inside/outside outside of the outside [or inside] and outside of the inside) the secret within the space of the crypt, only by putting it inside what is already outside, a performance of myself--and this without regard to this self or any self or even in spite of it. I can only have a secret by showing it, as Derrida will say in The Gift of Death: this does not mean that the only secrets are open ones (i.e. non-secrets), but rather that keeping a secret will make it take its place somewhere in the open. In other words, secrets, if they are secrets, only constitute an interiority elsewhere. If an other learns a secret, then, this only exposes an exterior or something outside the subject to that other. The secret is encrypted to others and--this is the crucial point--for others. It becomes indecipherable for the subject whose secret it is, and always able to be decoded in such a way that the other will misread its contents.