The post on Derrida and his phrase "To see in secret--what can that mean?" in The Gift of Death, below, is (like many of the posts here) taken from one of my papers for seminars. I've been revising and redoing that paper, and so can now present it more in full. Hopefully it will make more sense:
In the last section of The Gift of Death, “Tout autre est tout autre,” Derrida seems to link visibility and the sense of sight to one of the main ethical, political, and/or religious points he develops throughout the essay: that responsibility only takes place via secrecy, via an act that exceeds calculation or planning. He gathers together seeing and this secrecy in a formulation so basic we cannot but feel they are somehow indissociable. This formulation, given its own separate line in the text, is precisely a question about this indissociability. It is the following: “To see in secret—what can that mean?” Or, in the French: “Voir dans le secret. Qu’est-ce que cela peut vouloir dire?” (The Gift of Death, 88/ Donner la mort, 85)
We understand immediately that this phrase does more than just situate responsibility in the sphere of the bodily, where vision could then somehow play a part in it. In other words, it does not amount to a reiteration of Derrida’s call for an explanation of the terrified, trembling, crying body that he makes in the prior section. “One doesn’t know why one trembles,” Derrida says there, claiming that “we would need to make new inroads into thinking concerning the body, without dissociating the registers of discourse (thought, philosophy, the bio-genetico-psychoanalytic sciences, phylo- and ontogenesis), in order to one day come closer to what makes us tremble or what makes us cry” (55/57). If we were to say that political, ethical, and/or religious acts of responsibility are just bodily or embodied for Derrida, as it is popular to do with other thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we would feel that we were not really getting at that seeming link between sight and secrecy here. Nor for that matter would we get at the sense in which Derrida is asking us to make inroads into what makes us tremble or cry—that is, the sense in which this phrase here is a reiteration.
We would feel that this is the case because the force of this simple question does not revolve around either seeing or secrecy as much as it does upon meaning. “To see in secret—what can that mean?” The stress here is upon seeing in secret remaining something questionable with respect to whether it has sense or not. If it were just the assertion of something meaningful about responsibility along with sight it would not take place in a question. Our sense of a link refines itself, then. Seeing and secrecy: these are for Derrida things that are questionable when brought together and (thereby) forced to mean or have sense. Perhaps for Derrida they are only questionable when they are supposed to mean—that is, when they take place within a question as to their meaning. In a way, then, the question seems to enact its question: it wonders whether seeing and secrecy can be questioned with respect to whether they mean in questioning them with respect to whether they mean.
But this stress on whether the link makes sense is also due to how the phrase “to see in secret” is precisely that part of the question not written solely by Derrida: it is from the Gospel of Matthew, as cited at the end of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which Derrida analyses before and after this point in the text (cf. 80-1, 97-99). So “to see in secret” is that part of the phrase “to see in secret—what can that mean?” outside of which Derrida seems to stand (as it were) as he writes it, in order to ask it whether it can mean. Indeed, if we take his French more literally, what Derrida asks of “to see in secret” is whether it can be said (qu’est-ce que cela peut vouloir dire?). That is, he asks whether “to see in secret” does not already constitute something that would be beyond his (or anyone’s) ability to submit it to his (or anyone’s) speech as something questionable. Thus, Derrida (or anyone else) could not say, “I see in secret.” Nor could Derrida really ask it his question as to whether it can be said, for “to see in secret” would call itself already into question by itself. Thus, when it came into Derrida’s writing (precisely as the question as to whether it could be said), he would then not be saying it: he would already need to ask whether his writing said or meant anything (and thus he writes his question). The question Derrida asks not only enacts what it questions, therefore: it only enacts this because of the questionability of the link between sight and secrecy that this question, when asked by Derrida (or anyone else), cannot question. The sight of the body and the secrecy in responsibility: these are things that are beyond our ability to question them as to whether they are linked while they still remain questionable—that is, precisely when they are linked by Derrida or by us and thereby forced to mean.
Obviously for us it does not make sense, then, to ask what vision, linked to secrecy only insofar as this link were unquestionably questionable, would be experienced, or would change our sense of life and of the world. Perhaps most of all it would not make sense to ask how it changed our notion of responsibility. For Derrida in this phrase shows us that fundamentally he is in a position similar to ours, if not the very same one: he feels that seeing and secrecy might be linked. And yet, Derrida is also in a completely different position, since asking how vision would be experienced, and responsibility changed thereby, is precisely what Derrida is doing throughout this part The Gift of Death. Somehow, he is able to get across to us precisely that vision and secrecy, while we cannot be sure they are linked, would have to take place precisely in this place where we are not sure of this linkage, in that space where it remains unquestionable in both senses of the word—that is, both beyond his ability to question it, and definitely, certainly, always occurring. Our question, then, becomes one of how Derrida is able to orient himself towards the asking of his (or, as we know now, anyone’s) question qua unquestionable. In other words, our question should concern how he is able to prepare himself for being in the same position as we were with respect to his phrase, and yet better prepare himself than us such that he could also feel like he could continue to ask it, in order to investigate how it changes our experience of sight and of responsibility.
Indeed we are given an indication about how this preparation takes place in the context of Derrida’s question. It is asked as he is testing how far he can extend his reading of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in Kierkegaard. Here, just by bringing vision constantly to the fore in the text either in figures of speech or more explicitly in the content of what he is saying, we see him setting up his question:
The sacrifice of Isaac is an abomination in the eyes of all and it should continue to be seen for what it is—atrocious, criminal, unforgivable; Kierkegaard insists on that. The ethical point of view must remain valid: Abraham is a murderer. However, is it not true that the spectacle of this murder, which seems intolerable in the denseness and rhythm of its theatricality, is at the same time the most common event in the world? Is it not inscribed in the structure of our existence to the extent of no longer constituting an event? (85, italics added)
Children, he says, are constantly sacrificed by society, left to die of hunger or disease because of the way the market is structured and controlled. There are insufficient distributions of funds, of aid, etc. such that a totally preventable sacrifice is made anyway, since the current functioning of this society dictates that these resources be used elsewhere. Thus,
such a sacrifice is not even invisible, for from time to time television shows us, while keeping them at a distance, a series of intolerable images, and few voices are raised to bring it all to our attention. (85-86, italics added).
A link between the way society sees sacrifice—it “actually organizes it” (86)—and responsibility—only possible in the secrecy of a sacrifice—is absolutely pressing for Derrida and for us, then. But because we do not know exactly what the link is between the visible and the secret, sacrifice seems as if it could always be questioned as to whether it took place—though it might be happening everywhere and all the time. Thus, we see why Derrida would need to ask, “to see in secret—what can that mean?” If these are his concerns, the question translates into the following: how could we adapt ourselves to the way this sacrifice is inscribed in the structure of our existence?
What is key about this preparation, however, is that it occurs in a specific way. Derrida is less lamenting that we do not have a theory of the linkage between sight and secrecy as highlighting how secrecy, the condition in which responsibility takes place, does not have such a direct relation to the visible. In other words, he is highlighting how the secrecy in sacrifice required for responsibility is not simply defined as the negation of visibility, or as what is invisible. Indeed, “such a sacrifice” as the one organized by society, “is not even invisible,” as he says, and this is part of the problem. And it is here that we will be able to bring out or reconstitute the way Derrida orients himself so as to be hospitable to the questionability of the linkage he establishes. Here, because in order to make the relationship between secrecy and visibility clearer, Derrida just after the passages on the theatricality of sacrifice and his question on seeing in secret says we might be confusing two ways that this invisibility can be understood:
1. There is a visibile in-visible, an invisible of the order of the visible that I can keep in secret by keeping it out of sight. This invisible can be artificially kept from sight while remaining within what one can call exteriority... what one calls the interior organs of the body—my heart, my kidneys, my blood, my brain—are naturally said to be invisible, but they are still of the order of visibility: an operation or accident can expose them or bring them to the surface; their interiority is provisional and bringing their invisibility into view is something that can be proposed or promised…
2. But there is also absolute invisibility, the absolutely non-visible that refers to whatever falls outside the register of sight… (GD 90).
Now, what is crucial about this passage is not yet the difference between the two and how they are indeed confused, but the seemingly unrelated fact that Derrida makes the same distinction in an introduction or compendium to an exhibition of drawings at the Louvre, later published as Memoirs of the Blind. For it is in this transit between a reflection on responsibility and a reflection on art that our new question about how Derrida prepares or orients himself can be pursued, and not only because there will be minor similarities and differences between the two texts that might indicate something about the work of preparation We will also be able to reconstitute this work to a large degree because both discussions rely upon and cite heavily from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of the visible and the invisible. By looking at Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, then, with special attention to his two significant essays on art—“Cézanne’s Doubt” and “Eye and Mind” (L’Oeil et l’Esprit)—and doing so in conjunction with a look at Memoirs of the Blind and Derrida’s extensive discussion of Merleau-Ponty in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, we will be able specify a field or a context through which Derrida will move in order to prepare himself for his unquestionable question of the linkage between seeing and responsibility. Or perhaps instead of a field or context—a set of inheritances or a history of ideas—we might, as he says in On Touching, reveal a trend (mouvance) in which he is still “beginning to orient myself.” Thus when, as we shall see, it is on the issue of depth that the two thinkers come extremely close to saying the reverse of what the each claims with respect to vision and the invisible, we will not be trying to indicate that point at which two thinkers fundamentally disagree, as if they were in an argument. Rather we will be feeling our way towards the humble and yet outrageous nature of the task that Derrida is attempting in feeling an impossible link between sight and vision in The Gift of Death, and yet still asking his question, “To see in secret—what can that mean?”
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