Is Nothing Secret?

It's a—we're a transparent democracy. People know exactly what's on our mind. We debate things in the open.

—President George W. Bush, June 21, 2006 (White House, "President Bush Participates")

How many can share a secret? Or, to ask the same question in reverse, is there any secret that is absolutely secret? Even the briefest consideration of the problematic obscurely traced in such questions reveals the outline of a certain aporia. A secret, at least that which we commonly call a secret, is something that is not or should not be shared. Yet in fact secrets are always being shared. The idea of a so-called "state secret," whose history and contemporary resurgence in American law we will consider more specifically in a moment, obviously involves a secret that must be, in principle and in practice, both shared and concealed. Even the most expansive visions of executive sovereignty necessarily concede that such power must be delegated as it is exercised; and state secrets are thus inevitably shared, at least, by the "agents" of the "agencies" that carry out the policies of the state. At the same time, of course, a state secret is also rigorously concealed, not only from presumed enemies and aliens outside the state, but even from most of its own citizens. The very word "state" in this phrase seems to denote both the special status or quality of the secret (that it is a "top" secret, a kind of arcani imperii accessible only to those at the top) and its practical condition as something necessarily shared by some subset of that "body of people occupying a defined territory and organized under a sovereign government" whose "national security" is claimed to necessitate secrecy in the first place (OED "state" n., 30a).

As for the personal or private secret—the domain of what is more commonly called privacy—it too is commonly both shared and concealed: shared within the various limits of friendships, families, and communities, and concealed from everyone else. It is possible, no doubt, for a secret to be maintained by only one, by a unique and singular being. But is there any secret that remains absolutely unshared and un-communicated—not even, let us say, by actions that might later be followed back, as if in a detective story, to their secret source, nor, in the Freudian manner, by accidents, jokes, or symptoms that obliquely manifest that which is secreted within? Would not such a secret, if there were such a thing—a secret in every sense private, and thus wholly withdrawn into some pure subjective interiority—be as such deprived of all presence, and exist, if it can even be said to exist, only in the shape of a certain privation?

In any case, a secret evidently can—or must—be shared by more than one; and yet, to remain faithful in any sense to its own concept, it cannot be shared by every one. We therefore must conclude, at once, that a secret must not be shared, that a secret can only be shared, and that a secret can be shared by two, but not by three, or by three, but not by four, and so on. In those cases that are called, in English, "open secrets," and in French, "les secrets de Polichinelle," only the sharing of the secret is secret, not the secret itself; and even such sharing remains always suspended just this side of a necessary limit which it may always encounter in, for example, the voice of a child proclaiming an emperor's nakedness. Are these problems of number and limit (as such phrases and examples seem perhaps to indicate) the source of the faintly comic note that seems to play, as we shall see, around the whole idea of the secret, even in its most serious (and secretive) political form?

We will also suggest that this question of the secret is a kind of ghostly double of the question of democracy itself, to which it remains inescapably linked by exigencies at once practical and theoretical. Democracy and the secret pose a...