A Taste for the Secret (review)

Derrida's recent religious turn might have been predicted by a psychoanalyst. The forces waiting for his writings, as he puts it, parallel as a rhetorical gesture the forces that he sees as waiting for the messiah. Both ideas are linked to the "fracture or trauma" that he describes in The Post Card and to the compulsion to work against authority in search of a final (messianic) authority. Derrida explains that his expulsion from school and his experience of anti-Semitism in Algiers at age twelve created an intellectual "configuration" that disabled him from distinguishing "the biographical from the intellectual... the conscious from the unconscious." His rhetorically dislocating method, one might say, consists of a continual replay of that trauma, whose symptom is a need to linguistically dislocate others. This symptom also produces, in the form of resistance against comprehensibility, a singularly romanticized identity involving the conviction that he belongs to no one and nothing: "'I am not one of the family' means: do not consider me 'one of you,' 'don't count me in,' I want to keep my freedom, always: this, for me, is the condition not only for being singular and other, but also for entering into relation with the singularity and alterity of others." Oddly determinate about his own and others' singularity despite the indeterminacy that he believes future messianic justice requires, Derrida states his conditions for any relationship in solipsistic terms: "Between my monad—the world as it appears to me—and yours, no relation is possible." Only "God sees from your side and from mine at once." To follow this logic, the reader must either succumb to Derrida's religious vision or imagine others who are counted in so that Derrida can be counted out. His singularity thus appears paradoxically codependent; and his secret, now revealed, is a desire for personal, if not metaphysical, transcendence: "a promise or an appeal that goes beyond being and history." The grandiosity of that desire is undiminished by a brief glance here at "the problem of the narcissistic image."