Derrida's Secret by Barbour Charles;

Author:Barbour, Charles;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

3

Between Two Solitudes: Self-Deception, Consciousness and the Other Mind

State Secrets

In the previous chapter, I attempted to draw together Derrida’s discussion, particularly in his later work, of politics, literature and the secret. I focused my attention on the theory of testimony or avowal developed in most detail in the essay ‘Demeure’, in which, by way of an extended discussion of Blanchot’s ‘The Instant of My Death’, Derrida suggests that testimony is, at one and the same time, utterly singular, or having to do with a secret knowledge that only the one who testifies can genuinely possess (I can only testify to what only I can know, as I put it), and something like universal, or at any rate a repetition of a past experience or event that itself becomes infinitely repeatable or iterable. I tried to show that this paradox or aporia of the singular universal also has a bearing on Derrida’s approach to literature, on the one hand, and time or temporality, on the other. According to Derrida, I claimed, literature is a paradigmatic example of the singular universal, and thus a paradigmatic or exemplary example of the logic of the example as such. That is to say, literature is always an instant that is also an instance. Indeed, I even went so far as to propose that, on Derrida’s account, this logic of the example (or of the open secret, as it were, or the thing that cannot possibly be known but that must also be entirely knowable) configures experience or our relations with others and with the world in the broadest possible sense. Finally, if only briefly, I began to sketch what all of this might have to do with Derrida’s lifelong concern (indeed, near obsession) with the problem of time, and especially death.

In this chapter, I want to continue with this line of thought. But I also want to place more emphasis on its discretely or predominantly philosophical stakes. In fact, initially at least, I want to try to show how Derrida’s treatment of the secret might be seen to inform a number of debates among philosophers who do not typically pay much attention to his work, and often repudiate it – namely, Analytic or Anglo-American ones. I am thinking in particular of two sets of debates within what is called the philosophy of mind: first, the problem or paradox of self-deception (a subset, really, of the Liar’s Paradox, which explores whether or not it is possible to lie to oneself, and which has an affinity with Russell’s Paradox as well, which I mentioned above in relation to the problem of the example and the exception); and second, the problem of consciousness (or what, approximately twenty years ago now, the Australian philosopher David Chalmers first dubbed ‘the hard problem’, or roughly the fact that there can be no purely physical or functional explanation of our mental experience, or the feeling that accompanies our awareness of things).1 As we will see, both of these problems open onto a

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