Seeker After Truth

 
The secret in Ibn ‘Arabi and Derrida

The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about.

– Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being’

‘Hie words secret and sire pepper the texts of Derrida and Ibn ‘Arabi. Both writers seem to be differently obsessed with their power, keen to delineate the (non)meanings of these words, even to examine the motives of those who would unlock them. Both writers seem to be aware of the possible futility of the secret – which, like Kundera’s brides and glory-hunters, only leads from ‘veil to veil’. Both writers appear to situate the ’secret’ at the heart of their oeuvre, as the ultimate metaphor for what they have to say.

Readers familiar with the author of Dissemination and ‘How to Avoid Speaking’ will be unimpressed at the thought of Derrida possessing a ’secret’, particularly since Derrida himself has spent so much text saying precisely the opposite. And yet the aim of this chapter is not to put Im2ocentric words in the mouth of Jacques Derrida, turning the post-structuralist into some fanciful mystic. Rather, what this chapter will examine is how the Derridean ’secret’, if one can use such a term, actually bears some resemblance to Ibn `Arabi’s Sir r, insofar as its exposure entails the becoming-aware of a long-existent situation, a genuine de-construction of artificially separate identities and the lifting of an illusion (1 use the word very carefully) brought about by logocentric” metaphysical assumptions.

Derrida on the secret of the non-secret

The learned doctors of the Great Vehicle teach us that the essential characteristic of the universe is its emptiness. They are certainly correct with respect to that tiny part of the universe that is the book … under all the storm and lightning, there is nothing. It is just appearance, a surface of images which is why readers may, perhaps, enjoy it.
– Borges, Preface to A Universal Elision

The illusory depth of the secret that is, the suggestion that the only secret is that there is no secret is a familiar enough motif. RobbeGrillet writes ‘of having found a locked drawer, then a key; and this key opens the drawer quite impeccably … and the drawer is empty’.  In Umberto Eco’s Pendolo di Foucault, a group of young academics construct a bizarre conspiracy theory out of Templar lore, Freemasonry, Egyptian pyramids and numerology, attracting unwanted attention from a variety of dangerous parties as they do so. When the unfortunate Belbo is finally trapped by a motley collection of cultists, masons and Crowleyesque aesthetes, he refuses to give them the ultimate secret –that there is no secret, that their entire research has been an elaborate academic hoax – and pays for his silence with an unpleasant death. Such is the allure of the much sought-after enigma, which turns out to be hopelessly irrevocable, a cruel joke or (worst of all) only leading onto an infinite regression of further pseudo-secrets (surely the joke of The Maltese Falcon, a film whose entire plot is driven by an object which remains forever off-screen). Stratagems which remind us of the important theological consequences of an all-too familiar trick: a secret does not have to be ‘real’ in order to exert its power.

In examining the place of the secret in Derrida’s thought, perhaps we should begin by saying what everyone else has said about the Derridean secret – that it is a non-secret, an illusion, a semantic surface forever kidding us with a promise of depth. Beneath all sign-systems, writes Carl Raschke, ‘is buried the “secret” of all traditions of structured discourse – that they signify nothiniz’.4 Morny Joy speaks of a Derrida whose ‘disclosure is the absence of any presence – of any secret’. “The Buddha emphasized that he had no secret,” insists David Loy, wryly alluding to Derrida, “although that did not stop later generations attributing one to him.”6 Perhaps Mark (Taylor puts it most directly of all:

Since the ‘genesis of secrecy’ is always missing, there is nothing to tell. I repeat: There is nothing to tell. The secret is that there is no secret]

And, just in case someone out there still hasn’t got the point, John D. Caputo eloquently reiterates:

This secret – which is sans savoir and non-savoir – has no semantic content. This secret has nothing to hide. This is an odd sort of secret, something of a non-secret, the secret that there is no secret in the sense of some sort of secret knowledge, some secret knowing, some positive contents

There are no secrets

– or – 

If you like, there are only secrets, an endless succession of them, each one promising to be resolved by its successor.

And this is precisely what a “secret”, traditionally understood, would be –a sign which would somehow, magically, unproblematically, explain all the previous signs leading up to it in one all-enlightening moment of magnificent self-presence. The disclosure of a secret would be the end of meaning. Nothing more could be said.
The questions, however, still remain: what exactly is Derrida’s attitude towards the secret? How does he understand their genesis, their propagation, their (ab)uses? Would the world be a better place without them? And what part does deconstruction play in all this talk of le secret – a dismantler of enigmas or a primordial source of them? To what extent is ‘deconstruction’ really a synonym for “demystification”?

It is no exaggeration to suggest that the secret, more than any other single motif, dominates the length and breadth of the Derridean oeuvre. Partly because the ’secret’ has been used so often as the standard metaphor for the meaning of a literary text; partly because of its indelibly religious significance (the secret name of YHWH which no-one may pronounce, the secret face of God which no man may see and live, the secret hour of the Last Day, etc.); partly because of Derrida’s own playful appropriation of the secret, at times self-ironizing, at times utterly serious (in ‘La Differance’, for example, where Derrida can speak of ‘the very enigma of difference’, only to declare eight pages on that ‘there is nothing kerygmatic about this “word” ‘).9

Thus, in essays such as ‘Post-Scriptum’ and ‘How to Avoid Speaking’, Derrida examines the rale of the secret – the `topolitology of the secret’ – in negative theology, re-affirming his familiar claim that the secret of the negative theologians is. in the end, the very onto-theological God they claim to rid themselves of. In ‘Passions’, Derrida devotes an entire essay to the subject of the secret, insisting that lI y a du secret but (in the best apophatic tradition) choosing not to say what the secret is. but rather what it is not. In ‘Of An apocalyptic Tone’ he considers the mystagogue – victim of Kant’s rationalizing diatribe – as the keeper of a secret, and the original meaning of apokalupsis as the disclosure of a secret, whilst later works such as The Gift of Death explore the relationship between secrecy and responsibility, between secrecy and community. Even in less directly related works such as Dissemination, the thought of the secret – and what happens in its absence – permeates all of Derrida’s speculations on the text without depth, on the ‘as yet unwritten page’. Such are the fruits of Derrida’s obsession with the secret — a cryptophilia which, as we shall see, is not without its own ironies and ambiguities.

Derrida’s several remarks on the secret are varied, arising as they do in a multiplicity of radically different contexts, each proffering subtly different speculations on the notion of what is hidden, veiled or withdrawn. A cluster of them best conveys their diversity:

There is no secret as such; I deny it. And this is what I confide in secret to whomever allies himself to me.
(‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’)

Non-presence, the gaping void of desire, and presence, the fullness of enjoyment, amount to the same. By the same token, there is no longer any textual difference between the image and the thing, the empty signifier and the full signified, the imitator and the imitated, etc.
(Dissemination)

I have forgotten my umbrella is a statement at once hermetic and totally open, as secret and superficial as the postcard apocalypse it announces and protects against.
( ‘Of A Newly Adopted Apocalyptic Tone’)

But if, without liking literature in general and for its own sake, I like something about it … this would be in place of the secret. In place of an absolute secret. There would be the passion. There is no passion without secret, this very secret, indeed no secret without this passion.
(Passions: An Oblique Offering’)

I refer first of all to the secret shared within itself, its partition ‘proper’, which divides the essence of a secret that cannot even appear to one alone except in starting to be lost …
(‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’)

Here there is no longer any depth of meaning.
(Dissemination )

A number of points need to be drawn from these. Firstly, the secret forever recedes, it is always already lost. If the secret is ‘that in speech which is foreign to speech’,’ t then divulging the secret only pushes it further away, like Augustine’s God (‘Whatever we say about God is not true, and whatever we do not say about Him is true’ ).Talking about the secret only serves to defer it – it remains forever ‘on the other side’ of whatever noises or marks we try to make about it. Secondly, there is no difference between the secret and the non-secret. For Derrida, there are no ‘full’ or ‘empty’ signifiers, no texts which are somehow ‘deeper’ than others, no marks or characters which are more intrinsically significant than others. The by-now famous remark at the end of Nietzsche’s notebooks –I have forgotten my umbrella – illustrates the perfectly dual status of the kerygmatic, a capacity for the ordinary to conceal the extraordinary (and vice versa) which readers of Kafka and Pinter have long been familiar with. Anything, potentially, could be a secret – every signifier could, potentially, signify something radically other than its habitual signified. Thirdly, the illusion of secrecy is analogous to the illusion of depth – which is where we begin to move closer to the theological resonance of Derrida’s remarks upon the secret. It brings to mind a passage from Tillich:

The Name of this inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what the word means…. For if you know that God means depth, you know much about Him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or an unbeliever, for you cannot think or say: Life has no depth. Life is shallow. Being itself is surface only. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist, but otherwise you are not. He who knows about depth knows about God.I2

For Derrida, one can’t help feeling that ‘depth’, sooner or later, always gets associated with ‘divinity’. Insofar as all secrets require a knower
possibly even a Knower Derrida’s denial of textual depth constitutes the denial of anyone or thing ‘out there’ who might have the Last Word, hermeneutically, on the meaning of a text. For the medieval exegete, poring over the uncial letters of God’s Holy Word, there was always a divine mind who had understood something – who would always understand something – the reader had not. Regardless of
neither, we are talking about the scholastic rigours of’ Dominican exegesis, the mystical toil of Islamic hermeneutics, or the midrash of the Jewish commentary tradition, the idea that the Ineffable Author is on the ‘inside’ – whilst we, humble readers, linger forever on the ‘outside’ 13 –remains essentially the same. The Derridean synonymy of ‘secrecy’ and ‘surface’ effectively erases this distinction between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’. A phalanx of scribbled symbols on a sheet of parchment – c’est tout. In deconstructive hermeneutics nothing is hidden not because there is nothing to hide, but rather because there is No-one to hide it.

Whether all this amounts to a ‘demystification’ of metaphysics in the Enlightenment fashion, the kind of Weberesque Entauberung which replaces the mysterious cause with the visible, remains debatable – as Derrida has clearly commented elsewhere. In ‘Of an Apocalyptic Tone’ he is searching for a possible ‘limit of demystification’, one which ‘would (perhaps) distinguish deconstruction from a simple, progressive demystification in the style of the Enlightenment.14

There are certainly moments elsewhere in Derrida where ‘deconstruct’ and ‘demystify’ appear to be synonymous in their early stages, even if they ultimately concern two radically different kinds of analysis (literally from analvein, to loosen or untie). What this chapter suggests is that deconstruction is simultaneously a work of both demystification and mystification — it locates and dissolves the moments of self-presence in a text only to leave in their place a semantic void, one which liberates the text from its single destination and allows it to drift, rudderless, in an infinite number of directions.

What does make deconstructive demystification so different from its rational counterparts? “There is no unfathomable mystery in the world” Moritz Schlick, the Vienna positivist, famously said. For logical positivists like Ayer and Carnap, the mysteries and enigmas of everyday life were simply ‘bad’ uses of language – the result of using ‘nonsense’, unclear metaphysical propositions. As soon as we stopped asking the wrong questions and began to use correct, verifiable assertions, the so-called ‘mystery’ (for logical positivists a word always synonymous with ‘problem’) would vanish of its own accord. It is difficult to see how such a project of clarification can be attributed to deconstruction.

“To make enigmatic” what one thinks one understands by the words “proximity”, “immediacy”, “presence”’ wrote Derrida in Of Granimatology, “is my final intention in this book.” If Derrida rids the text of its mysterious secret – the senses spiritualis which lies buried like hidden treasure beneath the page – this does not mean he wishes to replace it with one of his own. What distinguishes deconstructive demystification from all the other Enlightenment versions of mystery-murder is precisely this calling into question of the desire to explicate. For deconstruction, to ‘explain’ is simply to produce another set of signs to describe the first. Solving a secret simply means producing another one. “From the moment there is meaning, there is nothing but signs.” The belief that there exists a secret whose meaning, once unlocked and lifted out of its precious casket, would somehow unambiguously enlighten everyone concerned without ever having to use a sign itself — this is surely the naive dream of structuralism which Derrida so happily takes apart in essays such as ‘Force and Signification’. Meaning, like the secret, enjoys a certain semantic inexhaustibility – there is no end to either of them.

“To make enigmatic…”. It is a curious phrase of Derrida’s, particularly when one bears in mind the kind of clarifying/explicating versions of Derrida offered by critics like Gasch?, who see the theorist as a one who resolves ‘inconsistencies’ in philosophical systems and their exposition?

“To make enigmatic…” Does this mean that deconstruction brings an enigma to the text? After all our talk of demystification, does deconstruction turn texts into secrets once more? Does it restore a kind of Ur-secret to the text as the originary condition of literature? Perhaps … but if deconstruction does attribute a secret to the text, it is a ‘secret de Polichinelle’, a secret for no-one. If deconstruction does re-mystify the text and liberate it from certain rigid parameters of meaning, it is not by insisting upon a secret, transcendentally hidden interpretation of the text, but rather by restoring an originary darkness (from ainigma, lit. ‘to darken’) to the illusion of clarity. A darkness that no amount of htmiere or Aid/Xining can ever completely dispel. A darkness in which nothing is hidden.

In what does this enigma – this darkness – consist of? It is the darkness of the abyss – a word (Pahime) which seems to recur often in Derrida, usually in the context of the futility of representational thought, he hollowness of the sign which forever empties itself, the abyssality of the signifying chain which can only ever pass on the message without ever understanding its ‘meaning’:

Once it [the centre] lends itself a single time to such a representation that is to say, once it is written — … it is the abyss, is the bottomlessness of infinite redoubling.
(`Ellipsis’ in Writing and Difference)

The labyrinth, here is an abyss: we plunge into the horizontality of a pure surface …
(ibid.)

Representation in the abyss of presence is not an accident of presence: the desire of presence is, on the contrary, born from the abyss (the indefinite multiplication) of representation …
(Of Grammatology)

… historicity remains a secret. Historical man does not want to admit to his historicity, and first and foremost to the abyss that undermines his own historicity.
(Gift of Death)

The abyssal secret of the text’s utter superficiality remains, paradoxically, something which both threatens the meaning of the text whilst indefinitely multiplying it. Ex nihilio nihil fit: nothingness as the source of meaning. The nothingness, the semantic void at the heart of the text enables all its various counter-texts, sub-texts, con-texts to proliferate in a `bottomlessness of infinite redoubling’. It is the abyss beneath the text – the absence of any supernatural, extra-textual presence that might control it – which enables its meanings to shimmer and multiply.

This removal of the text’s depth, however, does not signify the end of interpretation, but merely the end of nostalgia. The secret of the text’s `pure surface’ still permits interpretation to take place, but will divide future exegetes into two categories:

(i) the uninitiated – those who still haven’t realized that the only secret is that there is no secret, the academic detectives who will forever search and scrutinize the signs before them in an attempt to recover the Real Meaning, and

(ii) the enlightened–those who will have finally understood the millennia-old illusion of exegesis but decide to carry on with it anyway, out of habit, passion, fear, obstinacy or simply lack of imagination.

For this second category, interpreting texts from now on will mean reacting to them; bumping into collections of signs and responding to them with some of their own. In a sense, the demise of textual depth leaves the activity of interpretation intact, but simply re-understood in an ironic and slightly self-mocking way (one thinks of Sartre here: I never gave or took a command in my life without laughing’ ). From now on, no-one will read or give an interpretation without smiling – the smile of one who has understood the double-bluff of the game of interpretation, the impenetrability of the text, not because its secret has been locked away for good, but because there never was a secret to begin with.

Ibn ‘Arabi on the secret of idolatry

In Lordship there is a mystery, that mystery being you…
Sahl al-Tustari, cited in the Fusus al-Hikam

In critical theory circles, there is a story by Edgar Allen Poe which has probably enjoyed as much attention as anything he ever wrote, thanks to a critique by Lacan (an essay in turn critiqued by Derrida and Barbara Johnson). In “The Purloined Letter”, an important letter is successfully hidden from a thorough but unimaginative police chief, who ransacks an apartment three times but fails to find it – if only because the thief has decided to ‘hide’ it from the investigators by leaving it openly on the table for all to see. Far from being concealed in some hidden drawer, the secret envelope is so obvious and visible to all that no-one guesses its true identity. By its very openness, it retains its secrecy. In Poe’s story, the revelation of the hidden has gone unnoticed – no-one is even aware it has taken place.

This tale of the extraordinary being mistaken for the ordinary exemplifies, in many respects, the meaning of the secret in Ibn `Arabi’s work. It could be said that the only real secret for the Shaykh al-Akhbar is the fact that there is anything secret at all. Of course, there are ‘obvious’ secrets in Ibn ‘Arabi – moments where some form of information is clearly being withheld from general knowledge – such as the ‘Mystery of Destiny’ (sirs al-qadar)21 or the ‘Mystery of Premeasuremene;22 the secret plans of God which mortals cannot know. However, the most important secret of all what Ibn ‘Arabi refers to as the sire al-sirr or ’secret of secrets’ – is a secret so tremendous that, like Poe’s innocuous envelope, it lies right in front of our eyes without any of us ever guessing what it is.

Ibn `Arabi’s secret is so successful that most people (the masses) are not even aware there is a secret. The sin of idolatry (shirk) offers the clearest example of this. In the Book of Majesty and Beauty, Ibn ‘Arabi says of the Koranic declaration ‘Your god is One God’ (dankly/I dahnn wdhicittn):

It is a statement applying to everything deified and worshipped.
This is a secret of Allah’s Divinity. If it were not for what every worshipper finds in the object of this worship … he would not worship it … [the idol-worshipper] is merely the servant of a particular object of worship, the secret of whose divinity itself belongs to Allah Most High. That is the soul of His saying:  Your god is One God

So the statement affirms the essential form of a thing rejected in actual practice. People only adopt these [idols] because of the relationship with the divine that they establish by carving them … So understand that: it is a remarkable secret. Ibn `Arabi’s point is striking: God is the secret of all idolatry. Even the most profane and secular things we can think of contain this secret.