In Defense of Secrets Anne Dufourmantelle, translated by Lindsay Turner,  Fordham University Press, 2021,  160 pp., $28.00, paperback, ISBN: 9780823289233

Published online: 20 March 2023

© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2023

How to speak of the dignity of the secret whilst respecting its secrecy? How to draw attention to the vital powers of the secret in an age obsessed with knowing everything and convinced that everything can be known?

The six sections of In Defense of Secrets offer a philosopher’s and psychoanalyst’s foray into a territory both ignored and misunderstood. Philosophically speaking, the secret is immanence, or, better, arises in the horizon of unlimited immanence (p. 5). Psychoanalysis has often ignored the secret; the ‘ineffable’ it has confined to the awkward zone between the Symbolic and the Real. But to become a psychoanalyst is to cross over to the secret’s side (p. 3), to be able to sense it as akin but irreducible to truth, silence, memory, forgetting and dreaming.

Dufourmantelle starts by inviting the reader to consider the demise of the ways of the secret in a modern world typically (mis)guided by an adherence to scientific truth, as opposed to learning to live with the shadows and the penumbras of the secret. The secret is sequestered, set apart, but can be approached by familiarising ourselves with its environs and its affinity to the sacred, the sacrifice and mystery (p. 4). In fact, our very modern unfamiliarity with the meaningful content for the three terms justifies a philosophical and psychoanalytic exploration with a view to discovering in the secret a hopeful way forward, away from the stagnant, spiralling, transparency-obsessed modes of thinking that prevail in the present.

With the deftness of an experienced analyst Dufourmantelle gradually steers the reader towards the qualities of the secret, adding, subtracting, differentiating or linking terms, while gently introducing, again and again, the premise that modern