The Secret

Definition

The secret, in Fatal Strategies (1983), is the condition of the world before transparency — the enigma that envelops you without your knowing it, and that obscenity and the transpolitical destroy. "In the beginning was the secret, and this was the rule of the game of appearance. Then there was the repressed, and this was the rule of the game of depth. Finally comes the obscene, and this is the rule of the game of a world without appearance or depth — a transparent universe." Baudrillard's decisive move is to make the secret a structural feature of appearance, not a hidden content: "The enigma, like the secret, is not unintelligible… it is, on the contrary, fully intelligible, but it cannot be said or revealed." The secret belongs to the object and to the game: "The secret is made up of the annihilation of causes and the burial of ends in the organized order of appearances alone: the Rule of Appearances and Disappearances." Its relation to the subject is paradoxical: "No one holds the key to his own secret — this is the error of all psychology, including that of the unconscious… only the other knows, God alone knows, destiny alone knows." The secret is thus the object of seduction (which "preserves its enigma") against the confessional demand of psychology and the media: "More invisible than the invisible — this is the secret." Its destruction is "the end of the secret—the irruption of transparency," and hence the defining event of the transpolitical. See appearance-and-disappearance, obscenity, seduction, transpolitical, destiny.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "The secret is what envelopes you without your knowing it"; "only the other knows"; "More invisible than the invisible — this is the secret" (1983).
• Sigmund Freud — psychoanalysis as the rival that treats the secret as a hidden content to be interpreted (the "error" of the unconscious).
• Walter Benjamin — the "aura" and the secrecy of the work of art as a neighbouring register.
• Not yet paged: Elias Canetti — the aphorisms on language, dreams, and the "phrases that come from elsewhere" that preserve the secret.

Related Concepts

• Appearance and Disappearance — the secret is the annihilation of causes in the order of appearances.
• Obscenity — the secret's destruction: "the end of the secret — the irruption of transparency."
• Seduction — seduction preserves the enigma; love reveals.
• The Transpolitical — "the end of the secret" is the transpolitical's defining event.
• Destiny — "destiny alone knows" the secret.
• The Masses — the masses as the silent, secret object of the political.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining source: "The Obscene": the three rules (secret, repressed, obscene); "the secret is what envelopes you without your knowing it"; "only the other knows"; "More invisible than the invisible."
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the end of the panopticon and the implosion of meaning as the secret's dissolution.
• The Dialectics of Outside and Inside (Bachelard 1957/2006) — the wiki's counterpoint on the hidden and the intimate.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Baudrillard's secret is not a hidden content but a formal feature of appearance. Is this compatible with the wiki's psychoanalytic interior materials (facilitating-environment, inwardness), which treat the secret as psychic depth?
• "Only the other knows" — is the secret a social relation or a metaphysical condition? The wiki should distinguish.
• If the secret is destroyed by transparency, is there any way to make a secret (to design one)? The ceremony and seduction materials suggest there is; the wiki should ask whether architecture can.