La crypte et l’herméneute

Derrida, la violence du langage et la question du secret

Abstract

Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s seminar Répondre – du secret (1991–1992) and its reading of the nymph Echo, this essay argues that the secret is not a theme of literature but its very condition: the literary thing is secret. In Ovid’s myth, the violence of language dispossesses Echo of her speech, condemning her to repeat others’ final syllables; from this dispossession she fashions an art of the secret, turning repetition against itself to forge ciphers and schibboleths through which she can still respond. Reading the secret across its Greek and Latin lexicons – the crypt (kryptein) and secession (secernere, secedere) – the essay situates the hermeneut at their juncture and uncovers the technicity, the iterability, that makes every language a possible site of the secret.