In an interview, contained in A Taste for the Secret, Derrida (2001) offers some insights into his life as author, such as his reasons for writing, his initial resistance to being photographed, and so on. The curious reader might ask, but are personal secrets revealed? The title would lead one to expect not. Yet, Derrida shares some inner thoughts. On clarity: “my own experience of writing leads me to think that one does not always write with a desire to be understood—there is a paradoxical desire not to be understood” (2001, p. 30). On school: “even though I have always been in school I was never good at school. I failed a lot of examinations, was held back” (2001, p. 40). On grammar: “I detest grammatical mistakes. Even when I take liberties that some people find provocative, I do so with the feeling—justifiable or not—that I do in fact know the rules. A transgression should always know what it transgresses” (2001, p. 43). On death: “I think about nothing but death, I think about it all the time, ten seconds don’t go by without the imminence of the thing being there” (2001, p. 88). On afterlife: “I do not believe that one lives on post mortem” (2001, p. 88).
For Derrida intersubjectivity is intertextuality. In contrast to Husserl’s search for an indubitable ground of human understanding in the cogito, Derrida points out the essentially unstable and undecidable character of the nature of signs, language, and meaning. Through the method of deconstruction Derrida aims to demonstrate not the invariance of human phenomena but the essential variance, the “différance,” destabilizing all meaningful distinctions and discernible identities. Conventionally we take identity to mean that something differs uniquely from other things that may seem the same. Phenomenology may indeed be conceived as the study of identity and difference. The phenomenological question is, what makes a thing what it is and not something else?
The concern with the meaning and place of writing and secrecy recurs throughout Derrida’s work. In A Taste for the Secret, Derrida explains how the condition for sharing, thematizing, or objectifying something implies that there be something non-shareable, nonthematizable, nonobjectifiable. And this something is the absolute secret—we speak of it but we cannot say it, we evoke it but we cannot write it. The secret is absolute because it is detached, cut off (ab-solutus) or separated (secrete) from that to which it belongs. What is the significance of this unconditional and absolute secret? Dwelling in the secret forces the recognition of the irreducibility of things. It reminds of the singularity of experience and of existence in its relation to language and inquiry. The reader may agree that we must not only have a taste for the secret, but we must cultivate the care for the secret.