USELESS SECRETS

1

The enigma will not dissipate, the secret will not be communicated. Or perhaps there are no “secrets,” if we persist in thinking of them as propositional, or as having some content to convey. Because if that were the case, we’d have to say: nothing’s hidden, nothing’s in secret.

But what’s transmitted or shared in secret is that the secret is only “in” the transmission, “in” the sharing the moment the edifice cracks, when the whole communication falls to pieces. The secret “is” the surprise of itself. The surprising newness, at each event, of being.

There’s no secret to such a transmission. No secret transmitted. The secret is simply about the transmission. It can’t be transmitted or shared; it can’t be translated. It is it. And so it lives on…

2

The secret is that “nothing” can be shared, but only in secret. When something is shared in secret, it’s both created and dissolved at the same time. It extends itself, and then it ex-’s itself out. No secret is “advanced,” and there’s nothing to respond to or answer for.

Secret is what inspires, for what inspires it is unexpected. It is the novum that cracks the enclosure of the nous. It manifests, it imposes itself on us like a cherry fly. It’s where sense once made is then surpassed, where sense comes alive.

It’s an event of enduring inspiration that’s at stake, at once the birth of language and the birth to presence; and it’s the ellipsis between the two, where one is in transit to the other and each instant of the one communicates the other.

The event of inspiration, the “transmission” of what’s only “in” secret, becomes an opening to language, to presence, to others — as transmission: the birth of a self communicated indirectly, disrupting time (its signification and its narrative).

Transmission and the time it takes correlate respectively to the instability of “language” and “presence.” But in the time of the transmission, each are opened to the other’s secret, which annihilates their poles and proves their nothingness in themselves. Proves they run into each other, or fall quiet.

Such a history cannot be understood in terms of meaning or truth any more than it can be understood in terms of linear or synchronous time. It’s the history of a self who can only re-start, whose time has not yet come.

The secret asks that we think of language set free from having a “message” and of a time set free from “succession.” We’re asked to think of time and language in terms of an omnipresent “ex-”: sharing-dissolution.

This would be the essence of a secret that exists only in transmission: a secret that slips away “in order” to exist. A secret: ek-sistence.

3

What’s in secret is then both origin and communication, indistinguishably: the origin of what only originates, what’s only “in” origination itself; the communication of what can only communicate, what’s only “in” communicating.

In terms of “what” is originated-communicated — that is, the very quiddity of the secret: existence — a “rule of uncertainty” reigns. Let us consent to adhere to this at least!

The reign of uncertainty is not an imposition or something to master; it is quite simply the rule of the undetermined, or the recognition that the “first fact” in every instant is the fact that it is undetermined. Potential in the instant is not determined by the given conditions of that instant; secondly, potential doesn’t actualize itself, it simply creates potential; it does so by loosening roots without uprooting them.

The rule of uncertainty intends for the secret “itself” to never be, for the moment it enters in to being, it’s just one more proposition, one more dirty meaning: it’s reabsorbed into the sphere of use-value. Uncertainty suspends this absorption by suspending being. In other words, being is suspended over itself– your being.

But the secret as not-being, as not-yet-being… — as creation, as potential — has another value. It only takes on meaning by letting its meaning be undermined. It’s valuable and it’s worthless because its truth cannot take the form of meaning without dissolving into the meaningless. It can only go by way of an “elsewhere” not possible before the transmission, a kind of “elsewhereing” which the transmission is. And so it cannot be mapped according to any current signification, nor to the coordinates of the given world.

The incredible heights to which this thought takes us makes us tremble; we only want to avert our eyes. But the course takes on a mind of its own, laughing at death…

Priceless gestures to the point of absurdity, curious to wild conjecture, its real value lying in its indirectness, in its inability to “jive” with this world, its “not of this realm”, its incommensurability. That is, it’s being there, it’s being currently, it’s being this moment for you.

Because the real secret is that existence itself is this incommensurable. Your existence. Only exists by way of this incommensurable,  this opening that is not an “event,” but something in excess of presence. A present excess, something coming before the very question. Something beyond you.

4

What’s in secret therefore interrupts all secrecy and whatever happens to be in secret. It exposes it to be nothing. Or, the secret is just this: the presentation of what’s in secret, that is, of nothing… Such a presentation has only one function: to dispel the myth of transparency, to call into question whatever professes to be “out in the open” and thus communicable, exchangeable, speakable.

Whatever’s out in the open is withheld — until it passes through. It can’t be recognized for what it is until it passes. But it never passes. The terminals of our circulatory system tremble outside of the pages that express the shudder of the passage. Only elsewhere is the shudder sensed.

That only “nothing” can come out into the open: this is what the secret brings to light, or keeps well-kept in the dark; or rather, brings to light in the dark where all cognition founders, where all desire pangs. It’s not that cognition stops, certainly not, but rather that it’s forced to cede its power to this opening that exceeds it every time, this god-devouring, infinite mouth.

Whatever is behind or beyond the known, “embedded” too viscerally in it, too “right up front,” such that thought cannot even articulate it or come close. An “omnipresent,” transitive nothing. Whatever this oneself is.

5

What’s in secret therefore goes openly unrecognized. Nowhere has this ever been more evident. The secret of what’s transmitted is in its being-unrecognizable, because there’s nothing, there’s no one, to recognize. The radicality of the abstraction rattles the root, the rational stays hidden; but only a hidden, concealed thinking, drawing away from being itself, can grasp the ungraspable in the secret; and only in the movement of thinking and communicating. For what binds the secret to itself is that nothing about it is ever hidden or concealed. It is only simply revealed, moved, communicated. Again, nothing: there is no secret. Some origin, right now, discovering you…

6

The secret: there is no self to speak of! No one reads, no one writes: these are impossible propositions, as unavoidable as they are unthinkable. Essence of the “un-” as such. Whatever it must mean to be someone.

But nevertheless, the secret — out of nowhere and still destined to get us nowhere, out of thin air and still destined to evaporate back in to it — conjures something. For the secret is an incessant conjuration of an “elsewhere” — here. It is the limit of being in this sense: an absolute, unconditional summons, to excess as to collapse.

Only someone can be summoned or called. The secret conjures language as birth or origination, and it summons selves as communication.

The self communicates itself as illusion, thus conjuring other selves in and as metamorphosis; and the language of the secret communicates itself to itself as illusion, thus summoning language as conjuration-transmission: metamorphosis.

7

The secret, with all the intensity it can summon-conjure, de-tools reality, self, and language at once. What’s in secret doesn’t function, it transcends; or it is immanent as an existence or a world without function. Unless, of course, its function is to think-conceal, hide-transmit, the secret of language, history, and presence!

What really “is” on the register of reality is “ineffectual”: there’s no measuring stick, no rubric, no criteria for it. It is priceless, broken, irreparable: it exceeds itself by nothing. There is no other register for reality: it is the bittersweet flux of sense itself. This is how, with all the intensity we can conjure-summon, the secret is kept while simultaneously being you.

Thus are languages and selves made responsible, taking on only what they can take on at once, in the opening of this here to its own elsewhere. Only in this way are we made passionate and patient before the nothing that we are, that our world is.

Only a world that is not and remains not holds open the possibility for the impossible: for what’s in secret to “open.” Not to come out into the open, but to open language and so many selves to what only opens in secret. Even this does not happen here, for the secret (again, it’s a question of responsibility and address– persons and places and “spokens”) only exists on another register, or in the movement of an “elsewhere.”

But this register or movement can only come from this one. It can only originate here. It can only communicate here. There is no other world than ours — not the “same” world, not “one” world, but this world: the world we share. This is the barrier against its “exchange,” or rather, the limit of the transmission or communication.

The secret (language, self) holds itself (and us) hostage in the realm (register, movement) of a not-quite-here-right-here: the inexchangeable, the real world…

8

What’s in secret crosses the border between what constitutes us as beings and what constitutes Being as impossible; the border between being closed and being open being passed.

The secret says: you are impossible, nothing is your result. You aren’t because you, unlike the rest of reality, aren’t an illusion. In the yet-to-be lies your strength, the world’s reality.

The secret conjures up all the “real illusions”: language as conjuration and summons, presence as transmission and communication. “Self” itself as summons, ascent, and release. As if these things had never been, and never could be.

That’s the real secret, the enigma that will not allow dissipating: we’ve not yet been, but we are called to be, or rather, we happen, with an intensity that exceeds whatever is, this excess that we are…

9

The imperative of the secret, which never advocates secrecy and recognizes that secrecy as a strategy is a self-defeating game, the secret’s imperative or “way of life” is to hold ourselves in this “we’ve never been born” and this “language has not yet occurred”– thrown irresistibly into the world at hand.

It’s to hold oneself on the other side of being, to hold oneself otherwise, to embrace what’s not yet, the eruption of what is as impossible, to seek what’s lacking in what’s lacking without filling in or covering over the lacking, which in that very moment transforms into the effulgence of an infinite communication, the sense of which remains absent but absent because already coming.

The tendency of the self is to be. But the only self that is holds itself to the other side of its being-itself, to the impossible-real, the elsewhere-in-the-here, to whatever is staring it in the face. Because it’s only here that the self comes to be, to speak, and to create history. Right here: no secret.

10

The self proper is the self that revises itself. It speaks, moves, opens up…

It’s the self that’s held in secret, the one that upholds itself and its promises by never quite being itself…

“Self”: exactly what’s held “in” secret, between us, loved/abandoned…

The self for whom there is  no “in”, but only “ex-”…

The self whose only “in” is in speaking, in being exceeding, in opening to all its alter sides…

The self that is shared and splinters apart… uncertain, illusory…

A self that pukes and limbers on… fortunately…