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"No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy," the citation from "Passions" [28] that Phil Lewis has again brought to our attention, recalling us to vigilance bewildered and rudderless in the wake of Derrida's death, is preceded and indeed surrounded by discussion of the secret or of secrecy. In "Passions," secrecy is the mother aporia-I use "mother" in the culinary sense, the basis for a vinegary secretion, a fermentation- that produces the relation between literature and democracy: literature permits saying everything and conversely retains the right of nonresponse: "This non-response is more original and more secret than the modalities of power and duty because it is fundamentally heterogeneous to them. We find there a hyperbolic condition of democracy which seems to contradict a certain determined and historically limited concept of such a democracy. . . . This contradiction also indicates the task . . . for any democracy to come." Derrida then goes on to say, "There is in literature, in the exemplary secret of literature, a chance of saying everything without touching upon the secret" [29].
From "Passions" to a recently published discussion of religion, secrecy thus retains a prominence within the aporetic nexus of Derrida's later work. Indeed, in reply to a question from Kevin Hart concerning grace, he gives to the secret originary prominence: "Perhaps . . . deconstruction starts from the possibility of, if not grace, then certainly a secret, an absolutely secret experience which I would compare with what you call grace. That's perhaps the starting point of any deconstruction" ["Epoche and Faith" 39]. And, as I shall shortly discuss, the secret is also a focus of "Literature in Secret."1 In approaching the question of literature's relation to democracy my comments will therefore begin by concentrating on the passion of secrecy, on a passionate secrecy and its relation to literature, but only in order to return to the political and to democracy, if not with a vengeance, then with what I'll advance as a form of controversial or controversary dissidence. Controversy I'll say more about later; dissidence is Derrida's word, encountered in yet another text replete with talk of secrecy, namely, The Gift of Death. There he notes the etymology of heresy (hairesis, bias, inclination, hence departure from a doctrine)...