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Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative

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The anthropologist Michael Taussig provides a detailed and thoughful narrative on the cultural phenomena of public secrecy and Hegel's "labor of the negative," drawing inspiration from an impressive range of sources both new and old. This is a book on the theory and practice of unmasking, as a cultural practice that both contains and sustains the sacred in its ever-slippery transition back and forth between explicit cultural knowledge and public secrecy. In "unmasking unmasking" (to borrow a Taussigian metalogism) via a lively engagement with the ideas of both critical theorists (Nietsche, Benjamin, Canetti) and ethnologists, we learn that public secrecy can be the most crucial - if the most rarefied - form of social knowledge. In the book's last section, we recognize Uncle Mike as the little child in "The Emperor's New Clothes," who naively but urgently challenges us to see how that film of secrecy - behind which social life is all-too-often lived with perfect complicity - actually works its way into the making and unmaking of meaning.