If privacy exists as a historical realm of experience or social concern, secrecy is different in being at once more specific and less amenable to representation. Unlike the private, which can be defined in opposition to the public, the secret has no settled semantic opposite. To a certain extent, the secret is bound by rule or context. A secret is a form, an intentional gap, a blank, a redaction—but not for everyone and not for all time. Not only is a particular secret inseparable from its circumstances: secrecy can constitute a climate that shapes the conditions of knowledge and practice. Secrets generate a further, troubling dimension within the realm of the private. The ambiguity of the secret is that it is already functioning in the world of knowledge, yet in order to function as a secret, we must be able to think about a state in which it is not simply another form of epistemological structuration. This is the possibility of the secret as something apart from or unreachable by history.

We invite explorations of the pragmatics of secrecy as well as its ramifications. Secrecy demands a paradoxical performance, an active keeping and keeping-from; thus, it poses particular challenges for the analysis of narrative discourse and its relation to story. The temporality of the secret also upends or entangles social and narrative scales of measuring, valuing, or ignoring time. Does the durational span of a secret depend on or constitute an event? What determines the secret’s value or productivity, in a text or a historical situation? When and how does secrecy become a means of political regulation or revolution? 

What genres, forms, languages, media does secrecy pursue? Secret sympathies, unvoiced suspicions, secret engagements, state secrets and spies, secret histories, algorithms, and commodity fetishes all suggest that secrecy is as much an ontological and axiological as it is an epistemological issue or practice. Secrets cannot be separated from forms of historicity, value, and transcendence.