This volume includes two texts. The title of the first includes the title on the cover: "I Have a Taste for the Secret," which is a long interview of Jacques Derrida by Maurizio Ferraris. The interview is pretty wide-ranging, and mostly a somewhat retrospective view of Derrida's life and work. Derrida several times (beginning with an epigraph for the book) identifies himself with Augustine of Hippo, which was an interesting surprise to me, but makes a certain cumulative sense, starting from geography. (Both were "European" intellectuals born in north Africa.) Throughout the interview, there are manifold references to other 20th-century philosophers, and an effort to relate Derrida's themes to the circumstances of modern society.

On pages 57 through 59 there is the most direct discussion of the "secret" of the title, including such observations as these:

"[I]f there is something absolute, it is secret. ...

"Fundamentally, everything I attempt to do, think, teach and write has its raison d'etre, spur, calling and appeal in this secret, which interminably disqualifies any effort one can make to determine it. ...

"For me, the demand that everything be paraded in the public square and that there be no internal forum is the glaring sign of the totalitarianization of democracy."

The second half of the book is the essay "What Is There?" by Ferraris. It is an unusual approach to ontology in a Derridean vein. At the end, Ferraris returns to a theme touched on in the interview regarding dialectic (in both Platonic and Hegelian senses) as a possible point of breaking with Derrida. While Ferraris maintains that "dialectic is the absolute master" (158), Derrida insists on "thinking a dialecticity of dialectics that is itself fundamentally not dialectical" (33).

Although I enjoyed this read a great deal, and felt that it gave me new insight into the Derridean project, it may take me another pass before I can make any use of its ideas in my own work.