Logics of Political Secrecy
Logics of Political Secrecy
复制标题
政治保密的逻辑
DOI：
10.1177/0263276411424583
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发表时间：
2011
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
E. Horn
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
E. Horn
在现代，政治秘密获得了坏名声。在现代民主的透明理想下，政治保密被等同于政治犯罪或腐败。这篇文章认为，现代民主国家对秘密的压制缺乏对政治秘密的结构和运作的实质性理解。通过概述政治保密的谱系，它阐明了当前保密文化的逻辑以及盲点。它着重于两个基本的秘密逻辑，从拉丁语术语“arcanum”和“secretum”推导出来。神秘学的逻辑将秘密视为政府的一个合法维度，而现代的秘密逻辑则以知识的撤退与传播、秘密与公开之间的不可分割的辩证法为特征。在这里，秘密与其说是一种被隐瞒的知识，不如说是一种“秘密效应”，它通过一种永久的怀疑和丑闻的辩证法，将秘密领域与公共领域联系在一起。与其落入这种“秘密效应”的陷阱，我们更有必要仔细研究一下帝国奥秘的传统思想，从塔西佗到早期现代的理性主义学说，再到卡尔·施密特。这一传统涉及的是保密的功能及其与法律的复杂关系。奥秘学传统阐述了秘密的关键点：它的潜力，但也有其深刻的矛盾心理。保密打开了一个不受法律约束的自由裁量的行动空间，根据卡尔·施密特（Carl Schmitt）的说法，它无视法律以使其生效。保密有助于保护和稳定国家，但同时也为法治开辟了一个例外空间，滋生暴力、腐败和压迫。与其将保密视为透明政治文化的对立面，不如将保密视为透明的补充——然而，这是一种既巩固民主又威胁民主的深刻矛盾。
In the modern age, the political secret has acquired a bad reputation. With modern democracy’s ideal of transparency, political secrecy is identified with political crime or corruption. The article argues that this repression of secrecy in modern democracies falls short of a substantial understanding of the structure and workings of political secrecy. By outlining a genealogy of political secrecy, it elucidates the logic as well as the blind spots of a current culture of secrecy. It focuses on two fundamental logics of secrecy, deduced from the Latin terms ‘arcanum’ and ‘secretum’. Whereas the logic of arcanum regards secrecy as a legitimate dimension of government, a modern logic of secretum is marked by an inextricable dialectics between the withdrawal and communication of knowledge, between secrecy and publicity. Here, the secret is not so much a piece of withheld knowledge as a ‘secrecy effect’ that binds the realm of secrecy to the public sphere by a dialectics of permanent suspicion and scandal. Instead of falling into the trap of this ‘secrecy effect’ it is worth taking a closer look at the tradition of thought on the arcana imperii, from Tacitus to early modern doctrines of raison d’état to Carl Schmitt. What this tradition deals with is the functionality of secrecy and its complicated relation to the law. The arcana tradition elaborates the crucial point of secrecy: its potential, but also its profound ambivalence. Secrecy opens up a discretionary space of action exempt from the rule of law, and, according to Carl Schmitt, ignores the law so as to allow it to become effective. Secrecy serves to protect and stabilize the state, but at the same time it opens a space of exception from the rule of law that breeds violence, corruption and oppression. Instead of seeing secrecy as the opposite of a political culture of transparency, it is more productive to regard secrecy as transparency's complement – a counterpart, however, that is marked by the profound paradox of being both a consolidation of and a threat to democracy.