Jacques Derrida, Secrets of Responsibility – ed. Ginette Michaud and Nicholas Cotton, trans. E.S. Burt and Katie Chenoweth, University of Chicago Press, April 2027

Jacques Derrida on the problem of secrecy, the first in a ten-seminar series on questions of responsibility. 

Delivered at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris during the 1991–92 academic year, Secrets of Responsibility is the first of ten seminars given by Jacques Derrida under the umbrella “Questions of Responsibility,” a cycle that includes Hospitality, Perjury and Pardon, Death Penalty, and The Beast and the Sovereign—each also published by the University of Chicago Press.

In this seminar, Derrida asks a basic question—what is a secret?—which he then explores across scientific, technical, social, political, and religious domains. Over twelve sessions, we are treated to analyses of industrial, state, military, professional, and religious secrets as well as secret societies and secret police. Derrida also tackles secrecy in literary fiction (especially in Melville, James, Poe, and Baudelaire) and philosophical texts (including Freud, Kant, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Patočka, Nietzsche, Levinas, and others). The result is a set of profound and surprising insights delivered as only Derrida can.

Good to see this scheduled, after a slower pace of recent translations – the French volumes are quite a few ahead of the English now. This volume is a translation of Répondre – du secret. Témoigner was published in 2025; and Être témoin is due in November 2026. That will mean only the 1994-95 seminar of the late sequence mentioned in the description above is still to come, though there are several from the earlier periods also being published.

I’ve mentioned these before, but notes from Derrida’s seminars are searchable here. The Derrida Seminars Translation Project site no longer seems to be updated.