Defacement - Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative
Michael T. TaussigArguing that this sort of knowledge ("knowing what not to know") is the most powerful form of social knowledge, Taussig works with ideas and motifs from Nietzsche, William Burroughs, Elias Canetti, Georges Bataille, and the ethnography of unmasking in so-called primitive societies in order to extend his earlier work on mimesis and transgression. Underlying his concern with defacement and the public secret is the search for a mode of truth telling that unmasks, but only to reenchant, thereby underlining Walter Benjamin's notion that "truth is not a matter of exposure of the secret, but a revelation that does justice to it."
About the author
Michael Taussig is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author, most recently, of The Magic of the State..