Literature and the Secret of the World

Abstract

This paper began to take shape in the context of a conference called “Literature and the Secret of the World.” The conference organizer proposed a dual point of departure for reading the title: first, Jacques Derrida’s assertion that literature is “the most interesting thing in the world, maybe more interesting than the world” (Derrida 1992, 47); second, the assertion in Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 that in the serial murder of women in Santa Teresa lies hidden “the secret of the world”(Bolaño2008,348). My discussion of Bolaño’s novel pursues the relation between literature, world, and secret, to which I add important considerations by Martin Heidegger and Carlo Galli concerning what gives with this thing called “world.”