Anne-Lise François. Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780804752893. Price: US$24.95

Beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with iconic figures such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler, an intellectual revolution sweeps through Europe that commonly goes by the name of the scientific revolution. One of the guiding premises of this revolution is that the natural world can be mathematized and that the best way to grasp the underlying structure and logic of nature is by subjecting it to mathematical scrutiny. In the eighteenth century, this revolution is further radicalized when it is transposed to the human world, with the conviction that human behavior and moral action are not only susceptible to the imperatives of calculability but also best comprehended in that way. Attempts to arrive at a felicific calculus from Hutcheson to Bentham, La Mettrie’s insistence that the human being is a machine, and Adam Smith’s theory of sympathy, with analogies to Newton’s theory of gravitation, are only the most prominent examples. These revolutions continue apace today, unchecked and even intensified, not only in the natural sciences but also in the social sciences. The science of positive psychology is only the latest instance of the attempt to construe human aspiration by way of scientific method. Anne-Lise François does not rehearse this well-known narrative, but it is only against this backdrop (which she alludes to by the names utilitarianism, positivism, enlightenment, and modernity), and a keen sense of the ravages wrought by a naïve and reckless quantification of everything human, that her quest for a literature of uncounted experience acquires its peculiar urgency: “the ‘literature of uncounted experience’ … does indeed correspond to an ethos of ‘non-ado’ – of casual losses and as easily missed gains – resistant to modernity’s call to materialize and make good on given potential” (267). Her book would perhaps have been better subtitled “The Literature of Uncountable Experience” because what she is after is not simply those experiences that have through some omission not been counted, but rather those experiences that are not susceptible in any way to counting, accounting or recounting (150), to the scrutiny of publicity. To say that these experiences resist calculability would be saying too much since resistance itself would render them measurable or perceptible and bring them into the light of phenomenality. In order to elude the realm of the calculable, such experiences must pass nearly unnoticed (267): they must be what François calls “open secrets,” there for all to see yet unremarked and even unremarkable. All the difficulty of François’ project is concentrated here, in the strange logic by which the very act of scrutiny threatens to make the experiences she is seeking disappear. The real strength of François’ book lies in having isolated, through precise, attentive and sometimes virtuosic readings, an entire class of such improbable and nearly impossible experiences, in texts by Madame de Lafayette (La Princesse de Clèves), Wordsworth (the Lucy poems), Dickinson, Hardy (Poems of 1912-13) and Austen (Mansfield Park). Perhaps the most elegant example of the open secret, its liminal status as an action, and the complex and unpredictable effects it has, is to be found in François’s analysis of the following scene from Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves: This secret communication, available for all to read yet illegible to any but the lovers, is a paradigmatic instance of the open secret and François traces carefully the strange, unlikely, and barely noticeable effects produced by the (non-)event of the secret: As compelling as such an analysis in the tradition of Barthes’ Lover’s Discourse or Nancy’s Inoperative Community is, what could be the purpose and …