Bringing Simmel’s sociology of secrecy into dialogue with a governmentality perspective, allows us to see how secrecy itself works as a mode of government. Rather than hiding something, secrecy plays with concealment. It makes us believe in its secret, and thus raises curiosity or suspicion. Hence, thinking that power works through secrecy, that is through hiding something from us and thus through establishing distinctions, according to Foucault, is to follow power’s path: it is to believe in the power of power, and especially in state power. Although secrecy is counterintuitive to liberal democracy’s credo of transparency and participation, it is widely accepted as an integral part of security. Yet, the notion of dispoitifs tells a different story. Rather than operating through secrecy, security renders the population intelligible in such a way that it appears to be constitutive of security matters.