The repetition that rages in history presupposes a whole history of repetition. The more we go back in time, the more repetition is cloaked in majesty. The rarer written traces become, the more impressive is the role that repetition plays in them. It seems that signs are marked out most of all to indicate how something has to be repeated. Etiquette is the first literary genre. For something to make sense, it has to be repeated—and in repeating one thing, everything needs to be repeated. During the consecration of a king, but also during a hunting expedition, history has to be recapitulated from its origins, so that from it sprouts the tiny bud that is the new action, protected and sustained by all previous actions, the latest stitch at the center of the immense fabric. Passing down through time’s race toward us, the powers of repetition are gradually canceled out: like the goddess in the Underworld, where the Invisible Hand snatches a cloak and a diadem from her at every threshold. What appears in the end is not stark nakedness, but an empty frame, an animal legacy that cold-mindedness would like to wash away. Paul Valéry—the genuine New Man of the kind that became chemically distilled in the solitude of the algebraic Ego—looks upon that empty frame as the most tedious scourge: he calls it “cyclosis,” “the cyclomania of our essence.” And so he writes: “I was born, at the age of twenty, exasperated by repetition—that is to say, against life. Getting up, getting dressed, eating, evacuating, going to bed—and always these seasons, these stars—And history!
“I know everything by heart______
“to the point of madness … This table has repeated itself before my eyes for 39 years!—This is why I cannot bear the countryside, working the land, the furrows, waiting for the harvests—All this is regarded as ‘poetic.’
“But for me poetic is the opposite of this sad industry, mortally circular like the daytime rotation and the other______.”
Below the Acheron, which Freud had promised to stir up in the epigraph to The Interpretation of Dreams, lies the region of blind germinations, the vast inorganic silence that is sometimes broken by improbable life: Freud reached this fathomless place, well “beyond the pleasure principle,” immediately after the end of World War I. But what was driving him to question “twenty-five years of intense work,” and, above all, using theories that could easily be considered “mystical,” blending them with the libidinal opprobrium of his treacherous son, C. G. Jung? What was still so deeply troubling the psyche of Sigmund Freud, the man who had the peculiar quality of recapitulating the whole of Western history in each of his moments of anxiety? It was repetition. With the perfect candor that, along with his “intellectual impartiality” in describing the “ultimate things,” makes him the only analyst who succeeded through his work in raising himself to the sacrificial status of Patient, Freud tells us: “Once, as I was walking through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was strange to me, on a hot sunny afternoon, I found myself in a quarter the character of which could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a while without being directed, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, but only to arrive yet a third time by devious paths in the same place. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to abandon my exploratory walk and get straight back to the piazza I had left a short while before.” Freud then moves on to a second example, where the guile of “involuntary repetition” appears even more uncanny, since it takes the form of pure chance, of a coincidence that is found in the world without even requiring the ambivalent collaboration of the subject wandering aimlessly in a foreign land. And here Freud, as on so many other occasions, fails to tell us he is referring to a personal experience: “We of course attach no importance to the event when we give up a coat and get a cloakroom ticket with the number, say, 62; or when we find that our cabin on board ship is numbered 62. But the impression is altered if two such events, each in itself indifferent, happen close together, if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number—addresses, hotel rooms, compartments in railway trains—always has the same one, or one which at least contains the same figures. We do feel this to be ‘uncanny,’ and unless a man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure of superstition he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence of a number, taking it, perhaps, as an indication of the span of life allotted to him.” The person not “hardened and proof against the lure of superstition” was Freud himself in the face of repeated appearances of the number 62 during his travels in Greece in 1909, when he was obsessed by the idea that he would die at the age of sixty-two. And, as he was writing those lines in his essay “Das Unheimliche” (“The Uncanny”), without mentioning that they referred directly to him, he was only a few months past his sixty-second birthday. Immediately after setting out these two examples, Freud introduces for the first time (and referring already to Jenseits des Lustprinzips [Beyond the Pleasure Principle], which would soon be published) a detailed account of repetition-compulsion, the last and supreme divinity in his mythology: “It must be explained that we are able to postulate the principle of a repetition-compulsion in the unconscious mind, based upon instinctual activity and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts—a principle powerful enough to overrule the pleasure-principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic character, and still very clearly expressed in the tendencies of small children; a principle, too, which is responsible for a part of the course taken by the analyses of neurotic patients.” Here Freud was trying to delve beyond endopsychic reality, to find a way into metapsychology, to return to dealing with the demonic power of nature. The same repetition that nature continually offers us in the processes of its forms emerges everywhere in the life of the psyche: not just in the fort-da (gone-there) repeated by the child who makes the wooden reel disappear and reappear always to control his worry over his mother’s absence; not just in the dreams of someone who is suffering from traumatic neurosis and always goes back to those dreams to encounter the trauma; not just in the behavior of the patient who, when urged by transference neurosis, acts out those personal elements repressed rather than remembering them; not just in the history of the embryo that is “obliged in the course of its development to recapitulate the structures of all the forms from which it is sprung, instead of proceeding quickly by the shortest path to its final shape” (all cases discussed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle). There is another repetition, even more subtle and menacing, which is given as an example in The Uncanny to introduce repetition-compulsion and not mentioned again in Beyond the Pleasure Principle—a roaming, uncontrollable repetition: that of casual signs that accumulate, that suggest a nexus, a “secret meaning.” Here the repetition is hybrid, it forms a part of the changeable scene of the outside world and, at the same time, of the mental scene where it comes to claim its place. The repetition of a sign in the outside world transforms it into an omen: it suggests a significance whose origin we don’t know and cannot ignore. Every meaning that we ourselves have not established or produced is uncanny. The coincidences are uncanny because they suggest a destiny, a network of significances that precede us, accompany us, are playing about with us. The repetition-compulsion is directed at someone inside us (the “Double,” heir of the “Self” of the Upaniṣads) who is shrouded by that network of meanings—and sometimes appears there replicating our own features. Some people who are not neurotic give the impression “of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some ‘daemonic’ power”: but what disturbs them is not so much the ability of the mind to become caught up in repetition, as much as the elastic readiness with which reality approaches them, promptly offering its services so that the repetition-compulsion occurs. The most intolerable suspicion, for Freud, is that there might be a complicity between the outside world and the psyche: and yet he came across such complicity in the estuary where the waters of the unconscious mix with those of the world. Being unable to admit that such conspiracy could implicate a surplus of meaning—since this would have undone his whole construction—he admitted only that it indicated the convergence of nature and the psyche toward one and the same point: the origin itself, as a place of the undifferentiated, of meaningless repetition, where meaning—like every tension—is canceled out.
This was the unrecognized threat that such creepy moments of daily life transmitted—and, in The Uncanny, Freud was careful to give a reassurance, deceiving even himself, that he’d had no further experience of them for many years: “The writer of the present contribution, indeed, must himself plead guilty to a special obtuseness in the matter, where extreme delicacy of perception would be more in place. It is long since he has experienced or heard of anything which has given him an uncanny impression.” Once having opened the door onto the world outside us, two opposing possibilities present themselves: either to accept a nature that speaks through capricious oracles, that extends into the psyche and intervenes in it; or to consider nature as a still life, jealous of the life that has developed around it, and eager to lead it back to inanimate stillness. It was this second path that Freud was forced to take. In the most radical lines of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the unnamed Thanatos appears as a supreme power that doesn’t so much clash with Eros, but uses him for his own purposes (“the pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts”). The erotic surge covers the uninterrupted action of death instincts, which “seem to do their work unobtrusively.” Rather than conflict, it is a cruel harmony. It is a convergence, with two differing styles, toward the same purpose: punishment for that guilt which is life itself, its enforced return to that inorganic stillness, from which a dark and unnatural tension has made it emerge. Freud describes it as “a force of whose nature we can form no conception,” and explains: “The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavored to cancel itself out. In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state.” In the tangled structure of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud outlines the insurmountable cosmogony of modernity. Valéry’s impatience with Freud’s notion of repetition and his dark vision of repetition-compulsion spring from a single source: a terror at the nonhuman origin of meaning, expressed in the demonic whim of coincidences and in the relentless monotony of nature. Beyond the Pleasure Principle has yet to be read as the record of that solitary patient, Sigmund Freud, who had the great strength to recapitulate, in the most sober and exact detail, the syndrome of Western history: to obtain an order out of nature, but on the condition of accepting that such order, as a variant of repetition-compulsion, is just one long vicious circle that leads back to the cancellation of itself. As Freud wrote, gazing at the landscape of civilization: “Whereas cleanliness is not to be expected in nature, order, on the contrary, has been imitated from her. Man’s observation of the great astronomical regularities not only furnished him with a model for introducing order into his life, but gave him the first points of departure for doing so. Order is a kind of compulsion to repeat which, when a regulation has been laid down once and for all, decides when, where, and how a thing shall be done, so that in every similar circumstance one is spared hesitation and indecision.” “Every similar circumstance” includes coincidences: but their function will be that of recalling the insignificance of everything. For Freud, coincidences can only allude to death. “It was still an easy matter at that time for a living substance to die,” writes Freud in his hallucinatory vision of primordial times. Civilization, on the other hand, is a protracted death. Above all, it is a question of style: choosing “ever more complicated détours,” and ensuring that the organism is able to achieve what it most wants: “to die only in its own fashion.” “The fact that man shakes off what does not relate to him is, for me, a proof that something of the kind exists,” said Goethe to Eckermann, in relation to entelechy. For Freud, that grand notion narrows down to the ultimate claim of the individual and of civilization: for each to die in their own way, to draw a final arabesque before the return to that mute stillness that ignores meaning.
There is one phenomenon that is the perfect reversal of that repetition of the world’s disparate signs becoming condensed into as many omens: it is the forced repetition of a word, which after a short interval of time loses all meaning and is lost before us like an opaque husk of sound. In these two experiences we discover, in the private and intimate space of our minds, the original schism: when, on the one hand, there was a world overladen with meanings, and those meanings had a vast, uncontrollable, overwhelming life of their own, so that their excessive power ended up converging on one single meaning: death; and, on the other hand, another world was forming, the enclosure of culture, which enforced the power of arbitrary will, the capacity to give names, to establish meanings with the artifice of convention. If we shy away from the repetition of signs that come to us from the world, it is because we find that in such repetition the powers of the world are always there, perhaps dormant, certainly distant, but nevertheless present and ready to swallow us up as though we ourselves were a word in their language. If we feel a strange unease in observing how a certain word, automatically repeated, seems to lose all connection with its meaning, it is because at that same moment we sense the weakness, the precarious nature of the act on which every culture is based. Thought involves setting off falteringly toward that place of twofold uneasiness, a simultaneous attempt at escaping from nature and culture. This is why thought is an irregular and improbable activity.
Sacrifice: repeating the irreversible.
Coincidence is the appearance of a constellation in the life of a single person. The night sky cannot be seen in the large cities: so it re-forms itself within us in these fleeting apparitions.
Myth, if it is not repeated, wears out, dying eventually like the gods, after many deaths. But the world, which has even forgotten to bury it, and has immediately plunged into the statistical cloud of the New, suddenly realizes that its actions cannot manage to be arbitrary, even though they claim to be. Otherwise, how do we explain that involuntary repetition, that dull murmur of familiar words, of déjà vu, of fixed movements that accompany it? Everything now is a prayer mill. Tibet is nowhere to be seen, no one prays, no authority can demand their ritual payment: and yet everything continues to go through a succession of obscure stations, in a circle. When Talleyrand was alive, those stations had pristine names, ready to be squandered in lecture halls: Ancien Régime, Revolution, Terror, Directory, Empire, the Restoration, Citizen-King. Never again would those clean profiles be seen on the last medals, soon removed from circulation, to be replaced by paper money without any second thought—more practical, more potent. Nature was also bound in paper, newspaper. But the one thing that would not be bound—indeed it bound other things more than ever—was repetition itself. Marx once felt the vertigo of repetition when he read in the newspaper about a new 18 Brumaire, led by a new Bonaparte. But he immediately banished the ghost, since he was convinced that he himself was the ghost, the one who would hand out the parts for the Final Rehearsal. The repetition had no end, and soon Marx would also be horribly repeated.
“The tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living. At the very time when men appear engaged in revolutionizing things and themselves, in bringing about what never was before, at such very epochs of revolutionary crisis do they anxiously conjure up into their service the spirits of the past, assume their names, their battle cries, their costumes to enact a new historic scene in such time-honored disguise and with such borrowed language. Thus did Luther masquerade as the Apostle Paul; thus did the revolution of 1789–1814 drape itself alternately as Roman Republic and as Roman Empire; nor did the revolution of 1848 know what better to do than to parody at one time the year 1789, at another the revolutionary traditions of 1793–95.” This was what Marx wrote in December 1851 (though plundering images and phrases from an earlier letter from Engels of December 3); and before that, between November 1850 and March 1851, in Sorrento, Alexis de Tocqueville was working away on his Souvenirs of the revolution of 1848 (“there have no doubt been crueler revolutionaries than those of 1848 but certainly not, I believe, more stupid”), noting in this respect in May: “It was the parody of February 24, in the same way that February 24 was itself the parody of other revolutionary scenes.” Earlier, recording the attack on the Chamber of Deputies, he had written: “Our Frenchmen, especially in Paris, gladly mix memories of literature and theater with their more serious manifestations; and this often leads to the idea that the feelings they demonstrate are false, whereas they are just awkwardly decorated. In this case, the imitation was so apparent that the terrible originality of the events remained hidden. That was the time when everyone’s imagination was tinged with the garish colors used by Lamartine in his Girondins. The men of the early revolution were alive in everybody’s spirit, their actions and their words present in everyone’s memory. All that I saw that day carried the visible mark of those memories; and it always seemed to me that everyone was far more concerned about acting out the French Revolution than continuing it … Although I could see the end of the performance would be terrible, I could never really take the actors seriously; everything seemed to me like a bad tragedy performed by a few provincial amateurs.”
Both Marx and Tocqueville had therefore recognized that they lived in an age blinded by the New, even though it continued practicing the cult of bloody repetition. The sequence tended to be this:
the New has to happen (from the time when the spirit of “eternal revision,” as Burckhardt would soberly describe it, receives the anointment of sovereignty);
the New tends inevitably to repeat some fragment of the Canonical Phases, which had in turn repeated other specters;
the eruption of technology continually modifies dimensions and weights, distorting actions in a continual anamorphosis, which invades time;
repetition unleashes its unforeseen novelty and the New is faithfully repeated in the alliance between grotesque, atrocious and portentous, which transmits the psychic shock of the Modern.
“Verification-compulsion” is what it could be called: this disease has infected us, forever. But where does this disease originate—in what desire, in what sense? If the West has been so violently struck by the need to affirm, to insist upon repetition, this is because never before has the absolute unrepeatability of every element, the precarious but irreducible life of every detail, made itself so firmly felt as in the West. Without verification-compulsion, without empty repetition, we could not have endured the surfacing of disconnected appearance, which is fleeting, has no offspring, has no correspondences—that emergence which had never before been evoked by itself. The unique flavor, the anguished but triumphant and looming sense of every pure form of the West is to be found in this precariousness, up to its farthest-reaching manifestations, where destruction is imminent. Hence the need for stone, for solidity. But no civilization has been so lacking in solidity, so exposed, as the West. The West abandons mythological repetition in order to impose upon itself a repetition spread in matter, since it questions not only whether everything is repeated in a certain way, but whether the world itself, as it is, can reproduce itself. This immense sense of suspension requires an equally extreme counterbalance—and at the point of balance we find a first stubborn, brazen choice: it emerges from the piano, it is the moment musical, a paralyzing, diffusing and yet affirmative power (and this time there is no need for magic, which is always overburdened with meaning), whereas that sound always and only returns in one phrase, a clear and fateful quaver: wanting what passes because it passes. “… Nothing, and enamel on top of it,” whispered Gottfried Benn.
CHEVALIER DE B***: Whether history repeats itself is a fatuous question, but the effects of thinking about repetition are devastating. In the act of repetition, as in a faded scrap of Oriental cloth, survives the heritage of myth, the capacity to consider an act as a model, the sense of a destiny connected to a form. Louis XVI read and reread, with fear and horror, the story of Charles I, until he, too, ended on the scaffold. The Duc d’Orléans thought of reenacting the Fronde of Cardinal de Retz, but found himself on the same scaffold soon after. Events can overlap—or stand in stark contrast to each other: what counts is that any action contains within it the ghost of the other action. Just as there is no book that is not the reprise, or response to, or consequence of another book, so too, with every gesture, the hand that moves is held by another invisible hand that guides, or encourages, or restrains it. In relation to every event, we need to ask ourselves: what was trying to be repeated here? what was being answered here? Sometimes events are so distorted by the eruption of chance that it is hard to detect any sign of an historical nexus. The whole of our relationship with the past lies in the thought of repetition; figures detach themselves from time, like a massive lapse of memory, anxiously waiting to reappear. At times they are wretched and awkward—and sometimes, at that very moment, they reach the maximum, murderous, force of impact.
Repetition is the invisible step back that accompanies every gesture. Historians stand out for their capacity to connect this to their account of actions, of visible exploits. But, to achieve it, they must forget all caution and mingle with the shadows, emerging from the past as if from Avernus. Michelet, Burckhardt, Warburg, Tocqueville …
Chateaubriand saw life in Paris during the years of the Revolution as like the “collection of ruins and tombstones from every century, heaped up in disarray in the cloisters of the Petits-Augustins: except that the wrecks I am talking about are alive and constantly changing.” The repetition is not just of order, but of chaos, of the time when various orders come together—Greek and Gothic, blood and enamel. The Revolution was also the first total spectacle, the Gesamtkunstwerk that emerged from the drawing rooms and from the sewers, and trod the stage of a city. François-Joseph Talma made his theater debut immediately after seeing the Marquis de Favras hanged. Chateaubriand assures us that “the avenues of the Tuileries garden were thronged with giggling women,” and the footsteps of the crowd echoed around the recently deserted convents “like in the abandoned halls of the Alhambra.”
Like every great mythologist, Freud bases everything on something we can say little about: the return to the inorganic. In their migrations over thousands of miles, birds and fish are supposed to be searching for their original home, which should be the inertia of matter, before the emergence of life. This is the inevitable consequence of a principle that, under various names, had always guided him—at the time of the Project for a Scientific Psychology, he called it a “principle of neuronic inertia,” and in Beyond the Pleasure Principle he would call it “principle of constancy,” describing it as a “tendency operating in the service of a function whose business it is to free the mental apparatus entirely from excitation or to keep the amount of excitation in it constant or to keep it as low as possible.” If, therefore, the pleasure principle implies a return to an earlier state (and here the myth of Eros in the Symposium comes in useful to Freud, who was asking himself, with great perplexity, what event copulation could possibly repeat), when translated into phylogenetic terms it implies a return to the inorganic, which is the state preceding life. Freud’s construction is based on nothing more than this: but the preconditions for this inconspicuous gesture are precisely what remains to be explained, and what Freud doesn’t wish to explain. It is difficult to let the “principle of constancy” pass as an experimental observation like so many others. This principle, for Freud, is the invisible Hermes that enables him to construct what is most essential in this perspective: a caesura, a defensive barrier—otherwise the subject (i.e., Freud himself) would fall into the foul swamp in which the Ouroboros lives. And Freud chooses the least ascertainable caesura, the one marked by the emergence of life, since he needs to identify all life that precedes our life (thus the whole of nature) with death. He is not therefore talking about the inorganic, a shrewd device that allows him to frame his discourse with casual reference to various scientific publications. What he is anxious to establish is the equation between the whole of nature (organic and inorganic) and death. Why indeed should the repetition-compulsion be the expression of a death instinct? Hadn’t Freud himself explained admirably, in relation to the fort-da game, the child’s role in controlling, in dominating, and therefore in exalting the power of life? We have to search deep into the prose of Beyond the Pleasure Principle before we find the radiant peradam, the phrase from which everything else descends: “The elementary living entity would from its very beginning have had no wish to change; if conditions remained the same, it would do no more than constantly repeat the same course of life.” But for Freud, that ordinary “course of life,” inasmuch as it is opposed to the “tension” that establishes the emergence of real life (our life), becomes equivalent to death itself. The tolerance of primordial nature toward life extends only as far as allowing it to appear (life is octroyée, granted), but so as then immediately to let it be repeated—and in this way reabsorb it within itself, in its own death knell. The model of repetition is not just the rotation of the stars, but physiology: breathing, sleep, hunger. For Freud, everything bears the mark of death—like the number on the cloakroom ticket he is given. It is not chance alone, but the whole of nature that we must keep at a distance. A final step: nature is death first of all because it kills. Nature is always an excess that threatens us. In the scientistic delirium toward which Freud always wished to lead the psyche, translating its “figurative language” into that of physiology or chemistry—which in turn is yet another “figurative language” as Freud himself observed with cruel self-irony—there is one frequently recurring sign: the excessiveness of nature’s dominance over perception, which survives only because it takes “small specimens of the external world,” because it limits itself “to sample it in small quantities.” Indeed, to save itself from the rampant spread of nature, the psychic apparatus even kills a part of itself to create within it an insensitive “protective shield,” a last defense against the murderous fury of external nature. This “protective shield” is the “outer layer” of the apparatus itself, which consents to die, becoming “to some degree inorganic” in order to save “all the deeper [layers] from a similar fate.” This visionary glimpse has no connection with any physiological process, but has everything to do with the ancient theory of sacrifice, which is transcribed here into the “figurative language” of an imaginary physiology, where—if we want to understand what is happening—we have only to replace the words protective shield with the unutterable words sacrificial victim. This, Freud observes, in regard to the stimuli that reach us from outside: but the cerebral cortex is a cork panel between the wind and the waves: we defend ourselves from the wind of the world by perceiving as little of it as possible, raising up against it the part of us we have killed in the sacrifice, but the waves come from the body’s obscurity, and against them there is no defense—apart from resorting to “protection,” which catapults into the external world the battering rams that assail us from within. In a few swift and unobtrusive moves, Freud here arrived at the deduction that paranoia was a normal and uninterrupted experience of the psyche.
The discoverer of laws in history will always resemble the wild inventor of useless patents, whose method is that of cornering his interlocutor in order to explain how, at home, he has managed to achieve perpetual motion. Why not come and see the machine for yourself? It’s here … Ever since Polybius wrote his elementary reflections on the cyclical nature of forms of government—first monarchy, then aristocracy, then democracy, then monarchy again, ad infinitum—history has continued to prove him right, as it has done with many other, far more complex, cyclical theories. But it has done so with disdainful magnanimity, since in the end this law—if we can call it that—was an elaborate way of showing the pointlessness of history, which becomes all the more apparent once its hidden mechanism is revealed. For history to have an unassailable meaning, a télos is required, which cancels out history itself. Otherwise, every secularized cyclical pattern of forms leads history back to a much-feared morphology, which reaffirms nature’s supremacy over it. And here Spengler appears: “‘Mankind,’ however, has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than the family of butterflies or orchids.” Freud—out of intellectual sobriety and karmic loyalty—could not admit a télos, but nor could he abdicate in favor of nature. So he bowed to mute origins, admitting their ultimate hegemony: but he would never grant them the character of unnamed life. They were the marks of death, from which life detached itself with a gesture of momentary whim. Civilization is a curved line of seashells on the sand, but enclosed within it is the cipher of its form. The sea that washes it away will never possess it.
“And you shall raise high your staff, stretch out your hand over the sea and cleave it in two, so that the Children of Israel can pass through the sea on dry ground,” says Yahweh to Moses pursued by the Egyptians. “Then the cloud that covered the camp was seen, / the dry land rising up out of what had been water, / out of the Red Sea an unhindered highway / and a grassy plain out of the tempestuous waves / by which they passed, as one people, they who were protected by your hand,” sings the Wisdom of Solomon. Passing through the Red Sea on dry land—a salvific event, a glint of the elect—is also a repetition of the Creation: the Red Sea dries up just as in the beginning the earth, the soil on which those feet protected by the Lord walked, was separated from the waters under the firmament: “Elohim called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of the waters he called Seas.” Now the “grassy plain” that substitutes the “tempestuous waves” is a momentary excess of divine love. If this meant a gradual drying up of nature, it would turn into dire punishment. But that image, promising a total draining of nature, would continue to guide many generations: the dry priests of Judaism, those who prefer to keep their feet on the cultivated plain rather than venture into the sea, those who regard the sea as no more than the tomb of the Enemy. Later, when Yahweh’s presence is obscured, the divine gift will become the dream of a vast reclaimed land, no longer a miracle come down from the sky, but a laborious conquest of the subject.
Freud’s heraldic motto—Wo Es war, soll Ich werden (“Where Id was, there shall I be”)—presupposes the drying up of the Zuider Zee, and once again in relation to a “salvation,” though secularized, anguished, and uncertain: “It may safely be doubted […] whether this road will lead us to the ultimate truths from which salvation is to be expected. Nevertheless it may be admitted that the therapeutic efforts of psychoanalysis have chosen a similar line of approach. Its intention, indeed, to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the superego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id. Where the id was, there the ego shall be. It is work of culture—not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee.”
We can hear another dry priest in Lévi-Strauss. Having reached the Finale of his tetralogy, he feels the need to describe himself as “someone who has never felt the slightest twinge of religious anxiety.” What a steadfast intellect, in one who for years and years, with the painstaking devotion of a new Linnaeus, had drawn out the taxonomic table of myths where the tribes of the “savage mind” had summoned up their gods! And yet, so long as he remains in the pure vegetable and mineral purity of myth, Lévi-Strauss is swept along by a sure and unconditional passion to reconstruct those astonishing architectures that unconsciousness protects from the vicissitudes of life. If in fact some errant phenomenon of “the life of the emotions” were to emerge too insistently in the myth, Lévi-Strauss would not concern himself in it, but would leave that task to the care of priests of another, darker kind: “Any phenomenon of the life of the emotions which does not reflect, on the level of consciousness, some important event hindering or accelerating the work of understanding, is not a matter for the social sciences; it belongs rather to biology and its discussion must be left to others.” There is something, however, in those final pages of Mythologiques that still disturbs him—and constantly reemerges in the experience of his savage thinkers as well as in the sharp comments of certain academic colleagues: ritual. Driven by a sad compulsion, those subjects who elaborate myths have always tended to celebrate rituals. Lévi-Strauss observes them with sympathetic embarrassment, and finds in their ceremonial actions that “characteristic mixture of stubbornness and ineffectiveness which explains the desperate, maniacal aspect of ritual.” We feel ourselves here in a vein close to that of Freud’s observations on obsessive actions, on the neurotic “ceremonial” as a descendant (and progenitor) of “religious practices”: “Any activities whatever may become obsessive actions in the wider sense of the term if they are elaborated by small additions or given a rhythmic character by means of pauses and repetitions.” Contained here in one sentence are the two peculiarities that, according to Lévi-Strauss, in the end prove essential in the ritual: “fragmenting” (in Freud, the elaboration of “small additions”) and “repetition.” What is the purpose of these two elements? Before the glory of the Discontinuous, before the majestic procession of binary oppositions that constitute the algebraic building blocks of civilization, ritual continues to bear witness to the unhappiness, the obscure nostalgia that is not satisfied by the Discontinuous. Using a theatrical ploy worthy of a Wagnerian end-of-act climax, Lévi-Strauss reveals here a thought that had been bothering him like an unwelcome companion: ritual not only doesn’t duplicate the myth being acted out (which would be a horrible contaminatio), but actually chooses to go in the opposite direction. The ritual seeks to regain the “fluidity of the real” (this is what the Red Sea is now called, after centuries of intellectual sobriety). Ritual seeks to plunge us once again in that mobile element that “constantly tends to escape through the mesh of the grid that mythic thought has placed over it so as to bring out only its most contrasting features.” A desperate venture, which obliges Lévi-Strauss to resort to the language of the “life of the emotions” (here too an age-old abrasion has produced this formula), which is now set out menacingly, and in the very way that Freud had earlier described: “Ritual, by fragmenting operations and repeating them unwearyingly in infinite detail, takes upon itself the laborious task of patching up holes and stopping gaps, and it thus encourages the illusion that it is possible to run counter to myth, and to move back from the discontinuous to the continuous. Its maniacal urge to discover the smallest constituent units of lived experience by fragmentation and to multiply them by repetition, expresses the poignant need of a guarantee against any kind of break or interruption that might jeopardize the continuance of lived experience … On the whole, the opposition between rite and myth is the same as that between living and thinking, and ritual represents a bastardization of thought, brought about by the constraints of life … This desperate, and inevitably unsuccessful, attempt to reestablish the continuity of lived experience, segmented through the schematism by which mythical speculation has replaced it, is the essence of ritual.” It is a vision of sad desolation, which runs counter to the transparent harmonia plantarum that Lévi-Strauss loves to contemplate: that harmony between the genetic code, the “savage mind” and—clash of cymbals—the scientific intellect which deciphers both the genetic code and the “savage mind,” all united by the indissoluble and flashing nexus of binary opposites. These, and only these, are the blocks used to build the House of the Discontinuous, the only true Temple of Solomon, which will rise up on the land claimed from the sea.
Lévi-Strauss’s revelations about the world and about himself at the end of his tetralogy help us understand why he is always so unconcerned about the messiest of rituals: sacrifice. But this unwelcome guest in his anthropology could not fail to appear, if only in passing, in the final orchestration of the themes. And it will be at the very point where Lévi-Strauss wants to emphasize, in criticizing Victor Turner, how ritual creates precisely nothing. Indeed, in relation to “categories, laws, or axioms,” adamant agents of the Discontinuous, it can indeed be said that ritual “endeavors rather, if not to deny them, at least to obliterate, temporarily, the distinctions and oppositions they lay down, by bringing out all sorts of ambiguities, compromises and transitions.” In the geometrical city of the intellect, sacrifice is the harbor area: narrow alleyways, illicit dealings, the smell of the sea. And here Lévi-Strauss gives a rapid analysis in The Savage Mind, where he had sought to separate totemism and sacrifice once and for all, so that the tireless Australian classifiers were finally freed from any suspicion of such a blemish. The opening is already drastic: “That it should have been possible to regard totemism as the origin of sacrifice in the history of religion remains, after so long, a matter of astonishment.” But the reason for the scandal is immediately clear: the totemic system is based on series of parallel classifications, finely and rigorously developed, according to the sound rules of the discontinuous; sacrifice, on the other hand, is based on contiguity, on tracing and retracing a path from profane to sacred, and from sacred to profane: the principle of substitution, which dominates it, is joined, in the shadow, with the imperative of connection, and this latter implies a sequence of links that cross nature and society in every sense. “Sacrifice therefore belongs to the realms of continuity.” And this is the realm that Lévi-Strauss will never legitimize, the place of contaminating “ambiguities,” “compromises,” “transitions.” Lévi-Strauss regards the form of the sacrifice as the greatest offense against culture: “sacrifice turns to comparison as a means of effacing differences.” Here, without pronouncing their name, he evokes, as silent witnesses, the ultimate opponents of his thought: the Vedic seers. For him, no form of thought is as repugnant as their tireless straddling of three worlds, saying “this is that,” with no respect for any taxonomic boundary, without accepting those gaps that should alone guarantee meaning and are each time covered at least with wild orchids. Meanwhile, behind everything, looms the hated category: interdependence, no longer of relationships but of substances, a mystical plexus that envelops every logical mesh. This is the real Enemy: and here pathos ends up betraying the scholar. The confrontation between totemism and sacrifice becomes more and more harsh, until it is transformed into a sort of sorrowful condemnation: “Totemism, or so-called totemism, confines itself to conceiving a homology of structure between the two series [the natural species and social segments], a perfectly legitimate hypothesis, for social segments are instituted, and it is in the power of each society to render the hypothesis plausible by shaping its rules and representations accordingly. The system of sacrifice, on the other hand, makes a nonexistent term, divinity, intervene; and it adopts a conception of the natural series which is false from the objective point of view, for, as we have seen, it represents it as continuous.” Here we surprise the great anthropologist while he is blaming a religious ceremony for speaking about something “nonexistent,” which is “divinity.” Why such intemperance? Perhaps we are nearing the threshold where Lévi-Strauss feels the “savage mind” is becoming too “savage” and no longer worthy of being called “mind.” The analysis is paralyzed by a feeling of horror continui. And the language is suddenly no longer that of passionate description, but of rejection—almost, one might say, for moral reasons. Such thinking must not be thought. Eventually he comes close to insult, with a shrug of the shoulders of an upright, taxpaying citoyen: “To express this difference in level between totemism and sacrifice it is not, then, enough to say the former is a system of reference and the latter a system of operations, that one works out a schema of interpretation while the other sets up (or claims to set up) a technique for obtaining certain results: that one is true, and the other is false. Rather, to put it precisely, classificatory systems belong to the levels of language: they are codes which, however well or badly made, always aim to make sense. The system of sacrifice, on the other hand, represents a private discourse wanting in good sense for all it may frequently be pronounced.” The conclusion of anthropological science would therefore be that sacrifice is a discourse “wanting in good sense.”