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.³⁶² 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.³⁶³ 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”).³⁶⁴ The erotic surge covers the uninterrupted action of death instincts, which “seem to do their work unobtrusively.”³⁶⁵ 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.^{366, 367} 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.³⁶⁸ 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.³⁶⁹ 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.”^{370, 371} “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.³⁷² 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.