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.