“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.³⁷⁸

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.