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.”³⁷⁹ 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.”^{380, 381}

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.”^{382, 383} 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.^{384, 385} 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.