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.”^{386, 387, 388} 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.”^{389, 390, 391, 392} 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,”³⁹³ 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.”³⁹⁴ 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.