The park of the Son of Heaven epitomized the whole of nature in miniature, in the middle of society: now the whole of nature is our park, and we don’t know what it epitomizes.

An embarrassment peculiar to post-history:

“When one same impression awakens within us a geometer, a child, a poet, an artist, a philologist—a dozen languages and types of accommodations, and series of distinct acts—it is quite understandable that we should feel embarrassed.”⁵¹¹

In Russia, law is an imported item. Like all exotic curiosities, it rouses enthusiasm and creates its devotees. But the background onto which it is applied remains hostile. There are then two possibilities: either the law is banished forthwith, insofar as it attempts to contaminate the genuine prosperity of the land, or it is assimilated, but in such a way as to be held forever in contempt. During his brief months in power, Tsar Peter III, who played games with wooden soldiers and had a mouse court-marshaled and hanged for daring to climb over two cardboard fortresses, decided to introduce in Russia the code of law that Frederick the Great had recently brought into force in Prussia. “But,” as Claude Rulhière noted, “both through the ignorance of the translators and the shortage of words in the Russian language for all the ideas of law, not a single senator could understand the code; and the Russians saw this vain attempt merely as a sign of contempt for their own ways and a foolish attachment to foreign ways.”⁵¹² When it came to the age that sought to explain history step by step, Frederick’s enlightened and military law was replaced by Marx’s law of the phases of development of productive forces. But both of these served above all to perfect the practices of the Bureau of Secret Affairs, set up by Peter the Great to oversee the conduct of the nation through a sophisticated policing system—and which continued operating with zeal and providence under various names, from Ochrana to the KGB, offering among other things the only example in Russia of the undeniable march of progress.

Between the death of Hitler and the death of Stalin, there was a moment of lull in which nations, still dazed, prepared meekly to slot into the new order. Post-history had finished blossoming; it now awaited an Amazonian lushness. During those years there was a proliferation of objects. Anyone practiced in the hermetic arts would have described them as subtle objects—objects that, in comparison with ordinary objects up to that time, were like the subtle body is to the gross body in alchemy. The peculiar mechanisms of the age gradually came into motion. The first moves of the game were indicated by the war in Algeria and the assassination of John Kennedy. And everything soon became wrapped up in it, everyone was involved, with the same naturalness that Coca-Cola cans were used to decorate fetishes, between nails and splintered glass, as though they had always been there for that purpose.

Two parallel histories can be written about what took place between 1945 and today: one by the historians, with all its intricate apparatus of parameters, statistics, masses, political parties, movements, negotiations, production; and the other by the secret services, punctuated by murders, deceptions, betrayals, bombings, cover-ups, arms deals. We know that both histories are inadequate, that each claims to be self-sufficient, that neither could be transposed into the other, that they will continue their parallel lives. But hasn’t it perhaps always been like this—at least since the time when the Old Man of the Mountain let his men loose on the world? Yes, it has long been so, but secrecy at that time really was secret—and evidence of it was arbitrary and restricted, a presence perceptible but elusive—a presence, in fact, that remained secret. Secrecy had not yet been assimilated into the secret services. For this to happen, it was necessary to wait for the years of pure post-history, the expression used here—a poor name, which only indicates our inadequacy in the face of the unnamable present—to describe the age that follows 1945.