The metaphysical significance of the secret services lies in the words that describe them: secret services because they take over secrecy, the whole of secrecy. Their meaning—far more than in their foul and dizzying achievements—lies in the fact that, through violence, they have forced the secret to make itself apparent, to become too visible, as blatant as a poster on a street corner. There is one task that all secret services share, which is far more relevant, far more effective than all their wars: the annihilation of the secret.

Post-history: the numbing epiphany in which hypostases solidify, they become tangible bodies, and thus become less perceivable than ever before. Their contagion casts doubt on the substance of all bodies. When secrecy is put into words, the words dazzle. They are no longer read; they are merely reproduced.

“Hidden power,” “secret organization,” “scheming,” “manipulation,” “conspiracy,” “double-dealing”: words and concepts that had once been those of the Gnostics, who were still illuminated by the oblique light of the Templars, and today mean murder, international blackmail, bribery, corruption. Crime assumes the shape that used to be that of the perennial heresy: of gnosis.

The secret agent is cloaked by a peculiar squalor, which has begun to emerge even in the novel. Yet why should this squalor have such a penetrating effect? Because the secret agent usurps the place of the secret—and Psyche is deeply disappointed when she realizes that the monster is no longer the secret, but the agent who had the task of destroying it.

Praxis, an obvious notion for every Jesuit, might only sound like a bold impiety in the cramped cities of Germany, where “time falls drop by drop, and no sound disturbs the reflections of solitude.”⁵¹³ Only in the upstanding, awkward, Nordic province, in its stolid and respectable melancholy, could such exaltation stir the leaves and dust, until its frenzied citizens took up their spades to mix blood with earth. Marx’s word presupposes, as material that demons can infiltrate, a place that is “profoundly tranquil; they sometimes made a noise there about certain ideas, but without ever thinking of applying them.⁵¹⁴ One would have said that thought and action were made to have no reference to each other, and that truth, among Germans, resembled the statue of Hermes, without hands to seize, or feet to advance.” Madame de Staël, thanks to her worldly knowledge, felt all of this straightaway, but it was too early for her to talk it over with Marx, who would have identified philosophy with those missing hands and feet.