The most shameless metaphors are those that once fixed the poles in world order. Woman-cow, man-bull are evidence of this, as well as disdain for the civilization of the goddess. Industry does not seek to cancel out tradition, as a reactionary theory claims; on the contrary, it brings it to fulfillment, in a traffic of archetypes. To this end it hides the foundation of tradition, the sense of the continual attack on order, that rituals were meant to heal thanks to an uninterrupted exchange, where what had just been the subject of wrongful and inevitable appropriation was given in offering. The sacrificial exchange is contradictory because it denies the very principle of exchange, the unit of measure, which is not given in common to human language and the elements of nature. Myth established the impossible symbolic system that had to allow exchange. Thanks to this impossibility, exchange was saved from the guilt that taints its origin. Since what kitsch reveals is not just the cutting off of natural relationships: it is the curse that transforms the primal moment of violation—when relationships were given a name—into a perpetual nightmare. Ignorance of this guilt is the foundation of industry: what exists is therefore a chain of messages, equal by right, convergent in meaning, varied in form. But there are no people who exchange them, nor anything that proposes them. This can be an image of the Word. Industry therefore has to be thanked: knowledge can only come per speculum in aenigmate, through a glass darkly.

CHEVALIER DE B***: During my adolescent years, as I was passing through what you call the “storms of the revolution” in my country, I believe I established one thing above all: I now know that our greatest and certainly our wiliest enemy is society, the very idea of it. At one time it was happy to represent itself as a large body, a giant troubled by occasional torments. Today it has engulfed the subterranean and celestial seas, from the Yellow Springs to Eridanus, it has incorporated stars and magma, it has amalgamated all that exists within itself. The primordial giant, the Great Animal that Plato had already dreamed of, will seem like miniature Sèvres carafes in front of the enormous glass bubble into which society has put the world: everything is a seedling in its greenhouse.

The foundation of inversion: society is able to absorb within it all divine as well as natural images: all that which stood in front of society, from which society was detached, with which it negotiated at every moment of its life: the triple hub that connects the wheel of the articulated to the threefold pada, from which the unarticulated descends, from which it depends, to which it returns. Transitions: Durkheim’s formula—“the religious is the social”—is the sign that this engulfing society already exists, indeed it is clear to see, so that it can be presented as a scientific hypothesis. With Simone Weil there is the first revolt against this secular form of religion—a revulsion emerges along the same lines as that of Lucretius for the “copious blood of quadrupeds sprinkled over altars.”²⁶⁹ With Simone Weil there is the first recognition of the most insidious peculiarity of society: the “mystery” through which there exists “an apparent kinship between social and supernatural”: this is the first statement that, as a consequence, the only idolatry is now that which bows to society, the only enslavement is “enslavement to society.”^{270, 271}