1 In the course of the winter semester of 2011 I was fortunate to teach a seminar with Bruno Karsenti on Freud’s testamentary book, Moses and Monotheism. The seminar was the opportunity to engage in many fascinating debates. For Bruno, it was an occasion to test, in conversation with myself and with the audience, the hypotheses that he has since shaped into his book, Moïse et l’idée de peuple [Moses and The Idea of The People]. The challenge that his interpretation represents led me to go back to Freud’s text and to immerse myself in it, without this work of reading producing anything that might lead to a thesis that could stand as material for a book. I approached Freud’s late work without any particular agenda. The hermeneutic violence that Bruno deployed, precisely that of an interpretation with an agenda, forced me in one sense to take a position and to forge a conviction about a text that has always interested me, but whose initially enigmatic character it would be pointless and essentially counterproductive to deny, from the point of view of interpretation.

2 Even today, I am not going to put forward an overall vision of the text, which would be equivalent in scale and depth to the vision defended by Bruno. It is still (much) too early for that. Perhaps, one day, I will write a book. For the time being I will make do with coming back to a concept that provides Bruno’s book with its subtitle, and which is effectively central in Freud’s text: that of “historical truth.”

3 The interpretation of this concept that he puts forward constitutes in more than one respect the pillar of the ingenious construction that Bruno has erected. Now, this interpretation appears to me to stem on the whole from the imaginary – in the most precise (and double) sense of the term: that of a projective identification from Bruno to Freud, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, of an identification of the Jewish people such that, going by Bruno, Freud would have thematized this identification, or in any case made it thinkable.

4 Please understand me correctly. It is not a matter of correcting, in the name of philology, an interpretation that would be false. I think that Bruno’s reading comes from a regime of discourse that is perfectly legitimate: that of the free use of Freud, a genre in which his success bears witness to the infinite fruitfulness of an author who allows us, in this day and age, to respond both to questions that he did not pose, or to which he did not always give the responses that we might like – that is to say, that our desire places in him. Therefore, we will not take an opposing stance here on the gratifying and frankly galvanizing ardor of the interpreter, which makes us think, truth by its nature being dull and disappointing of texts that say exactly what they say. If we are coming back to these texts it is because, in fact, what they say is vast, in a sense that is much vaster than what the interpreter makes them say. This is why it seems to me that it would be a shame not to listen to them before elaborating upon them, in order to finally cover them over with a reassuring construction.

5 Therefore, what we are going to work on is, in a way, a form of resistance to analysis. In effect, our hypothesis will be that it is important to restore this literally “mad” essay from Freud’s late period to its rightful place in analytic theory and perhaps, in a sense, to analytic practice.

6 According to Bruno, Freud says in Moses and Monotheism that “Biblical revelation, the ‘pious fiction,’ contains the ‘historic truth’ of the Jewish people.” [1] Of course, nowhere does Freud say exactly that. There where, from his pen, it is a question of “historical truth,” it is never the truth of a people, nor indeed of anything at all, but of “historical truth” period, and, as in the remark on the “Autobiographical Study” [2] rightly quoted by Bruno as an illustration of his comments, this “historical truth” is then invoked as that which gives “religion” its positive content (its “truth content”) – “religion” in the singular, we should note, and not one of many religions in particular. The concept of historical truth is supposed to respond to a difficulty that has been left in suspense since The Future of an Illusion of 1927, namely that of the power of religion, which remains enigmatic in its resilience and its resistance to critical analysis. Following the retrospective presentation that is given of it in Freud’s late work itself, his final research efforts would apparently have led him to the idea that religion’s power results, contrary to all expectations, from the truth of its contents, but in the sense of the historical truth, not the material truth.

7 This conceptual couple of historical truth/material truth does in effect lie at the heart of the last of the three essays that were grouped together by Freud under the title Moses and Monotheism. As we will see, without it being a matter of an invention that is specific to this book, the question of historical versus material truth plays a decisive role in it, ushering in the denouement of the difficulty that is discussed throughout these three essays: who is Moses, really? What kind of relationship is maintained between what has been said about him in the religious tradition and this reality? And if what has been said about him does not conform to this reality, as Freud’s critical analysis asserts, then what mode of presence does this reality nevertheless have in what is said about him, and perhaps not only in what is said about him? Without the notion of “historical truth” as an opposition to the notion of “material truth,” this problem would remain without a solution.

8 It is therefore of the greatest importance, if we want to understand this late text of Freud’s, to determine exactly what we should understand by “historical truth” (die historische Wahrheit).

9 On this issue, in his interpretation – in which the notion of “historical truth” plays a strategic role, because he hopes to find within it “the truth of the Jewish people” (following a syntax of the word “truth” that is therefore different from the one that is to be heard in the Freudian syntagma, which is a single block and does not leave any place for a complement) – Bruno clearly has his hypothesis. First of all, he comments on Freud’s introduction of this notion in the following terms:

10

This type of truth is distinct from the material truth, just as it is distinct from fiction: enveloped in the latter, it is distinct from the former due to the other framework, which is just as real but real in a different way, that it manages to isolate. [3]

11 One can find (almost) nothing to say about this remark. It is descriptive and literally true. However, the question that needs to be asked is that of the “envelopment” that is invoked by the commentator. What exactly does it mean to say that historical truth is “enveloped” in fiction?

12 From this point of view, the formulas that appear a little further on appear to be just as problematic. Bruno underscores that the historical truth is

13

[…] indeed contained in fiction, the pseudo-truth of revelation. It is contained within it as a very solid framework, woven from these two threads, where fiction implies reality, and where historical reality is constructed by fiction. We know nothing yet of this regime of construction, the exact modes by which the real and the fictitious are interlaced. [4]

14 If I understand this passage correctly, it introduces an idea that, in its own right, seems false in relation to Freud’s precise use of the syntagma, which we will be coming back to: namely that the so-called “historical truth” would be constructed. The formulas that Bruno employs are not entirely clear for me, but all the same I wonder whether, at this level, and in his whole interpretation of the notion of “historical truth,” we might not be meeting something along the lines of an implementation of a hermeneutic-type model: historical truth is, in some sense, what happens when the stories one tells becomes more true than the mere (observed) factual truth, because they have real effects. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” says Maxwell Scott in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. “When you print the legend, legend becomes fact,” Bruno seems to be saying to us; in other words: when you print it “in a people” (which is also a way of making a people). The “historical truth” is then the becoming-real of that which one recounts – the becoming-real of fiction.

15 A reading such as this, which I cannot be sure that Bruno fully endorses – in the end, his formulas about the reality of “historical truth,” in spite of the subject’s importance for him, are not entirely clear from this point of view – has clearly been magnetized by the false friend here constituted by the term “historical.” As though “historical truth” were the truth of History, or else the truth that makes History – for example, or perhaps par excellence, the truth that makes a people’s history.

16 All the same, we encounter something of this order on the following page, where Bruno comes back, in the most detailed fashion, to the meaning that is to be accorded, in his eyes, to the notion:

17

From this fiction, Freud will progressively extract a “historical truth,” understood as the true process by which the people that adopted the fiction constitutes itself historically and acquires a political identity as a people, i.e. the Jewish people, through a double movement in which this history is recounted by the very people it fashioned as a story. [5]

18 Now, I think that one of the difficulties when it comes to gaining access to the notion of “historical truth,” in the way that Freud mobilizes it, is that it designates precisely something that is not historical, or which in any case is not so in the hermeneutic sense (or in the narrative sense) that we usually attach to the notion of “History.” If the Freudian “historical truth” – perhaps – in a certain sense makes History possible (but then this term would have to be redefined in depth [6]), then it is not a matter of the “bürgerlich” sense of History according to which it has been defined as the (pseudo-)consciousness of a people. The problem, then, is no longer one of identifying with that which “one” recounts to oneself. We should doubtless also take this into account with regard to a possible re-definition of the idea of “the people” on which – and here I am in agreement with Bruno – Freud’s late mediation casts unprecedented light.

19 It is still the case that I do not believe that, in the Freudian sense of the term, one can maintain in any way whatsoever that “historical truth” is “constructed” truth. The Freudian analysis, as we will see, gives prominence to phenomena of construction, but this is not the level at which they intervene. In a certain sense, “historical truth” plays, on the contrary, against phenomena such as these.

20 In this sense, if “historical” truth is “historical” only to the extent that it does indeed refer to a “mental reworking of the facts” [7] – or, perhaps better put: to a mental reworking of the fact itself, engraved into the mind and exercising a constraint over it – I am not so sure that there is any sense in pitting it against fact, as though fiction were here to add itself to fact. Fiction deforms fact, but it does not invent it: it makes something of it. This is where the notion of the constraint of the real takes on meaning, in its properly ahistorical dimension. That this dimension should constitute a necessary ingredient of the implementation of a History in the modern sense of the term, that is to say, which finds its condition in a requirement that is transcendental in relation to the present reality, is not the least stimulating of the conceptions that Freud’s late period has bequeathed us.

21  

22 So, what is this “historical truth” that Bruno has legitimately placed at the center of his interpretation, and about which he likes to repeat that it is “neither material truth, nor fiction,” [8] but about which we nonetheless feel that, in the line of analysis that he implements, it veers definitively to the side of fiction: would it be at least partially its product? From the start, Bruno effectively has a tendency to describe this “truth” as a mixture, which, in some way, would interlace “material truth” and “fiction,” and from that point on, the emphasis of the analysis tends to bear on the supplementation that fiction would, so to speak, add to the “material truth.” As if historical truth were the material truth plus something else.

23 From this point of view, what would appear to be more correct is the characterization that intervenes at the end of Bruno’s analysis, in the second phase of the book, which is that of a “fiction under constrain” [fiction contrainte].” [9] Constrained not at all in the epistemic sense, in which it would meet the necessity of taking the facts into account as a limit – as in the historical novel [10] – but in the sense that it would make manifest the persistence, in the psyches of those that adhere to it, of a “constraint” (Zwang). In a certain sense, they do not have any choice as to what they believe in and as to the fiction that they recount to themselves.

24 Now, this “constraint” becomes fully manifest in a first phase, as Bruno has reminded us, through the resistance of a certain type of content to examination by critical thought, which is dominated precisely by the concern for extended reality as an exterior reality (äußere Realität). In a passage that Bruno cites, and which is extracted from the first part of the third essay in Moses and Monotheism, where Freud introduces his conclusive analogy between the history or the genealogy of monotheistic religion and psychopathology, Freud insists on this fundamental autonomy of constraint as a phenomenon that is characteristic of certain neuroses, in relation to the ordinary sense of reality. The so-called “constraint” refers back to that which, within us, appears to be indifferent to this reality. These phenomena

25

[…] have great psychical intensity, [...] exhibit a far-reaching independence of the organization of the other mental (seelisch) processes, which are adjusted to the demands of the real external world (der realen Außenwelt) and obey the laws of logical thinking. They are insufficiently or not at all influenced by external reality (äußere Realität), pay no attention to it or to its psychical representatives (Vertretung), so that they may easily come in to active opposition to both of them. [11]

26 Thus, it is through its incompatibility – its exception to the normal or normalizing Anpassung of our psychical processes to the ambient reality – that the “constraint” manifests itself: it leads us, or puts us already, beyond any compatibility.

27 Now, it is indeed uncontestable that the so-called “historical truth,” in the way that it is introduced in the last part of Moses and Monotheism, and contrary to what could be suggested by its name – as well, moreover, as by the initial use of this name at the very start of the same book – is very much, in this case, a fundamentally incompatible truth. It does not tally with the facts (in any case, not those with which we are currently confronted), and thereby enters into conflict with our image of the world, such as we are able to rationally establish it – precisely by a constant process of making the facts coherent. That which Freud calls “historical truth” arises, on the contrary, as apparent madness and incoherence, in the guise of pious fiction.

28 Does this mean that what is at stake is a “fiction” in the sense that this term usually assumes? Certainly not, because it is a matter of a “constrained fiction:” it takes on a certain twist, so to speak, independently of our will, and with it there is a sort of suspension of narrative freedom (which Bruno has convincingly highlighted [12]), that is to say, also and primarily of a fiction that expresses a constraint – a constraint that, as such, is absolutely real.

29  

30 What exactly is the purpose of the notion of “historical truth” in Freud’s Moses and Monotheism? The context is that of the last section of the book, in which a problem arises that has to be resituated in the overall evolution of Freud’s late work on the question of religion: that of its “truth content” (Wahrheitsgehalt). In 1927, the author of The Future of An Illusion had assigned religion to the category, precisely, of “illusion” (Illusion). In the remark from the 1935 postscript to the Selbstdarstellung pointed out by Bruno, Freud returns to what he now perceives as the insufficiency of this approach:

31

In The Future of an Illusion I expressed an essentially negative valuation of religion. Later I found a formula which did better justice to it; while granting that its power lies in the truth which it contains, [but] I showed that that truth was not a material but a historical truth (aber diese Wahrheit sei keine materielle, sondern eine historische). [13]

32 The idea of a “truth content,” central to the last essay of Moses and Monotheism, thus has a positive value. In religion, there is something of truth, and not only of illusion, and this truth is precisely that which Freud calls “historical truth.”

33 At the same time, there is an indication of the denegation that governs the introduction of this “historical truth:” “not a material but a historical truth.”

34 The same structure is to be found in the text of Moses and Monotheism:

35

We too believe that the pious solution contains the truth – but the historical truth and not the material truth. [14]

36 The idea of “historical truth” is nurtured, therefore, by the negation of the idea of “material truth.” Does this mean that, in opposition to the “material truth,” it is a matter of a truth that has been invented, of a truth that would lie in the very act of fictionalization?

37 In one sense, it is quite true that, here, fiction allows for something that, at first glance, scholarly discourse (“positive discourse”) would not allow – because this discourse only deals with, and makes it a point of honor to only deal with, that which has actually been given. In this sense, there is a specific truth of fiction, or more precisely of this genre of fiction – “pious fiction” (fromme Dichtung). At the same time, it would be an error to believe that this truth is a mere product or an effect of fiction. It refers much rather to the fact that this truth is the product of something, which it expresses in its irreducibility to learned and rational discourse in general. In this sense, “historical truth” is indeed fundamentally a truth, and not this strange thing that would be at once a truth and not a truth (“something between truth and fiction”). Once again, that which is at stake in the idea of “historical truth” is that, against all expectations, religion should possess a certain “truth content.” Simply put, this truth content, epistemologically speaking, cannot essentially be presented in the guise of factual truth – and, perhaps, in our current situation, quite simply cannot be presented epistemologically – and it is paradoxically in this that its truth lies.

38 In effect, religion confronts us first of all with a logical scandal: the scandal of that which goes expressly against the facts such as they constitute a given: “certain experiences in life and observations in the world make it impossible for us to accept the premise of the existence of such a Supreme Being.” [15]

39 Now, it seems to be the case that faith has invented a motivation that allows it to counterbalance common reason. The believer thinks that the idea of a one and only God “is a portion of the eternal truth which, long concealed, came to light at last and was then bound to carry everyone along with it.” [16]

40 Far from representing a leap, assumed as such, into non-truth, faith is placed therefore under the sign of the claim of a specific truth, which would constitute its content, but which, as such, would not stem from the domain of truths that can be observed by the material examination of the facts, that is to say, the facts currently given, in a character that is by definition transitory. It is a matter of an eternal truth, which is therefore removed from the ephemerality of what is current.

41 However, in a sense, the fault presented by the idea of this “truth” is that, while placing itself in the situation of epistemic exception – by definition, because it is eternal, it exceeds the sphere of the currently verifiable truth –, it still strongly resembles this “material truth” that it contradicts or in any case with which it is not immediately coherent. Everything happens as though – we do not know how – we would have access to a truth that would nevertheless find itself beyond the reach of our usual channels of acquiring truths and associated procedures of verification. Now, the idea that we would possess such a capacity is not only unjustifiable, but is eminently suspicious. In effect, as Freud reminds us:

42

It has not been possible to demonstrate in other connections that the human intellect has a particularly fine flair for the truth or that the human mind shows any special inclination for recognizing the truth. We have rather found, on the contrary, that our intellect very easily goes astray without any warning, and that nothing is more easily believed by us than what, without reference to the truth, comes to meet our wishful illusions. [17]

43 There where the believer invokes an intuition or a sort of sixth sense, a revelation, the psychoanalyst logically discerns the power of illusion: an illusion that corresponds to a desire.

44 Does this mean that the so-called “eternal truth” would be a pure product of the believer’s imagination, and a fiction? It is on this precise point that Freud introduces the notion of “historical truth.” It is interesting to note that it intervenes, therefore, in a continuum with the notion of “eternal truth” (ewige Wahrheit). At first sight, this is altogether paradoxical: does not “historical” stand in opposition to “eternal”? And, without a doubt, the paradox is a deliberate one. A psychoanalytically inspired understanding of the monotheistic phenomenon consists precisely in ferreting out as “historical” – in the sense of “anchored in a history” – that which presents itself as “eternal.” Hence the challenge, in the tradition of Ernest Renan, that is already present in the title “the man Moses:” Moses was a real man, and the analysis sets off in search of this real man and what really happened.

45 At the same time, it is fundamental that, here, the “historical” should be able to assume the load of the eternal and assume its figure for the believer. Historical truth is not the simple factual truth – the one, so to speak, of a fact like any other, which would simply have to be re- exhumed: a “material truth” whose material would not be immediately available, in some way. That which confers upon it the appearance of eternity, which in this sense is a true appearance, is that it is a question of nothing other than the truth of a real that does not come across (and is, therefore, in this sense, “eternal”).

46 To the truth of believers, such as they see it, which presents itself as a material pseudo- truth, we should oppose the truth of this truth as “historical truth,” qualified as “historical” not by the mere fact that a certain thing might effectively have come to pass, but by the fact that this thing does not come across, that it subsists within us and makes a return, in such a way as to “come to light and [...] sweep everyone along with it” with the force of a compulsion.

47 Philosophically speaking, Freud is here accomplishing a remarkable piece of work on the concept of “truth.” The concept of “historical truth,” in the way that he introduces it, functions in the gap between the traditional concepts of “truth” and of “reality,” respectively. The “historical truth” is a truth that is not known and that is, in fact, non-epistemic. The question seems to arise, from this point on, regarding what sense there might be in calling it “truth.” The response is that here it is a reality as such that is piercing through. If the truth, in the common sense of the term, may be characterized as the cognitive grasp that we have of reality – the fact that we know that which is effectively the case – then the fact that in a discourse it should be a reality as such that should be expressed authorizes our calling it “truth.” The “pious fiction,” far from being a pure construction, expresses a reality, and this is what justifies why, in this case too, we speak of “truth.” However, this point of view ought not to lead us to underestimate the gulf and the difference in category that exists between one type of truth and the other. In fact, the “historical truth” is closer to reality than to truth. It expresses the persistence, in certain structures of thought and of discourse, of the weight of a certain reality, of which these thoughts and discourses do not, however, give us knowledge (connaissance), but which is indeed present through them and which exerts a power of constraint over them. In this sense, the “pious fiction” does indeed “reveal” something; but to “reveal” and to “represent” in the sense of “giving to be known” are very different things.

48 So, we have to take measure of the fracture in the very concept of “reality” that is opened correlatively to this uncoupling of the two concepts of “truth.” On the one hand, we find represented reality in the epistemic sense of the term and which is integrated into a coherent image of the world, or in any case to which we refer in so far as we are on the path towards integrating it into such an image; and, on the other hand, there is a fragment of the real that does not come across, that appears to be forever lodged in our psychic apparatus like a splinter, and is precisely not “represented” in the epistemic sense of the term, but which makes an indefinite return in the guise of this enduring “piety” whose enigma Freud maps out.

49 The explicit doubling between “material truth” and “historical truth” that appears in the post-scriptum of 1935 to the Selbstdarstellung, probably as a reflexive return to the first attempts at drafting Moses and Monotheism (1934), is clearly to be heard only as an echo of a distinction present in Freud’s oeuvre, at least since the fifth edition of the Traumdeutung (1919): the distinction between “material reality” and “psychic reality.” [18] That which stands in opposition to “material truth” – that is to say, the truth of “material reality” or “external reality” – in “historical truth,” is nothing other than “psychic reality” itself. However, the conditions of an opposition such as this still need to be thought through as an opposition that has become irreconcilable, which cannot be mediatized by symptoms. As we are going to see, this kind of encapsulation of psychic reality, having definitively escaped from the – weak – logical constraint of exterior reality, supposes that there weighs down upon it another constraint: the constraint of a real that is too heavy to bear and that has definitively petrified it, blocked it into its posture of opposition.

50 Correlatively, from this point on, on the side of discourse, the problem is not that of fiction (of the well-known propensity of human beings to fictionalization and to allow themselves to be caught in their own fictions, which helps them to bear reality in the sense of exterior reality), but the strange persistence of a certain type of fiction, which is characterized not by its variational generativity – that of myth, which has been set out so well by structural analyses –, but by the fact that it remains intact, endowed with a form of immunity against the hazards of narrativity. “Historical truth,” then, is not the truth of the correct description of a known reality, which is always being called upon to be supplanted by that of another reality (because after all, reality changes, and this is why it gives rise to inquiry: the historia of the Greeks, but not that of the Bible), but much rather the expression of a pure real which, for its part, does not change, remains what it is, and to which, in its cumbersome purity, we precisely never manage to give the figure of a reality that could be controlled and, as such, known.

51 From this point of view, the notion of “historical truth” can only be fully understood if we give its rightful place to a fundamental aspect of the analysis of monotheism in the book on Moses: namely the shift from the model of neurosis towards the model of psychosis. Now, this is precisely the new element in relation to Totem and Taboo that we can find in the final analysis provided by Freud of the religious phenomenon, centered on monotheism.

52 The text is nevertheless fairly explicit. In the last section of his Moses and Monotheism, after having put forward the hypothesis of a “truth content” of religion, Freud gives himself over to a short psychoanalytical excursus concerning the existence in individual lives of phenomena of the “return of the repressed.” It is clear that he is seeking out, in phenomena such as these, the model for the possible return of a past that is nevertheless forgotten, and whose traces people have even striven to remove. Concretely, as can be seen at the end of paragraph E of this section, it is here that Freud hopes to find the principle for the explanation of the return and of the re-foundation of the Mosaic religion at the time of the compromise in Kadesh – a key moment in the foundation of the Jewish people on which Bruno has focused all of his analysis. How, in effect, was the memory of the strict monotheism of Moses – the first and the only true Moses – able to be maintained down through the centuries unbeknownst even to those who bore it within them and who had, it must be said, the greatest interest in occulting it? In response to these questions, the notion of the latency phase and analytical hermeneutics intervene at just the right time. The model that is convoked is, then, that of neurosis, or, let us say, ordinary neurosis. The religious man conducts himself like the neurotic grappling with his past; and religion is a form of collective neurosis. In reality, just like that of the neurotic, the attitude of the religious man stems from a past compromise between that which, within him, resists and is incompatible with actual reality, and this reality. From this point of view, it is clearly essential that the establishment that took place in Kadesh should be qualified by Freud repeatedly as a compromise (Kompromiß). Taking into account the use of the term in analytical theory and of its use in Moses and Monotheism itself with respect to neurotics, [19] a choice such as this owes nothing to chance. In religion as in neurosis, we could say, the real that cannot be mastered has entered into a compromise with reality.

53 This system is designed to account for the fact that “the religion of Moses only carried through its effect on the Jewish people as a tradition” [20] – in other words, that it only carried though its effect on the Jewish people once it had been made bearable, encoded in an apparatus of symptoms that are a host of compromises with reality.

54 However, the start of the paragraph on “Historical Truth” in the last section of Moses and Monotheism could not be clearer, such an explanation would be perfectly valid if the “pious fiction” was a “myth.” Neurosis gives way to the myth, and no more. Now, in the pious fiction of monotheism, there is more, and even infinitely more:

55

There is an element of grandeur about everything to do with the origin of a religion, certainly including the Jewish one, and this is not matched by the explanations hitherto given. Some other factor must be involved to which there is little that is analogous and nothing that is of the same kind, something unique and something of the same order of magnitude as what has come out of it, as religion itself. [21]

56 The grandeur that Freud speaks of here is beyond compromise: it is the grandeur of that which does not carry across – that which, in his eyes, forms the singularity of the Jewish people and its role in the establishment of culture in the modern and monotheistic sense (understood as Geistigkeit and not as mythology).

57 But the model that has been implemented thus far, the model of neurosis, cannot fully explain the appearance of culture. This is not, as Bruno suggests it is, because trauma would here be accessory or would in any case need to be complemented by a non-traumatic element, nor because we would have to relativize once and for all the pathological nature of the structure concerned. When he puts forward this normalizing thesis – which effaces what is profoundly beyond compromise in monotheistic religion – Bruno draws on the passage where Freud, in the first part of the third essay, poses, that is to say, softens the model of neurosis. The psychoanalyst then explains that, “we can disregard the distinction between traumatic and non-traumatic etiologies as irrelevant to the analogy we are in search of.” [22] Bruno believes that here he is able to glimpse the possibility of an interpretation of the foundation of monotheistic religion in non-psychopathological terms, the idea that the structure envisaged by Freud would mean that there should be a trauma or not finding its basis in a somewhat fanciful interpretation of the image of the gleitende Ergänzungsreihe (and it is true that this has been made very opaque by the translators). “The etiological conditions, that of the traumatized person and the non-traumatized person, overlap without becoming muddled, complement one another by sliding one over the other,” writes Bruno. [23] In fact, the meaning of the German text is perfectly clear: he does not say that traumatized persons and the non-traumatized “complement one another” (in what sense could they?); it is much rather that the trauma has two factors: one external and the other constitutive. Some people, says Freud, will be traumatized by that which will not leave any mark whatsoever on others. Therefore one has to make sure that one does not disqualify too quickly a particular event as a trauma: to determine if it is one, you have to consider both the event and the subject to whom it happens. The trauma is always the result of this addition, in which the relative weight of the components is variable, following a mobile scale. It is not a matter of weakening the notion of trauma, but of analyzing it and, in fact, of generalizing it.

58 Therefore, for Freud, it is not a question of denying – of disavowing? – that monotheism is rooted within us in a trauma. On the other hand, it is clear that the model being discussed in the passage quoted, and in relation to which Freud does in effect introduce some distance, is the model of neurosis, of that which Freud calls “traumatic neurosis,” therefore of a certain compromise: of a compromise with the trauma.

59 Now, the limitation of this model, including in its relative compatibility with a non-pathological representation of the religious phenomenon, which Bruno knows how to put to use, is called into question in the second half of this same third essay, which is presented as a repetition, but a repetition that will seek out something that, up until this point, no one had ever managed to say.

60 And in effect, in what is almost the final section of the essay (actually its antepenultimate section), bearing on “Historical Truth,” it is another element of comparison borrowed from analytical theory that imposes itself. So, it is no longer a matter of the phenomenon, a banal phenomenon, of the return of the repressed in neurosis. It is indeed a matter of such a “return,” but not in just any old form, but rather in the form of a “delusion” (Wahn):

61

An idea such as this [of a single great God] has a compulsive character: it must be believed. To the extent to which it is distorted, it may be described as a delusion; in so far as it brings a return of the past, it must be called the truth. Psychiatric delusions, too, contain a small fragment of truth and the patient’s conviction extends over from this truth on to its delusional wrappings. [24]

62 The text is perfectly clear: if the interpretation of the religious phenomenon as a whole, from Totem and Taboo (1912) onwards, was joined to the model of neurosis, which is characterized by compromise formations, the interpretation of monotheism, in its irreducibility and the fact that it requires a step further – in reality a leap – into analysis, is joined to the model of psychosis. Monotheistic religion, in the proper sense of the term, is a delusion. Only this given allows us to correctly interpret the notion of “historical truth.” This truth is the truth of the real to the extent that it makes a return, and this is what qualifies it as “historical:” the truth of history itself, in so far as it makes an effect, and not truth, on the real, as though the subject were placed on the outside of history and had a view that overlooked it. On the contrary, in the historical truth, he bears within him, in his deepest depths, the constraint of the real, and this ordeal is expressed in a very particular discursive modality: the discursive modality of delusion, which is a discourse of the real, that which “I am unable not to say.”

63 To fully appreciate this point, it should be noted that Freud does not employ the syntagma “historical truth” in the simple context of the elucidation of the mental foundation of the monotheistic religion. The notion stems also and initially from analytical technique. Freud specifies the scope of this at the end of his 1937 essay on “Constructions in Analysis” (“Konstruktionen in der Analyse”). This fact is important in and of itself because Bruno, for his part, makes the “historical truth” at least in part a “construction.” In his more or less contemporary essay on Moses and Monotheism, it is nevertheless in another relation to these “constructions” that Freud, as we are going to see, placed the “historical truth.” On the other hand, the “constructions,” here, are those of the analyst and not those of the analysand (or, to speak in Freud’s language, of the person being “analyzed”). A “construction” is a “fragment of […] the forgotten prehistory” [25] of the patient which the analyst infers and “reconstructs” on the basis of the material that is accessible to him, and which, on this basis, he presents to the patient. The terms in which Freud evokes this work of “construction” are unavoidably reminiscent of those in which he characterizes his task in Moses and Monotheism, notably in the first sketch of an introduction from August 9^th, 1934. There too, it is a matter of re-establishing a past that is no longer given: in a word, it is an archaeological task, but with the following crucial difference: in his essay of 1937, it is precisely a question of constructions in analysis, and which therefore will encounter a certain response on the part of the patient, who will react to them or not, which in turn constitutes an essential element of their evaluation as “constructions.” In the case of the archaeological investigation in Moses and Monotheism, as a genealogy of modern monotheism, we find, at least apparently, nothing of the like. Indeed, it is not clear who is being dealt with in Moses and Monotheism – at least when considered from a point of view of Bruno’s analytical abreaction, which, in a certain sense, recognizes itself in the construction put forward by Freud (of course, at the price of having adulterated it, but that is also part of the treatment).

64 On reading the essay, one is struck by the fact that, as in Moses and Monotheism, at a certain moment a theoretical frontier is crossed and one particular point is presented as a novelty. It is a matter of the considerations in section III (a little like the third essay of Moses and Monotheism): “I shall conclude this brief paper with a few remarks which open up a wider perspective.” [26]

65 So, what is at stake is the particular reaction of some patients when faced with the construction that has been put to them. In a remarkable way, Freud describes this reaction as a hallucinatory or quasi-hallucinatory reaction. In fact, after having mentioned some cases of partial or displaced memories – in the memory, there emerges with a form of quasi-hallucinatory obviousness a collateral detail of the principal scene that is the object of the construction – that are not, strictly speaking, hallucinations, because the subject does not believe in their actuality, his analysis displaces very quickly onto hallucinations in the strict sense. Indeed, he says that his attention was caught by “true hallucinations [that] occasionally occurred in the case of other patients,” patients whom he is careful to qualify as “certainly not psychotic.” [27] In fact, the remarkable fact is precisely that a phenomenon that is characteristic of psychosis, such as hallucination (in the guise of the memory of the actuality in which one believes), is able to be produced in the absence of any psychosis, as a reaction to a construction.

66 The taking into account of this singular clinical fact nevertheless leads Freud, in a second phase, to come back to the general meaning of hallucination:

67

Perhaps it may be a general characteristic of hallucinations to which sufficient attention has not hitherto been paid that in them something has been experienced in infancy and then forgotten returns – something that the child has seen or heard at a time when he could still hardly speak and that now forces its way into consciousness, probably distorted and displaced owing to the operation of forces that are opposed to this return. [28]

68 We can see straight away how this analysis of hallucination constitutes the matrix of the hypothesis made in Moses and Monotheism, against the background of the transposition from the history of the individual psyche to the history of the collective mind. Hallucination is evoked as a privileged vector of the “return” of the past that has been dug up. Now, at this point, the text takes a step further, tipping over into a borderline register that is the register of the analysis of psychosis:

69

And [this “and” at the start of the sentence, which strains the syntax to the point of being incorrect, here materializes, as it so often does, the “step further,” the step that Freud hesitates to take, but which he feels himself irresistibly led to take], in view of the close relation between hallucinations and particular forms of psychosis, our line of thought may be carried still further. It may be that the delusions into which these hallucinations are so constantly incorporated may themselves be less independent of the upward drive of the unconscious and the return of the repressed that we usually assume. [29]

70 Here, Freud’s analysis goes beyond its standard frame. It integrates psychosis back into a problematic that had first been constructed as a problematic of neurosis. The modality of the return of the repressed that is specific to psychosis is nevertheless very particular: it is the modality of delusion (Wahn) in which that which is not actual is presented as actual, with the subject adhering to its representation. The end of Moses and Monotheism will not qualify the idea of monotheism in any other terms: “it may be described as a delusion,” [30] a term associated with psychosis and that refers to a phenomenon for which Freud, at the end of Constructions in Analysis, tries to provide an explanation.

71 Now, this explanation uses none other but the notion of “historical truth.” What is at stake in the final sequence of “Constructions in Analysis” is harbored in the idea that there is a truth of madness, which is historical truth: “The essence of it is that there is not only method in madness, as the poet has already perceived, but also a fragment of historical truth.” [31] Therefore, there is no point in trying to convince the mad of the falseness of their delusions. This is the case not only because the constraining character of these delusions – it is part of the definition of the delusion that it is “constraining” – makes them in every case immune to criticism, but because, in the end, at a certain level, their delusions are true, or in any case there is a part of truth in these delusions: which is precisely what Freud calls “historical truth.”

72 From this point on, an analogy may be established between the delusion of the psychotic and the “constructions” of the analyst, an analogy whose limit it is nevertheless fundamental to perceive. The delusion of the patient, like the construction proposed by the analyst, will go in search of a past that no longer exists, in the sense that it is not currently available to consciousness. However, there remains a major difference between the two cases. The delusion of the psychotic is a construction that is true by definition. He is expressing nothing other than the permanence of this past, which the analyst attempts painstakingly to evaluate and in a sense to “reconstruct,” whereas, in the delusion, this past asks only to surge up again in its being of the real, but in such a way that the interpreter does not generally understand it right away, but must precisely modify his or her point of view and become accustomed to apprehending this delusion in its revelatory power of the real. Passing over to the register of the “historical truth” thus refers also to a necessary change in perspective on the analyst’s part. In a certain sense, if the delusion can serve as an epistemological substitute for the construction in some contexts – it gives us access to the same type of primitive past – it also measures the limit of the construction: the delusion is that which the analyst does not have to “construct,” but whose truth he must admit as being in a certain sense already there. One could say that the “historical truth” is the inconstructible as such.

73 The fact that we pick up, here, the thread of the analyses in Moses and Monotheism has nothing of a “construction” about it either. The identity of the different points of view is clearly announced in the final paragraph of “Constructions in Analysis:”

74

If we consider mankind as a whole and substitute it for the single human individual, we discover that it too has developed delusions which are inaccessible to logical criticism and which contradict reality (Wirklichkeit). If, in spite of this, they are able to exert an extraordinary power over men, investigation leads us to the same explanation as in the case of the single individual. They owe their power to the element of historical truth which they have brought up from the repression of the forgotten and primeval past. [32]

75 The “historical truth” – in the new sense that Freud gives to this syntagma – is thus, paradigmatically, the truth of the delusion: the truth of a discourse that is not “true,” and which is even straight-out false in the sense of an exact description of actuality, but in which it is the real itself that is making itself heard, in as much as it is beyond any possible description: the real of that which has happened to us.

76  

77 In a note to his book, Bruno builds, against the textual evidence of the obvious impregnation of psychoanalysis by the paradigm of psychosis, such as Freud came to understand it at the end of his life, something that I would tend to consider a dike made of paper. All the evidence suggests that what is important to him is to cleanse the Jewish people of any suspicion of psychosis in the Freudian construction. I am not convinced by his arguments and I also think that this defense is displaced. In effect, I think that, contrary to what Bruno maintains, the model of psychosis, in its difference from the model of neurosis, is serving here to think through the singularity of monotheism. It nevertheless needs to be understood that these categories, in the transgressive and demystifying aspect that they can have – or in the sacrilegious aspect that they can have: in this book that is immersed in an unparalleled experience of death, Freud moves forward like Baudelaire’s Don Juan in the Styx –, are equally hermeneutic tools designed to grasp the grandeur of their object. What is it that might be able to circumscribe the unique radicalness of the monotheist requirement, if not psychosis? There is, precisely, a visionary dimension to psychosis, in which the real itself is revealed – whereas, in neurosis, it is masked over. Clearly, neurosis is not sufficient here.

78 This is what Bruno neither wants nor is able to see, because his committed stance in his reading, which consists in reading a text inspired by psychoanalysis by systematically describing the specifically analytical categories that are at work in it, makes it invisible to him. From the moment that one seeks at any cost to de-pathologize psychoanalysis, “psychosis” becomes an insult. But ever since Totem and Taboo, the Freudian understanding of the religious phenomenon had been resolutely installed in the register of psychopathology. And, from this point of view – and as always with Freud –, Moses and Monotheism certainly does not represent a step backwards, or a way out, but rather a step forward: a step beyond the limits that were hitherto conceivable and even admissible.

79 Bruno’s argument is that “the passages that evoke psychosis [in Moses and Monotheism] refer in both cases to religion in general, without specification.” [33]

80 I do not think that this is exact. In the precise passage that Bruno cites [34] in support of his defense, the model of psychosis is mobilized in order to understand the way in which, in religion, a content is imposed that seems to be absurd and to which people adhere in spite of, or rather because of, this absurdity. In its own right, this feature seems completely generic: it concerns any religion. However, it should be underscored that it intervenes more precisely in this passage in order to give an account of the return of a piece of the real, leaving behind the latency of the forgetting into which it had fallen. In reality, as we can see very well from the paragraph that immediately follows this one, what is in question here is the capacity of the Mosaic idea to resurface in a people after a long time period has elapsed. Therefore, what is at stake is nothing other than the foundation of the monotheism that – and here Bruno is right – is essentially a re-foundation (in the sense that it presupposes a second phase). (Clearly the problem is that this “second time” itself presupposes another, which is more original and which is buried beneath it. We will be coming back to this in our conclusion.)

81 From this point of view, the text of this first part of the third section, to which Bruno refers, could not be clearer if one considers it in its overall economy. The perspective is explicit in the subsection B of this part, which introduces the idea of trauma. It is indeed then a matter of “Jewish monotheism” in its singularity, and it is this monotheism that is then understood in accordance with the model of “traumatic neurosis,” [35] regardless of the limits of this comparison. In fact, here, traumatic neurosis is the key to the explanation of the “latency phase” that is essential to the foundation of monotheism. In effect, it is not a matter only of observing that, in both cases, there is a phase of latency, but of seeking out the fact of trauma in the development of neurosis as an explicative principle of this latency, and of the differed return of that which, within this latency, is repressed. There has to have been a trauma.

82 Of course, one will argue that neurosis, even traumatic neurosis, and psychosis are not the same thing. Therefore, if it is a matter of carefully explaining the historical logic of monotheism by means of a model that has been borrowed from psychoanalysis, it should not be the model of psychosis.

83 I nevertheless think that this analysis – which Bruno avoids in his faithfulness to the position he has taken of not pointing out the psychoanalytical concepts that are present in the text, nor elaborating upon them – is insufficient. It does not take into account the radicalization that plays out, as repetition, in the second part of this third essay, in which Freud’s analysis attains its full power.

84 In effect, in the sequence on “historical truth” at the end of this second and last part of the last essay, it is indeed, as we have seen, the “psychiatric delusion” [36] that is in question, and that clearly echoes the final reflections in “Constructions in Analysis:” it is a question of psychosis. Now, it is a matter of nothing else than the key passage in which Freud distinguishes between material truth and historical truth. The second truth is clearly on the side of psychosis, or in any case is in the image of the truth of the psychotic delusion.

85 One cannot therefore get rid so easily of the model of psychosis, or in any case of the principle of differentiation furnished by the gap between neurosis and psychosis. The principle contaminates the very fundamental distinction (between material truth and historical truth) that Bruno legitimately places at the foundation of his analysis.

86 Once this fact has been taken into account, the reader is led to take a second glance at the passage from the first part of the third essay, which includes, in particular, the reference to psychosis, and which was attributed a little too quickly by Bruno to the account of a general anthropology of religions – and not specifically of monotheism. In effect, one cannot ignore that, in this passage, the concept of “historical truth” is already present, apparently in an intrinsic link with the model of psychosis evoked above:

87

We must grant an ingredient such as this of what may be called historical truth to the dogmas of religion as well, which, it is true, bear the character of psychotic symptoms but which, as group phenomena, escape the curse of isolation. [37]

88 Bruno feels a great relief in the fact of seeing “religions” like this in the plural form. He sees in this the sign of a generality that dilutes the weight of psychosis by sharing it out. I have said that, taking into account the role of this passage in the economy of the first part of the third essay, I have not been convinced by the attempt at dismantling. Furthermore, the ambiguity of the relative clause, whose function could indeed turn out to be decisive here, would have to be taken into account: these “dogmas of religion as well, which [ ] bear the character of psychotic symptoms” (in opposition to those that do not bear them, in which case it is not said that any religion – or everything in religion – is of its essence psychotic).

89 Nevertheless, let’s imagine that here it is a matter of religion in general. So, a further non-negligible difficulty arises: namely, that this concept of “historical truth” that Bruno, in a rather rapid way, turns into an invention of Moses and Monotheism [38] and the key to the singularization of the Jewish people, would therefore apply also, just as much as the concept of psychosis and for the same reasons, to all religions.

90 To tell the truth, this generality of the concept of “historical truth” is well envisaged and even accepted in Bruno’s interpretation. From this point of view, one would be able to see that the historical “construction” of the Jewish people, in his reading of Freud, functions as an example of this anthropological reality, instead of monopolizing it. At the end of Bruno’s book (in Chapter VII), one discovers, in effect, that the notion of “historical truth” constitutes a “general framework” for his analysis, and that, in this capacity, Greeks and Christians, as much as Jews, are the bearers of a “truth” such as this. In fact, we would find here the “three figures of historical truth.” [39] A little further on, Bruno generously grants that “The Iliad also has, therefore, its historical truth.” [40]

91 Now, it could be the case that this generosity is misplaced, or in any case that it makes it more difficult to achieve the desired goal: the thinking-through of the singularization of Jewish monotheism, and therefore, it has to be underscored, its aftermath, which is also Christian, even if the latter represents a form of weakening in relation to the former, following a form of regression towards a compromise (how to have monotheism and totemism both at the same time).

92 In reality, we are coming to an essential point: it could well be that an ambiguity is affecting the notion of “historical truth.”

93 In a legitimate concern to make the originality of Moses and Monotheism rise to the surface, Bruno declares at the start of his book:

94

In 1927, in The Future of an Illusion, at any rate, Freud in no way had this distinction [between material truth” and “historical truth”] in mind. It comes to the surface little by little in the course of writing his last book. [41]

95 I think that he is absolutely right. However, this thesis has nothing trivial about it, because contrary to what Bruno has suggested in many different places, but contrary also to Freud’s self-rewriting in the 1935 postscript to the Selbstdarstellung, the notion of “historical truth” is indeed present in The Future of an Illusion and in a stronger sense, which is not immediately reducible to the sense of “material truth.” In the eighth section of The Future of an Illusion, Freud writes:

96

Thus religious doctrine tells us the historical truth – though subject, it is true, to some modification and disguise – whereas our rational account disavows it. We now observe that the store of religious ideas includes not only wish-fulfilments but important historical recollections. [42]

97 From the opuscule of 1927, contrary to what Freud’s later auto-critique could lead us to think, it is not therefore true that religion is reduced to an “illusion.” A truth content is indeed imputed to it, which Freud calls “historical.” Now, in the passage we have cited, this “historical truth,” which is present in the religious tradition in an appearance that is likely to come up against our pretention to construct a rational image of the world – and therefore our “sense of reality” – is the truth of the murder of the father of the primal horde.

98 So, give the above, what is new in Moses and Monotheism? It is not the idea of a “historical truth” of religion, nor the idea of a “retour of the archaic past” in an encoded form – like the one evoked by Bruno when he speaks of the epic and notably of the Greek tradition. Rather it is the specific form of this return, its power of constraint: in short, it appears in the guise of psychosis. This is the veritable novelty: in the new accentuation that is given to the notion of “historical truth,” which is to be imposed upon us without concession, without possible negotiation. Here the space of the variations of the myth is foreclosed. The only space that remains is for the literalism of psychosis.

99 Now, how is this uncoupling possible? How does “historical truth” acquire this ultimate power, which is that of becoming a delusion, for which no “history” (historia: the enquiry) can act as a substitute, contrary to what came to pass in the case of the Greeks, and which defies the grasp of reason (which explains its definitive and unparalleled resistance to any form of call to reality)?

100 All the evidence points to the fact that, in this case, something singular must have come to pass. If the model of psychosis becomes pertinent here, it is because – behind this fixation to a stable content that, contrary to myth, does not vary, nor ultimately make way for our attempts at rational reconstruction or restoration of “reality” against delusion – there is the weight of a real that is too heavy, too unbearable for anyone to turn it into a “reality:” a real that is in some sense too heavy for our psyche to bear.

101 What therefore might be in question?

102 In Moses and Monotheism, Freud’s response to this question a reply is perfectly devoid of any equivocation. The ignorance in which it generally seems to be held results only from its excessive obviousness, prominent in the middle of the text, like that of the purloined letter – also, without doubt, Freud’s repeated and clumsy efforts to attenuate, by exaggerating the continuity of the reflections that had been put forward in relation to the theoretical framework provided in Totem and Taboo (1912), the scope of the threshold that he is in the process of crossing, with a theoretical audacity that knows no limits.

103 The history of Moses is, in effect, systematically presented by Freud as at once a confirmation and a repetition of the scenario of the origin that was put in place by Totem and Taboo. However, it is a very strong point of Bruno’s interpretation to have carefully marked out the gulf that separates the analyses in Moses and Monotheism from those in Totem and Taboo, the question of religion in general and the monotheistic question. Except that it does not seem to me that he has located the principle of this novelty in the right place. He has placed it in the compromise of Kadesh. Now, what could be more banal that a compromise, in the formation of what really needs to be called religious “neurosis” in general? We already found the problematic of the compromise as such at the heart of Totem and Taboo. The originality of the history recounted in Moses and Monotheism is not due to the fact that a certain compromise has been made, but rather in the object that it covers over, or rather precisely does not manage to cover over entirely, which specifies its particular nature of compromise as an incomplete, non-decisive compromise, in such a way that a conflict remains with the world, with history, with politics, and in such a way that the subject does not ever “re-find” him- or herself there, in accordance with happy “normality” – that is to say, domesticated neurosis – which would be that of the myth. What is it then that is new in Moses and Monotheism that constrains the aforesaid “compromise of Kadesh” so forcefully that it can never be without a remainder – which is borne out by circumcision, like a stratigraphic fossil (Leitfossil) [43] or, in other terms, a scar whose anachronistic persistence, beyond the compromise, materializes the resistance of a past that will not come across?

104 The solution is extremely simple and, once again, is blindingly obvious: what is it that we find that is new, in the primordial history of monotheism, in relation to the totemic scenario of the origin, if it is not repetition itself, which is an absolutely new and singular fact, which changes everything once and for all? The history of Moses in the way that Freud tells it, contrary to what Freud seems to suggest, cannot be held to be a simple application (an extension) of the schema that had been put in place in Totem and Taboo, but it is clear that it maintains an extremely tight relationship with this schema. It presents the unique scenario of the effective repetition of the schema, which makes its nature and its signification change entirely.

105 By taking up Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism together, as Freud urges us to do, we obtain the following scenario: after the murder of the father of the primal horde, the brothers had to come to terms with their act and to live with the guilt that went with it. Therefore, they encoded it symbolically, in a way that made the memory of it bearable and at the same time and above all in a way that made sure it would never really happen again, by finding substitutes and necessary displacements for it. The hypothesis of a symbolization such as this furnishes a principle of general explanation for religious neurosis. However, very particular historical circumstances – the difficulty for a people to endure the tyranny of a father who is ostensibly too symbolic (a father “who was not one of their own” [44]) – led to the unprecedented configuration, the very same that the religious system had the vocation of preventing: some of them did start again. They killed the father again: they re-killed him really, and not symbolically as religion invites us to do (we should understand this as the religion of the pagans). How were they to bear the weight of such a sin: the repeat offense, by definition without excuse, a head-on affront to religion in its original sense? It is upon this founding impossibility that monotheistic psychosis permeates, and which carries religion to an unprecedented radicalness, but which also makes it change signification: it becomes the endless and impossible management of a repetition that should not have taken place.

106 It is thus perfectly astute that Freud’s essay on monotheism – this is, in effect, the book’s only true subject, in a sense more than Judaism, or it is Judaism because monotheism, according to the history that has been recounted, is necessarily Jewish – is called “The Man Moses and the Monotheistic Religion.” In effect, what counts here is no longer the death of the primitive father, in any case no longer this death all on its own, but rather the death that should not have – that could not have – taken place, the repetition of the death of the father: that of Moses. If this unthinkable murder had not taken place, there would be no monotheism: there would be no need for monotheism.)

107 Monotheism is thus the historical consequence of a passage à l’acte. It is by this very same act that the original power of a real that has broken through the levees of a first symbolization makes itself heard. Only this fact can explain the very peculiar modality of the discursive return of the past (of “historical truth”) that is proper to it. This return, contrary to that which comes to pass in what we could call the standard case – the “normal” [45] neurosis of the Greeks – is not brought about in the way of epic free association, but in the way of a literal, intangible delusion: there where speech is fixed, in some way, because it is the very address of the real. Such is the properly unprecedented signification that the notion of “historical truth” then takes on, beyond any history that people would recount to one another: that of a letter to be preserved, to be transmitted, and to repeat, whatever the cost. This tireless (eternal) repetition is merely the stammering echo of another repetition, one that is more ancient and primordial: that of an action.