The limit of death…

represents the past in its real form; it is not the physical past whose existence is abolished, nor the epic past as it has become perfected in the work of memory, nor the historical past in which man finds the guarantor of his future, but rather the past which manifests itself in an inverted form of repetition.47 (262)

Footnote 47, (268): “(Added in 1966:) These four words [renversé dans la repetition] in which my latest formulation of repetition is found (1966), have been submitted for an improper recourse to the ‘eternal return’ [toujours present dans l’éternel retour], which was all that I could get across at that time.”

Lacan’s curse

Let whoever cannot meet at its horizon the subjectivity of his time give it up then. For how could he who knows nothing of the dialectic that engages him in a symbolic movement with so many lives possibly make his being the axis of those lives? (264).

the gift of human language

death as a means can be recognized in every relation in which man is born into the life of history. This is the only life that endures and is true, since it is transmitted without being lost in a tradition passed on from subject to subject. It is impossible not to see how loftily this life transcends that inherited by the animal, in which the individual fades into the species, since no memorial distinguishes its ephemeral appearance from the appearance that reproduces it in the invariability of the type.  (263)