Today, when we know more than Montaigne, we would say “let’s all learn from repression”—but the moral would have just as much weight: repression takes care of the complex symbol of death for most people. But its disappearance doesn’t mean that the fear was never there. The argument of those who believe in the universality of the innate terror of death rests its case mostly on what we know about how effective repression is. The argument can probably never be cleanly decided: if you claim that a concept is not present because it is repressed, you can’t lose; it is not a fair game,
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