By terror I mean the efficiency gained by eliminating,
or threatening to eliminate,
a player from the language game one shares with him.
He is silenced or consents,
not because he has been refuted,
but because his ability to participate has been threatened
(there are many ways to prevent someone from playing).
. . . The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take.
We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one,
for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible,
of the transparent and the communicable experience.
Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement,
we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return to terror,
for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality.
The answer is:
Let us wage war on totality;
let us be witnesses to the unpresentable;
let us activate the differences
and save the honor of the name.