For reality is but a concept, or a principle, and by reality I mean the whole system of values connected with this principle. The Real as such implies an origin, an end, a past and a future, a chain of causes and effects, a continuity and a rationality. No real without these elements, without an objective configuration of discourse. And its disappearing is the dislocation of this whole constellation.

Certainly a grain of genuine inquiry is to be found in each of these [investigations into Reality]; but certain as this it, it would be just as perverse if one should want to achieve a tenable solution of the problem by reckoning up how much has been correct in each case. What is needed rather is basic insight that while the different epistemological directions which have been pursued have not gone so very far off epistemologically, their neglect of any existential analytic of Dasein has kept them from obtaining any basis for a well secured phenomenal problematic.

Let us be clear about this: if the Real is disappearing, it is not because of a lack of it - on the contrary, there is too much of it. It is the excess of reality that puts an end to reality, just as the excess of information puts an end to information, or the excess of communication puts an end to communication. We are no longer dealing with the problematic of lack and alienation, where the referent of the self and the dialectic between subject and object were always to be found, supporting strong and active philosophical positions... By shifting to a virtual world, we go beyond alienation, into a state of radical deprivation of the Other, or indeed of any otherness, alterity, or negativity. We move into a world where everything that exists only as idea, dream, fantasy, utopia will be eradicated because it will immediately be realized, operationalized. Nothing will survive as an idea or a concept. You will not even have time to imagine.

We must say that the strongest resistance to this destructive virtualization comes from language itself, from the singularity, the irreducibility, the vernacularity of all languages, which are actually very much alive and proving to be the best deterrent against the global extermination of meaning. So the game is not over, but no one can say who will have the last word.

Simply, the object is what escapes the subject - more we cannot say, since our position is still that of the subject and of rational discourse. At any rate, we cannotrely on the pretext of an insufficient development of the scientific, intellectual or mental apparatus. The apparatus has given all that it can give; it has passed beyond its own definitions of rationality... It is the event horizon, as they say in physics, beyond which nothing makes sense and nothing at all may be discovered.

It applies today - with the caveat that, as the evil genius of modernity has changed our destiny, Holderlin's phrase must be reversed: the more the saving power grows, the greater the danger. For we are no longer victims of an excess of fate and danger, of illusion and death. We are victims of an absence of destiny, of a lack of illusion, and consequently of an excess of reality, security, and efficiency... But it seems that something resists this irresistible trend, something irreducible. And here we might quote, as a counterpart to Holderlin's phrase, this very mysterious sentence of Heidegger: "When we look into the ambiguous essence of technology, we behold the constellation, the stellar course of mystery."

The only justification for thinking and writing is that it accelerates these terminal processes. Here, beyond the discourse of truth, resides the poetic and enigmatic value of thinking. For, facing a world that is unintelligible and problematic, our task is clear: we must make that world even more unintelligible, even more enigmatic.