All speech is violence

All speech is violence, a violence all the more formidable for being secret and the secret center of violence; a violence that is already exerted upon what the word names and that it can name only by withdrawing presence from it – a sign, as we have seen, that death speaks (the death that is power) when I speak. At the same time, we well know that when we are having words we are not fighting. Language is the undertaking through which violence agrees not to be open, but secret, agrees to forgo spending itself in a brutal action in order to reserve itself for a more powerful mastery, henceforth no longer affirming itself, but nonetheless at the heart of all affirmation.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) p. 42