Deleuze isn’t a big fan of the vocabulary of crisis, especially if it’s to draw our attention to a golden age of philosophy. But it’s true that, on the question of thought, of how thought comes about, or what it can be attributed to, he likes to quote Heidegger’s claim in What is called Thinking? according to which what is most thought-worthy in our age that calls for thinking is that we are not yet thinking. He understands this “not yet” as indicative of the fact that thinking is not something that is in our power, or a matte for our will (it is, as I said earlier, involuntary). It’s not something we decide to do, a button we can switch on, contrary to what much of the modern, especially Cartesian tradition wants us to believe: we don’t have this innate, special relationship with truth, which the correct method can deliver. No: thought comes from without, from the world, from a kind of shock or violence. We are forced to think. Heidegger felt that this “force” was that of Being, and that, in the technological age, that force was most obscured and withdrawn, for all we are left with is the will to power and dominate of the human, and its force of representation. Yet Heidegger also felt that technology provides food for thought, indeed demands to be thought, from within this sense of abandonment and urgency, of planetary crisis and desolation that we feel as a result of it.
