Mission Impossible? Thinking What Must be Thought in Heidegger and Deleuze

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss and compare the (im)possibility of thinking that which is most worth our thought in Deleuze’s What Is Philosophy? (1994) and Heidegger’s course lectures in What Is Called Thinking? (2004). Both authors criticize the history of philosophy in similar ways in order to reconsider what should be taken as the nature and task of philosophical thinking. For Deleuze, true thinking is the creation of concepts, but what is most worth our thought in fact cannot be thought. For Heidegger, Being calls on us think, and to think rightly is to be underway toward thinking itself, a grateful heeding of Being. In this paper I explore the very possibility to think that which is most worth our thought. I will argue that although for both authors proper thinking as such is possible, thinking what is most worth our thought seems remarkably both possible as impossible.

Keywords

• Heidegger
• Deleuze
• philosophical thinking
• Beeing
• immanence