employing concepts and words, has meant undertaking a long (incal-
culable and interminable) march of liberation from Hegel.
Thus, I apologize to the young reader if my language might at times
appear unclear. It is not his or her fault, but mine. And it is not only a
question of language. The lack of clarity comes from the fact that I carry
in my discourse the trace of a style of thinking that has no vitality,
that is untranslatable into the daily experience of post-historical ex-
istence. And yet, it is from this style that the tangled multi-plane
routes of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought depart through rhizomatic
proliferation.User’s manual for HeideggerI have no affinity for Heidegger. His human and political experience is
that of a cowardly and reactionary petty bourgeois, the little man who,
out of love for tranquillity, allowed Hitler to do what he wanted. In his
works, however, there are glimmers of philosophical genius. Dim glim-
mers, glimmers that darkly colour the late-modern historical horizon.
His most beautiful book, in my view, is Off the Beaten Track
(Holzwege). The paths about which he talks are those that lead to the
heart of the woods. But these paths never join in any centre, because
there is no heart of the woods, no centre in the woods. The dialectical
hope is thus cancelled, and no possibility of overcoming is available.
Heidegger’s thought proclaims the end of modern hope. But at the
same time, it delineates the ontological architecture of a post-historical
and post-dialectical universe.
This architecture can be understood according to two concepts that
anticipate the formation of the digital techno-sphere, the concept of
the ‘language of technology’ and the concept of ‘the era of the world
image’.
When Heidegger speaks of the language of technology, he does not
mean that technology is an object of language, that language ‘states’
the technical like one of several possible discursive elements. It means
that technology is constituted as a language, as an access to meaning.
With Heidegger we understand that human civilization has moved
across the threshold of a universe (the techno-sphere) in which forms
of automation take the upper hand over choices, possibilities of alter-
natives, and historical dialectics.
And when he speaks of the era of the world image, we likewise must
not understand that in the modern era the world can be represented
(with techniques of photographic, cinematographic or televisualUser’s Manual 419780230_221192_07_cha06.pdf 10/3/08 11:34 AM Page 41