Thinking the Event. François Raffoul
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me and because I am the one by whom the world takes on a meaning. When something happens in the world, I am called to respond and to answer for it: I am responsible for it. Any event becomes a call to my responsibility: I am engaged by the event. Even if a war is declared by another, “everything takes place as if I bore the entire responsibility for this war.”11 Everything that happens is mine, says Sartre, and nothing human is foreign to me: “By this we must understand first of all that I am always equal to what happens to me qua man, for what happens to a man through other men and through himself can only be human” (BN, 708). There is no nonhuman state of things, Sartre insists, which means there is no radical alterity in the world and no events I have not chosen. I can decide on the nonhuman, but “this decision is human, and I shall carry the entire responsibility for it” (BN, 708). Sartre posits here a subjectivity as appropriation of all foreignness. Any event is immediately mine and taken over by my freedom, and there are no accidents without my appropriating them and making them my own. “Thus there are no accidents in life,” and “any way you look at it, it is a matter of a choice” (BN, 708). This hyperbolic inflation of appropriating subjectivity implies the reduction, appropriation, and overcoming of everything that seems to haunt and threaten it at every step, the accidents and events that happen to me from without, events of which I am not the cause. At this point, nothing is allowed to escape either the principle of reason or the constitutive powers of subjectivity.
It is at this juncture, where events seem to have been absorbed by reason and an appropriating subjectivity, that Arendt seeks to reawaken what she calls the “philosophical shock” (WEP, 165), the shock by which precisely thought realizes it is not in possession of its objects, but is rather exposed to an event that is irreducible to it: thought is exposed to an alterity that happens to it, which both interrupts it and sets it in motion. In fact, one also recalls here, paradoxically, Sartre’s rebellious cry against the dissolution of reality in consciousness in his short essay, “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology.” Rejecting the reduction of “a table, a rock, a house” to the contents of consciousness, rejecting what he calls a “digestive philosophy” that constantly attempts to trap things in its web, Sartre insisted that one cannot “dissolve” things in consciousness: “You see this tree, to be sure. But you see it just where it is: at the side of the road, in the midst of the dust, alone and writhing in the heat, eight miles from the Mediterranean coast. It could not enter into your consciousness, because it is not of the same nature as consciousness.”12 What appears here is the radical exteriority of the event to thought, which places thought in a state of shock. It is the very shock of which Deleuze speaks to account for the origin of thought. “Something must force thought, shocking it and drawing it into a search.”13 Thinking always begins from an event that comes from without: at the origin of thought there is not some rational principle, but an event, an accident, an encounter, a violent shock that calls on thought by its very outsideness. “Something must force thought”: not a “natural disposition” but rather “a fortuitous and contingent incitation derived from an encounter” (POE, 56). This encounter has no necessity, no reason: it is external, an event through which thought enters in relation with what does not depend from it. The relation between thought and its outside is contingent and cannot be derived from the connections it makes. As François Zourabichvili reminds us, for Deleuze it is a matter “of affirming the relation of exteriority that links thought to what it thinks” (POE, 51). The true beginning is an event that is “outside concept” (hors-concept), a concept now placed in relation with an outside that will always remain inappropriable for it. As Nancy explains, thought is not appropriative, not appropriation, not even inscription, but ex-scription,14 expropriated by the event.
This, indeed, is the challenge to reason: thinking is born from a contingent event, from chance, and is always “circumstantial,” dependent on events, that is, on an absolutely unnecessary phenomenon. “Thought is born of chance,” “relative to an event that happens unexpectedly to thought,” and therefore, “Whether it is a question of thinking or of living, it is always a matter of the encounter, the event, and therefore of the relation as exterior to its terms” (POE, 57). Thought is always in a state of crisis, Deleuze stating “that the act of thinking necessarily puts subjectivity into crisis, and that necessity, far from fulfilling the wishes of an already constituted thinking subject, can only be conquered in the state of a thought outside of itself, a thought that is absolutely powerful only at the extreme point of its powerlessness” (POE, 52). One encounters an event outside reason. The event of an encounter is not subject to the principle of sufficient reason: “An encounter is always inexplicable” (POE, 57). To think the event is to think such absolute inexplicability and contingency.15
The well-known paradigm of such encounter outside of reason is the case of friendship, as described by Michel de Montaigne between him and Étienne de La Boétie. “If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed except by answering: because it was he; because it was I” (Si on me presse de dire pourquoi je l’aimais, je sens que cela ne se peut exprimer qu’en répondant: parce que c’était lui; parce que c’était moi).16 As Marion comments, the event of this friendship occurs “all at once, without warning or anticipation, according to an arrival without expectation,”17 and without reason. The event of friendship is a fact (it “imposes itself”), a fact and a chance irreducible to reason. Therefore, no reasons will ever measure up to the fact of the encounter, to the chance happening of friendship. As Derrida puts it in The Politics of Friendship, “The analysis of conditions of possibility, even existential ones, will never suffice in giving an account of the act or the event. An analysis of that kind will never measure up to what takes place, the effectivity—actuality—of what comes to pass—for example, a friendship which will never be reduced to the desire or the potentiality of friendship.”18 Now, the notion that philosophy is born out of an event that it does not control is “a shock to reason” in its quest for ultimate foundations. For “how is it supposed to find a foundation [assise] in that which defeats it, in the inexplicable or the aleatory?” The logic of foundation of the principle of reason leads to its very ungrounding, its “collapse” in the abyss. Thought then “stands on a movable ground that it does not control, and thereby wins its necessity.” In the end, what transpires is that “we cannot give the reason for an event” (POE, 57).
When thought assumes its eventful origin, when it engages in “an authentic relation to the outside,” it then gains its authentic vocation and “affirms the unforeseeable or the unexpected” (POE, 57). There lies the fundamental aporia (and secret resource) of thought: it must think and account for what happens outside of it. Because the origin of thought is an event that lies outside of it, thinking will always fail in appropriating such beginning: “If thinking necessarily fails to grasp its beginning, perhaps it is because the beginning does not depend upon thought.”19 It is in this sense that in her 1946 essay, Hannah Arendt speaks of the failure of thought, as if such failure was its most authentic vocation. Arendt refers to Jaspers’s “border situations”: whether death, guilt, fate, or chance, these events provoke thought and “drive us to philosophize,” not because they can be thought, but precisely because they cannot. Arendt adds that “in all these experiences we find we cannot escape reality or solve its mysteries by thought” (WEP, 167, emphasis mine). Philosophy, she concludes, can “never get around the fact that reality cannot be resolved into what can be thought. Therefore, the very purpose of philosophic thought is to ‘heighten . . . the intellectually irresolvable’” (WEP, 185). As Derrida would put it, it is a matter of thinking “according to the aporia.”20 This is what makes us think: the fact that we cannot appropriate what we think. In the famed words of Martin Heidegger, the “most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”21 The event is then both the end and the origin of thought: it ends it in its claims to mastery while opening it to the infinite work of interpretation.
Arendt first describes the shock of the event of existence in terms of the resistance of singularity to conceptual generality. In its singularity, the event does not belong to a constituted whole, such as the world. It happens, and as it happens it interrupts any context that could include