Thinking the Event. François Raffoul
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of causa sui. Now this concept traditionally only applies to God, and Kant does make explicit reference to the tradition of the prime mover. However, such a first cause only pertained to the origin of the world. The issue here is determining how can there be also an origin in the world and how one can reconcile such a free spontaneity with universal determinism, or causality of nature. How does one begin absolutely when every event must presuppose a prior event that causes it? How can there be an origin within the causal network of nature? Kant himself recognized the difficulty in admitting a free cause that would operate within the world, that is, within a chain of causes, for all that has been established so far was the necessity of a first beginning of a series of appearances from freedom as it pertained to the origin of the world, while “one can take all the subsequent states to be a result of mere natural laws” (CPR, A 448/B 476, 486). This is the antinomy of pure reason, the idea of a free cause or unconditioned causality constituting for Kant “the real stumbling block for philosophy” (CPR, A 448/B 476, 486). Kant attempts to resolve this problem by distinguishing a beginning in time from a beginning in causality, the latter applying to free agency operating in the world. As (transcendentally) free agents, we can never begin in time, but we can begin in causality. Only in the case of divine creation beginning in time and beginning in causality are merged. For our own free actions, the beginning is only in causality (as we are not origins of the world but origins in the world, that is, beginning in causality). In the causality by freedom, in beginning in causality, no antecedent cause determines my actions, which in no way can “be regarded as simple causal consequences of the antecedent state of the agent.” In the midst of the world, and within the world and in the course of time itself, certain events somehow happen as absolute beginnings. To the potential objection that no absolute beginning can happen in the world, Kant replies that there can be a comparatively first beginning, that there can be an absolute beginning (in causality) occurring in medias res. Kant is explicit on this point: namely, that there is an origin of the world, but there are also origins in the world, writing that “we are permitted also to allow that in the course of the world different series may begin on their own as far as their causality is concerned” (CPR, A 450/B 478, 486). Even though freedom can only take place within the causal network of the world, it remains nonetheless absolute and uncaused, Kant insisting that an absolute first beginning of a series is possible during the course of the world.
Thus, on the one hand, the capacity to begin a new series of causes from oneself is absolute (although it is an absolute beginning only in causality and not in time), and on the other hand this capacity affects the fabric of the world and its causal laws. We introduce something new in the world, out of our own spontaneity,26 but what we introduce is something new in the world, which then gets taken up in natural causality. Whatever I decide to do out of this transcendental freedom still has to take place in the world. The new that I introduce is absolute (otherwise it would not be “new”), but that absolute happens in the conditioned world (this is why Kant spoke of a “comparatively first beginning”). All I can do is begin a new series of causes, themselves inscribed in nature. This is why Kant establishes that one must assume a first uncaused beginning, but along with it, “its natural consequences to infinity,” consequences of the free act which follow purely natural laws (CPR, A 450/B 478, 488). In a sense, the act is both free or uncaused and part of natural determinism, according to Kant’s distinction between a beginning in time (natural determinism) and a beginning in causality (freedom). To take Kant’s example: “If (for example), I am now entirely free, and get up from my chair without the necessarily determining influence of natural causes, then in this occurrence, along with its natural consequences to infinity, there begins an absolutely new series, even though as far as time is concerned this occurrence is only the continuation of a previous series” (CPR, A 450/B 478, 488). With respect to the event of freedom, natural causes exercise no determining influence whatsoever. Free action does indeed “follow upon them,” but “does not follow from” them (die zwar auf jene folgt, aber daraus nicht erfolgt).
This break with natural causality opens the possibility of a rethinking of the event, the happening of which is understood on the basis of this absolute causal spontaneity beginning from itself, “absolute spontaneity of an action” or transcendental freedom, which Hannah Arendt attempted to designate under the name of “natality.” As she puts it in The Human Condition, “the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting” (HC, 9). This “natal” power of beginning, this performativity of transcendental freedom (defined by Kant as the power, Vermögen, of beginning a state spontaneously or from oneself, von selbst), as decision to act, outside of natural causality, introduces the new in the world. Hence the importance of the motif of revolution for Arendt, for “the relevance of the problem of beginning to the phenomenon of revolution is obvious”27 Indeed, “revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning” (OR, 21). Now such events are never devoid of violence, Arendt noting that “such a beginning must be must be intimately connected with violence” to the extent that “no beginning could be made without using violence, without violating.” The event always carries the violence of absolute beginnings. The event is here synonymous with an anarchic, violent moment that is outside the law. As Derrida explains with respect to the event of the institution of political authority, “All Nation-States are born and found themselves in violence. I believe that truth to be irrecusable. Without even exhibiting atrocious spectacles on this subject, it suffices to underline a law of structure: the moment of foundation, the instituting moment, is anterior to the law or legitimacy which it founds. It is thus outside the law, and violent by that very fact.”28 The event is originary. As such, it has no ground, a groundlessness that is the focus of the next chapter.
ONE CAN TRACE the twisting free of the event from the categories of causality, reason, and subjectivity in Nietzsche’s destructive genealogy of the philosophical tradition, as well as in Heidegger’s deconstruction of the principle of reason. If the event in its eventfulness has been neutralized in the metaphysical tradition, enframed in an entire metaphysical and epistemological apparatus, then Nietzsche is a key figure in the task of thinking the event: for it was he who endeavored to provide a deconstructive genealogy of this tradition so as to reveal the processes and events that subtend it. Nietzsche’s destructive genealogy of metaphysical concepts consists in exposing their fictitious nature and overturning the values they carry while returning to the origins of the metaphysical tradition’s pathological formations in order to determine how its concepts have been constructed, for what purpose, and with what motives. It is a matter for Nietzsche of evaluating the value of our values, following the thread of life. “What are our evaluations and moral tables worth? What is the outcome of their rule? For whom? In relation to what?—Answer: for life.”1 Our concepts are symptoms of a certain state of life, and metaphysical constructs are to be read as a reaction against life, if it is the case that the “true world” “has been constructed by contradicting the actual world.”2
Nietzsche’s deconstruction of our metaphysical concepts is first a critique of conceptuality as such. A concept is never the grasp of some essence, of some objective fact, but a human, all-too-human invention, a creation of our mind that is then accepted by convention. By definition, a concept has no objective validity, no “truth-claim.” In a sense, a concept is from the outset, as a concept, something “false,” what Nietzsche calls a “lie.” This recognition cannot but cast a doubt on our traditional beliefs in our concepts and their objectivity. The reliance upon the traditional concepts of objectivity and truth finds itself shaken: our concepts are beginning to appear as beliefs, as constructs. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche explains that “man has for long ages believed in the concept and names of things as in aeternae veritates,” that “he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.”3 Of course, only much later did it dawn on humans that “in their belief in language they have propagated a tremendous error” and that we do not possess