Thinking the Event. François Raffoul
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of being is a historical question: the “question [of the meaning of being] thus brings itself to the point where it understands itself as historiological [historisch]” (SZ, 21). To raise the question of being implies engaging one’s own tradition. Dasein’s relation to the tradition, however, is far from transparent. On the contrary, tradition withholds from delivering its content to Dasein’s everyday being. Or, rather, it delivers it only as a “result,” that is, through the covering over in “self-evidence” (SZ, 21) of the primordial sources of the categories that have been handed down. The tradition is described by Heidegger as an obstacle (it “blocks our access to those primordial ‘sources’ from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have in part been quite genuinely drawn”; SZ, 21, emphasis mine), as an uprooting (“Dasein has had its historicality so thoroughly uprooted by tradition that it confines its interests to the multiformity of possible types, directions, and standpoints of philosophical activity in the most exotic and alien of cultures; and by this very interest it seeks to veil the fact that it has no ground [Bodenlosigkeit] of its own to stand on”; SZ, 21, emphasis mine), and as an obliteration or omission of the origin (“Indeed [the tradition] makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and it makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand”; SZ, 21). Tradition is described as a concealment of origins.
This situation reveals that the access to the event of being (and to the being of the event) requires a deconstructive passage through an inauthentic tradition. A thinking of the event will never go without a deconstruction of the obstacles that obstruct its eventfulness. “If the question of being is to have its own history made transparent, then this hardened tradition must be loosened up, and the concealments which it has brought about must be dissolved. We understand this task as one in which by taking the question of being as our clue, we are to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of being—the ways which have guided us ever since” (SZ, 22). In this sense, the inquiry aims “to go back to the past in a positive manner and make it productively its own” (SZ, 21), but this reappropriation of the ontological grounds will take the form of a deconstruction (Destruktion) of an improper tradition. Deconstruction must be integrated into the concept of method of phenomenology. This is why Heidegger adds to the reductive construction a destruction. “Construction in philosophy,” Heidegger explains, “is necessarily deconstruction [Konstruktion der Philosophie ist notwendig Destruktion]” (GA 24, 31/23, trans. modified). A thinking of the event of being must assume its deconstructive character. “There necessarily belongs to the conceptual interpretation of being and its structures, that is, to the reductive construction of being, a destruction. . . . Only by means of this destruction can ontology fully assure itself in a philosophical way of the genuine character of its concepts” (GA 24, 31/22–23). Destruction should be taken, literally, as a dis-obstruction or dismantling of what obstructs phenomenological vision and thus cannot be identified with a destruction or negative undertaking. It represents rather a positive reappropriation of the tradition since it returns to the sources of the concepts handed down by this tradition. “Construction in philosophy is necessarily destruction, that is to say, a de-construction of traditional concepts carried out in a historical recursion to the tradition. And this is not a negation of the tradition or a condemnation of it as worthless; quite the reverse, it signifies precisely a positive appropriation of tradition” (GA 24, 31/23).17
Further, deconstruction manifests the historicity and facticity of being. This facticity is apparent in the context of the phenomenological method’s “starting point,” which, as noted, “begins” with beings in order to reach, by an “aversive” movement, their being. The peculiar genesis of this movement, its “impure” beginnings, so to speak, inescapably affects the concept of being that is sought with a certain nonessentiality. The starting point is “obviously always determined by the factual experience of beings” (GA 24, 30/22), and phenomenological research, too, is “determined” (GA 24, 31/22) by this factical experience. This consideration by itself already constitutes a radical break with the Husserlian conception of reduction, which, by bracketing the natural attitude, claims to gain access to a pure field of phenomenological investigation. For Heidegger, because of its ontical foundation, ontology is marked by a constitutive “impurity.” By his emphasis on the facticity of constructive reduction, Heidegger points to (as early as in his early lectures on the hermeneutics of life) the limits of a conception of phenomenology that claims to gain access to a pure (transcendental) field. Rather, phenomenology is situated in a certain facticity. Furthermore, the very manner in which Heidegger defines this facticity, as the inescapable basis of phenomenological research, indicates a significant opposition to Husserlian phenomenology. “This commencement is obviously always determined by the factual experience of beings and the range of possibilities of experience that at any time are peculiar to a factual Dasein, and hence to the historical situation of a philosophical investigation” (GA 24, 30/22). Phenomenology no longer provides access to a pure field of essence, but is rooted in a factical and historical experience. Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggested that phenomenology is not to be construed as a philosophy of essences, but rather as a philosophy that situates itself in the facticity of existence and ultimately is about such facticity: “And yet phenomenology is also a philosophy that places essences back within existence and thinks that the only way to understand man and the world is by beginning from their ‘facticity.’”18 The young Heidegger explained that “a philosophical interpretation which has seen the main issue in philosophy, namely, facticity, is (insofar as it is genuine) factical and specifically philosophical-factical.”19 If it is the case that facticity is the very horizon of philosophizing, and is an irreducible phenomenon for philosophy, then facticity cannot be reduced, appropriately conceived through an intellectual operation or idealistic reduction. This emphasis on facticity severs the connection to any philosophy of essence. As such, the abandonment of such references to essence allows one to seize the phenomenon of being as a happening, as an event.
The motif of deconstruction, as it intervenes in Heidegger’s understanding of the concept of phenomenology, constitutes a break with any reference to a philosophy of essence or substance and opens the way for the emergence of a problematic of the event. Deconstructive phenomenology does not give access to a pure field of essences, but to being, which is precisely not a substance but instead happens. In fact, the three fundamental features of the phenomenological method (reduction, construction, deconstruction) reveal that phenomenology as such should be approached as a phenomenology of the event, in the following senses: (a) as reduction, it reveals that phenomenology is not simply about phenomena (things, entities), but about their being, that is, the event of their coming into presence. (b) As construction, it reveals that there is a domain that is specific to being as event and that a specific mode of thinking must be attuned to it, a thinking of being that is distinct from a thinking related to beings (one recalls here how Heidegger, in The Principle of Reason, often referred to the realm of being as being accessed only through a “leap,” a Satz in das Sein20). “Construction” designates a thinking of the event of being as such, always reached in a leap from the domain of entities, a leap that as it were is the site of the event. (c) Finally, deconstruction, as just alluded to, reveals how the event of presence is always caught in systems attempting to suppress it; further, it reveals the lack of essence (facticity) to which phenomenology is assigned. As such, being is not a substance that precisely never happens and only “remains the same” as constant presence but an event lacking any prior support or substrate. It becomes necessary to explore further and more concretely the connection between phenomenology and event and, indeed, the very notion of a phenomenology of the event.
Event and Phenomenology
Seized in its ownmost possibility, phenomenology may well prove to be a phenomenology of the event. In her article “Phenomenology of the Event: Waiting and Surprise” (PE), Françoise Dastur reveals the connection between phenomenology and event, indeed develops the resources to understand phenomenology as a phenomenology of the event. She first begins to challenge the tendency in contemporary thought to oppose phenomenology to a thinking of the event on account of the conceit that phenomenology