Thinking the Event. François Raffoul
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we make use of this pattern everywhere—we seek a doer from every event.”23 Nietzsche insists that one cannot attach a doer to deeds, that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming,” and that the doer “is merely a fiction added to the deed.”24 A subject-doer as cause of its effects, of its deed, these are grammatical-metaphysical fictions, prejudices, that Nietzsche characterizes in The Genealogy of Morals as a “seduction of language” along with the “fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it” (GM, 45). Just as the “popular mind” distinguishes the lightning from its flash, just as it reifies the “it” in the “it rains,” just as it conceives of the event as an action requiring a subject, just as it “doubles the deed” (“it posits the same event first as cause and then a second time as its effect,” GM, 45), the metaphysician distinguishes a subject from its effects. In fact, “there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything” (GM, 45). “The deed is everything”: this expression calls for another conception of the event, no longer anchored in a cause-substrate, no longer based on some subject or author, but happening from itself. Events do not emanate from nonhappening substrates: they happen from themselves, that is, without ground.
The event rests on no substrate, has no author; this is why it is always impersonal: it happens. What of this “it”? Reflecting on the impersonality of the expression es gibt (“it gives,” “there is”) in On Time and Being, Heidegger notes that the risk when discussing this “it” is to posit some “indeterminate power” that somehow would cause the event.25 The problem might reside in the very structure of language, in a certain grammar that divides subject and predicate, that determines the “it” as a separate entity with an efficiency of its own, leading to the belief in a metaphysical substrate. As such, this grammatical structure neutralizes the eventfulness of the event. It is a matter of no longer isolating the “it” from the happening of the event. The “it” does not refer to a subject existing under the event of being, but is coextensive with such event. If I say “it rains,” the “it” designates the raining itself, that is, the event of raining. The “it” designates the impersonal eventfulness of the event.
The event is a radically impersonal phenomenon, enacted by no one, no subject, no self: the event occurs outside the subject. As Derrida states, an event is “something that happens in some sense without or before any subject, without or before anyone’s decision” (For Strasbourg, 10). The event exceeds the capacity of a subject, the power of a self. This is why Derrida will ultimately reject the notion of the performative to think the event, as it still relies too heavily on the action of a subject. One often associates the performative with the enacting of an event. “We traditionally say that the performative produces events—I do what I say, I open the session if I am presiding over it, I produce the event of which I speak. In general, we thus relate the possibility of the event that is produced to a performative initiative and thus to a performative responsibility” (For Strasbourg, 67). However, in such a performative, the event is neutralized by the position of a powerful subject. “A performative produces an event only by securing for itself, in the first-person singular or plural, in the present, and with the guarantee offered by conventions or legitimated fictions, the power that an ipseity gives itself to produce the event of which it speaks” (R, 152). Just as so-called “constative” language, the performative also misses the eventful in the event. “Now, just like the constative, it seems to me, the performative cannot avoid neutralizing, indeed annulling, the eventfulness of the event it is supposed to produce” (R, 152). Certainly, Derrida concedes, something does happen with the performative, but what is eventful exceeds it: “I am not saying that nothing then happens, but what happens is programmable, foreseeable, controlled, conditioned by conventions.” Therefore, “it can thus be said, I would dare say, that an event worthy of its name is an event that derails all performativity” (For Strasbourg, 67). It is a matter of thinking the event outside of a problematics of power, “beyond all performative mastery, beyond all power,”26 as the event undoes both will and power. The experience of the event “defeats my will.”27 With the event, it will be a matter of a letting, not a doing. When it comes to the event, it is a matter of abandoning the will and letting the event happen, as opposed to making it happen, a “making happen” that always mobilizes the power and will of a subject. “Must there not be an absence of the will to abandon, whence the question of letting-happen rather than making-happen?” (For Strasbourg, 92).
The event undoes the power of the subject, as the event happens of itself, placing us, as it were, no longer in the position of actors, but, as Jean-Luc Marion suggests, of witnesses. As he clarifies, the term witness signifies the undoing of the transcendental subject constituting the event as object: “With the name witness, we must understand a subjectivity stripped of the characteristics that gave it transcendental rank” (BG, 217). To the constituting subject, “there succeeds the witness—the constituted witness” (BG, 216). The event happens of itself, not constituted by a transcendental subject: “The phenomenon of the passing reached me and, so to speak, constituted me as not constituting it—to the point that all I have is recognize myself as the mere witness (the one who certainly saw what he has seen, but does not understand what he has seen), and I renounce my claim to be its transcendental subject” (NC, 186). The event happens of itself without anyone conducting it. Hence, in Waterloo, the battle “passes and passes away on its own, without anybody making it or deciding it. It passes, and each watches it pass, fade into the distance, and then disappear, disappear like it had come that is to say, of itself” (BG, 228). Let me stress here the capital importance of this motif of passing in the thinking of the event. The event “is” not but essentially passes. The event belongs to the fundamental category of passing; not “being” in the sense of a substantial presence, but passing. As Marion explains, “First, it is not self-evident that in order to be, a being must subsist in permanence: indeed, what is proper to the event, by definition, is not to be insofar as it subsists in permanence, but insofar as it passes” (NC, 89, my emphasis). The event passes (passe) and passes of itself (se passe) while exceeding us from all sides.
The event happens of itself, i.e., is impersonal, and yet it always happens to someone, bringing forth an eventful self, that is to say, a self that is constituted (but also undone) by the event. Heidegger shows how being is an event (Ereignis) in which we have a part as human beings. The human being is not the ego cogito of the Cartesian tradition in a position of subject, but the one who is concerned by the event of being and happening from it. This new perspective requires that the self, far from designating some substantial ego, itself must be understood as arising from an event. In that sense, the self as such is an event, coming to be as a response to the eventfulness of being. It will be necessary, in our understanding of the event, to think together the impersonality of the event with the arising and responding of a self, as if the es gibt was the site of an I to be, a self that is corresponding with an otherwise impersonal phenomenon. In this respect, one ought not to be too quick to set apart the impersonality of the event with the selfhood that is engaged by it. The event is impersonal, happens of itself, but it engages a self that consists precisely in the reception of such event, in which the I suffers the “shock” of the event. What is at stake here in the task of thinking the event is to reveal how the self itself is an event, happening, as it were, in and from the happening of being. The self cannot be presupposed as a pregiven or preconstituted subject but rather originates in and as an event.
This selfhood, however, is not appropriative, not synonymous with the possessive appropriation of otherness in an absolute “at-home,” since to be a self is to be exposed to an event that remains inappropriable for it. Derrida insists that the experience of the event is always that of an inappropriable: “The undergoing [l’épreuve] of the event, that which in the undergoing or in the ordeal at once opens itself up to and resists experience, is, it seems to me, a certain inappropriability of what comes or happens [ce qui arrive]” (PTT, 90, trans. slightly modified). For Arendt the event always remains outside of thought, happening from without, a pure “that” that no “what” can ever explain. This is why