Thinking the Event. François Raffoul
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indicated the irreducible expropriation (Enteignis) at the heart of the event (Ereignis), going so far as to state: “Expropriation points towards what is most proper to the event.”28
II.
In chapter 1, I attempt to reconstitute the twisting free of the event from the demands of rational thought. I have indicated how the event has traditionally been understood within a philosophy of causality, subjectivity, and reason and how its eventfulness was neutralized by the postulate that events happen according to causality. In contrast with this tradition, which ultimately places the event under the requirements of the principle of sufficient reason, I follow the emergence of a thinking of the event after Kant (but in a sense already with Kant), drawing from Hannah Arendt’s 1946 essay “What Is Existential Philosophy?” Hannah Arendt argues that in the tradition the event of existence was neutralized by and reduced to the power of the concept, a project that culminates in Hegel’s work. Even in Husserlian phenomenology, the notion of an intentional consciousness establishes the reduction of the happening phenomenon to what a consciousness can transcendentally constitute: the event is not allowed to escape the constitutive powers of subjectivity. To think the event in its eventfulness will require a break with that reduction of being to thought, that is, with the postulated identity of being with thought in which the event is made to conform to the power of the concept and of consciousness.
Arendt evokes the “philosophical shock,” the very shock or wonder (thaumazein) that is at the origin of thinking and philosophy. The event happens outside of thought and remains inappropriable for it. This is, for instance, the shock of the resistance of singularity to conceptual generality. An event is each time singular, a singularity that interrupts the mastery of thought and the form of conceptuality. Derrida speaks of the event as “what comes to pass only once, only one time, a single time, a first and last time, in an always singular, unique, exceptional, irreplaceable, unforeseeable, and incalculable fashion” (R, 135). It is the shock of an event that does not occur within a pregiven structural whole, such as “the world,” but “pierces” its horizon. It is the shock of facticity in the face of thought, the “that” before the “what.” It is the shock of sheer existence before meaning. In each case, the event exceeds the form of the concept. I follow this freeing of the event from the power of the concept in Arendt’s reading of Kant, in particular in: (a) his account of synthetic judgments; (b) his refutation of the ontological proof of God’s existence; and (c) his notion of transcendental freedom.
I pursue in chapter 2 this emergence of the event outside of the dominance of causality and subjectivity by showing how for both Nietzsche and Heidegger, the event escapes the schemes of causality, subject or substrate, and reason. Two fundamental errors stand in the way of letting the event come forth in its eventfulness: the reliance on causality and the belief in the subject. With respect to causality, instead of the event following the cause, I suggest that the event is the original phenomenon. Events do not simply follow predetermined sequences. An event “worthy of the name” represents the surge of the new through which precisely it does not “follow” from a previous cause. A new understanding of temporality is here required: not a ruled sequence coming from the past to the present, but an eventful temporality, coming from the future, disrupting the causal networks, and transforming the entire complex of temporality, indeed transforming the past itself. Another conception of the event is called for, no longer anchored in a cause-substrate, but happening without ground.
This groundlessness of the event is revealed by Heidegger in his course, The Principle of Reason, in which he reflects on a principle that is precisely supposed to ground events: the principle of reason (der Satz vom Grund). As noted, it is paradoxically the very claim of the principle of reason, that is, that all events must be founded in reason, that turns out to be itself without reason and thus groundless. An abyss is here formed, which is the abyss (Ab-grund) of the ground that, in order to be the ground, must itself be without a ground. To the question of “why,” which asks for reasons and foundations, Heidegger opposes the “answer” of the because through his citing of the sixteenth-century poet and mystic Angelus Silesius:
The rose is without why: it blooms because it blooms,
It pays no attention to itself, asks not whether it is seen
The rose is without why, but blooms because it blooms. For Heidegger, that tautology, far from saying nothing, says everything, that is, the entire eventful facticity of the being: it happens as it happens. The event becomes the highest reason. The reason given is harbored entirely within the fact of the being, that is, within the being itself, “the fact of its being a rose or its rose-being [ihr Rose-sein]” (GA 10, 84/PR, 57, trans. slightly modified). We are asked to leave the why (the cause) for the because (the event). Heidegger cites Goethe, who wrote in his Collected Sayings from 1815: “How? When? and Where?—The gods remain mute! You stick to the because and ask not why?” (GA 10, 185/PR, 126). The because (weil) is, as ground, groundless. In contrast with the why, always in quest of foundations, the because remains groundless. “What does ‘because’ mean? It guards against investigating the ‘why,’ therefore, against investigating foundations. It balks at founding and getting to the bottom of something. For the ‘because’ is without ‘why,’ it has no ground, it is ground itself” (GA 10, 186/PR, 127). The event of being is groundless, without reason, without a why.
In chapter 3, I investigate the phenomenological senses of the event revealed by this dismantling—deconstruction—of the metaphysical categories of causality, subjectivity, and reason/ground. Once the event is no longer referred to the demands of the principle of reason, no longer anchored in a subject-cause, it becomes possible to let it give itself in its eventfulness, in the way it happens each time. “Thinking the event” would here mean not subjecting it to reason, but letting it be (especially if thinking itself is approached as a kind of letting, letting-be or Gelassenheit29), and indeed grasping phenomenality itself as an event. Following Heidegger in paragraph 7 of Being and Time, phenomenology is a bringing to light of the phenomenality of phenomena, that is, the event of their givenness. Phenomenology is concerned, not with the ontical given, but with phenomenality itself, with the event of givenness. The phenomenon is here taken in its verbal sense, as a self-showing. This suggests that phenomena themselves must be taken as events. This is why I argue that phenomenology, in its most authentic sense, ought to be reconsidered in terms of the event and recast as a phenomenology of the event.
Certain commentators have claimed that there is an antinomy, an incompatibility of sorts, between phenomenology and event on the account that phenomenology would always be directed at the present phenomenon while the event exceeds the present, and even the horizon of presence. To the extent that the event is not a present being or object, that is, is “not ‘presentable,’” it would “exceed” the resources of any phenomenology.30 I argue, however, that phenomenology is about that very excess. Drawing from Jean-Luc Marion’s description of the “saturated” phenomenon, I approach the event as excess. Unconditional eventful phenomenality exceeds any encompassing horizon and reverses the subject into the recipient (indeed, as we saw, the “witness”) of the impersonal passing of the event. As such, the event becomes unpredictable (for Derrida, “it’s an event insofar as what’s happening was not predicted,” CIP, 456), outside the domain or sphere of the subject and happening to it from without. An event is that which happens in excess of our subjective anticipations. Phenomenology is transformed by such eventful phenomenality, and thinking the event means here how thinking is affected and traumatized by the event.
In light of this phenomenology of the event, I investigate in chapter 4 the extent to which “things” themselves should be taken as events. Once things are referred back to the event of their givenness, they in turn become affected by such presence and find themselves participating in the proper mobility and happening of being so that they are precisely not simply “mere” things but events themselves.