Thinking the Event. François Raffoul
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the presence of this inappropriable in terms of what Derrida calls the “secret” (note that the French secret translates in Derrida’s text Heidegger’s Geheimnis). Through the leitmotif repetition of the expression “il y a là un secret” or “il y a là du secret,” “there is something secret” (literally, there is there something secret), Derrida seeks to emphasize that it is first a matter of recalling, not what the secret would be, but rather that there is a secret at all; as if, through this shift from the “what” to the “that” of the secret, it was a matter of remembering, or removing from its necessary oblivion, the presence of a secret in the experience of the event.
I then engage Derrida’s thinking of the “im-possible” as it pertains to the event. Indeed, for Derrida, “only the impossible happens” (PM, 87). In what was to be his last appearance on television, in June 2004 with France 3, answering the question of the journalist who had asked him what deconstruction is, Derrida replied: “deconstruction is what happens [la déconstruction, c’est ce qui arrive],” and then he added: “that is to say, the impossible.” The impossible, he concluded, is “the only thing that happens [la seule chose qui arrive]”!43 This is no hyperbole, but a rigorous understanding of the intertwining between the possible and the impossible as it pertains to the event. “‘The impossible is what takes place.’ Madness. I am tempted to say of this utterance, itself impossible, that it touches on the very condition of thinking the event. There where the possible is all that happens, nothing happens, nothing that is not the impoverished unfurling or the predictable predicate of what finds itself already there, potentially, and thus produces nothing new, not even accidents worthy of the name ‘event’” (OT, 57). As I alluded to prior, the impossible becomes the secret resource of the possible and the condition of any event “worthy of the name.”
Finally, in a concluding chapter, I sketch the contours of an “ethics of the event” and how the happening of the event opens onto a welcome to what comes in the event, a saying yes to being overtaken and taken away by its secret. Here appear the thematics of a hospitality to the event. Throughout this work, it has been an issue of freeing the pure eventfulness of the event from the traditional attempts to neutralize it, whether through the demands of a principle of reason or through the position of a willful ego, of letting the event give itself. The happening of the event is the coming of the arrivant, an arrival that is welcomed by an original hospitality. Indeed, the ethics of the event, as I approach it here, is to be taken as an ethics of hospitality, a welcome of the event in its irruptive coming. I am, before the event, caught by surprise, and without resources, an absolute weakness before its happening. In fact, an event exposes the utter vulnerability of the one who is exposed to it, the powerlessness and radical passivity of the one to whom it happens. Derrida writes that the event “is there, before us, without us—there is someone, something, that happens, that happens to us, and that has no need of us to happen (to us). And this relation to the event or alterity, as well as to chance or the occasion, leaves us completely disarmed; and one has to be disarmed. The ‘has to’ says yes to the event: it is stronger than I am.”44 The ethics of the event would designate this vulnerability, this unconditional openness to the other. From such exposure to the otherness of the event, always happening from without, one understands better in what sense the event weighs on thought from the outside (how it exscribes it) and how thought is nothing but the thinking of this shock, in wonder before it, even if it means never being able to comprehend or appropriate it.
The Neutralization of the Event
In her 1946 essay “What Is Existential Philosophy?,”1 returning to the roots of existential philosophy, Hannah Arendt makes the radical claim that the event of existence is a phenomenon that takes place outside of thought. With that insight, which posits the exteriority of existence with respect to thought, a genuine thinking of the event in its eventfulness is made possible. This possibility is born out of a break with reason’s claims to encapsulate or enframe the real, which has been the dream of the entire philosophical tradition culminating with Hegel. Precisely commenting on Hegel’s system as an attempt to encompass the whole of reality in thought, Arendt writes: “With a comprehensiveness never achieved before him, Hegel provided a philosophical explanation for all the phenomena of nature and history and brought them together in a strangely unified whole.” In so doing, she continues, thought became a “prison for reality” (WEP, 164). The eventfulness of the event is thereby reduced to the demands of reason. Such attempt to reduce events to what thought can grasp is best represented, according to Arendt, in Hegel’s work, “the last word of all Western philosophy,” in the sense that it accomplishes the ancient identification of being and thought. In Hegel’s well-known expression in his preface to Elements of the Philosophy of Right, “what is rational is real, and what is real is rational (Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig).”2 Now, according to Arendt, the origin of existential philosophy is to be situated in the rupture with this postulate of an identity between being and thought. What those existential philosophers “were rebelling against, and despairing of,” she writes, “was philosophy itself, the postulated identity of thought and being” (WEP, 164). Whether in the form of materialisms or idealisms, whether by affirming the primacy of matter or on the contrary the primacy of the mind, all traditional systems of thought agree on this identity, and they all attempt “to re-establish the unity of thought and Being” (WEP, 164). Existential philosophy breaks with that supposed identity, through which the event is neutralized and made to conform to the form of thought.
Never has this neutralization of the event to thought appeared so clearly as in the reduction of events to causality in Kant’s theoretical philosophy. With Kant, one sees how events are conceived in terms of and on the basis of causality, how their independence is reduced or neutralized by a causal order. Kant posits that events happen according to causality. Kant assumes the universal determinism of nature and asserts his commitment to a universal causal determinism for everything that happens, according to which “everything in the world happens solely in accordance with laws of nature.”3 Such universal natural causality is taken by Kant as a given and not in dispute. This is not surprising, if it is the case, as Heidegger states in The Essence of Human Freedom, that “causality, in the traditional sense of the being of beings, in common understanding as in traditional metaphysics, is the fundamental category of being as being-present-at-hand [Vorhandensein].”4 One cannot stress enough the importance of the motif of causality in traditional metaphysics, with Jean-Luc Marion going so far as to claim, “Metaphysics knows nothing but the cause.” Metaphysics knows nothing but the cause, and “knows nothing except through the cause, either as cause or as effect.”5 Causality is the fundamental category. “In metaphysics, cause does not exist merely as one categorical function among others; it is set up as the universal category for all beings. Thus for Suarez: ‘There is no being that is not an effect or a cause’; for Pascal: ‘All things caused and causing;’ or for Kant: ‘Everything of which experience teaches that it happens [geschieht] must have a cause.” ’6 Causality of nature is traditionally the paradigm to think the being of beings, the meaning of being.
Kant posits this paradigm in the second analogy of experience in the Critique of Pure Reason, which states (in the A edition) that “everything that happens presupposes something which it follows in accordance with a rule” and (in the B edition) that “all alterations [Veränderungen] occur in accordance with the law of the connection of cause and effect” (CPR, A 189/B 232, 304). Let me clarify from the outset that for Kant, as he demonstrated in the first analogy, all appearances are alterations, that is, alterations of an enduring substance, as opposed to “an origination out of nothing” (CPR, A 206/B 251, 314). He writes in the second analogy that “all appearances of the temporal sequence are collectively only alterations, i.e., a successive being and not-being of the determination of the substance that persists there,” and: “This could also have been expressed thus: All change (succession) of appearances is only alteration”