Thinking the Event. François Raffoul
to think the being of beings, the very meaning of being. One cannot stress enough the importance of the motif of causality in traditional metaphysics. As Jean-Luc Marion puts it, “Metaphysics knows nothing but the cause.” It “knows nothing except through the cause, either as cause or as effect” (NC, 181). This is why causality is not one category among others but “the universal category for all beings” (BG, 161).
Kant posits this paradigm in the “Analogies of Experience” (second analogy) in The Critique of Pure Reason, which state that all events happen according to causality. “All alterations [Veränderungen] occur in accordance with the law of the connection of cause and effect” (CPR, A 189/B 232, 304). Every event occurs following a causal rule since “everything that happens presupposes a previous state, upon which it follows without exception according to a rule” (CPR, A 444/B 472, 484). The succession of events follows the order of causality, and an event becomes the effect of a prior cause. The event is not something new, an original phenomenon disrupting and breaking the course of time, indeed generating time, but the product or result of a prior process. For Jean-Luc Marion, this proves that the kind of events mobilized by Kant in the second analogy are not properly events but rather what he terms impoverished events, that is, events reduced to what reason demands of them: predictability, repeatability, and foundation in causality: “the analogies of experience concern only a fringe of phenomenality—phenomena of the type of objects constituted by the sciences, poor in intuition, foreseeable, exhaustively knowable, reproducible—while other levels (and first of all historical phenomena) would make an exception” (BG, 207). The events of the analogies of experience are not properly events but intraworldly facts that are subject to causality. “Eventful” events, as will be noted, are not subject to causal determinations; rather, in their original happening, they indeed do not follow but constitute new causal networks and thereby reconfigure if not create a new world. An event “worthy of the name,” as Derrida would say, represents the surge of the new through which precisely it does not “follow” from a previous cause. By introducing the new in the world, indeed by bringing forth a new world, does an event not disqualify prior causal contexts and networks? To that extent, an event could not be “explained” by prior causes because its occurrence has transformed the context on the basis of which it could be explained. To that extent, an event has no cause. Jean-Luc Marion writes: “Inasmuch as it is a given phenomenon, the event does not have an adequate cause and cannot have one. Only in this way can it advance on the wings of a dove: unforeseen, unusual, unexpected, unheard of, and unseen” (BG, 167). Kant, however, thinks in the perspective of the demands of the principle of sufficient reason. This is why he reduces events to the law of causality and then attempts to establish a perfect symmetry, or reversibility, between event and causality: “If, therefore, we experience that something happens, then we always presuppose that something else precedes it, which it follows in accordance with a rule” (CPR, A 195/B 240, 308). Conversely, as soon as I perceive in a sequence “a relation to the preceding state, from which the representation follows in accordance with a rule, I represent something as an occurrence, or as something that happens” (CPR, A 198/B 243, 309–310). This structuring accomplishes what Leibniz had posited, namely that events must conform to the principle of sufficient reason.
In addition to this rational enframing, one also notes an egological reduction of the event in the philosophical tradition, as one finds for instance in a hyperbolic or paroxistic form in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. On the basis of the view that we are responsible for what happens to us, Sartre claims that whatever happens happens to us, and what happens to us happens through us. Ultimately for him, I choose the meaning of events. Sartre attempts to reduce the alterity and surprise of the event, as it is immediately appropriated by the self in its responsible engagement. Any event becomes a call to my responsibility: I am engaged by the event. Even a war declared by others becomes mine. For Sartre “everything takes place as if I bore the entire responsibility for this war.”14 Everything that happens is mine, and nothing human is foreign to me, which means there is no radical alterity in the world, and thus no events I have not chosen. I can decide on the nonhuman, but “this decision is human, and I shall carry the entire responsibility for it” (BN, 708). Sartre posits here a subjectivity as appropriation of all that happens, as appropriation of the event. Any event is immediately taken over by my freedom, and there are no events without my appropriating them and making them my own. “Thus there are no accidents in life,” and “any way you look at it, it is a matter of a choice” (BN, 708). This hyperbolic inflation of appropriating subjectivity implies the reduction, appropriation, and overcoming of the alterity of events.
The event has thus traditionally been grounded in reason, made to follow the order of causality, and reduced to what thought can grasp or to what a subject-agent can will. In all these instances, the event finds itself neutralized as it has been situated within a metaphysics of essence, causality, subjectivity, and reason. However, I will question whether there might not be other ways to conceive of an event—doing justice to its eventfulness—once the categories just mentioned are put into question in post-Nietzschean thought. What would an event mean if not enframed in a philosophy of essence, as it were enveloped in an essence? If no longer conceived as the deed of a doer, the act of a willful subject? If it was no longer interpreted in relation to a subject or a substrate? If it resisted the attempt to integrate it within a rational order? If it was, finally, freed from the laws of causality? With respect to the reliance on causality, one can indeed wonder: does the category of cause pertain or even apply to the eventfulness of the event? Is an event, as event, “caused”? Or instead, as suggested prior, does the very eventfulness of the event precisely not point to a certain excess with respect to causality? Marion speaks of “the character and the dignity of an event—that is, an event or a phenomenon that is unforeseeable (on the basis of the past), not exhaustively comprehensible (on the basis of the present), not reproducible (on the basis of the future), in short, absolute, unique, happening. We will therefore call it a pure event.”15 It is that “pure event,” freed from causality and the demands of rational thought, that remains to be thought and is the focus of this work.
The category of the event has become a major concern in contemporary continental thought. It is the ambition of this work to reflect on the place and importance of this phenomenon and to show how the very senses of the event have been transformed. My underlying hypothesis is that in the wake of the end of traditional metaphysics (the twilight of the metaphysical idols of substance, reason, causality, identity, agency, and subjectivity of which Nietzsche spoke), and the withdrawal of transcendental modes of thought, the event becomes the main motif from which to rethink traditional philosophical problems. Ultimately, I seek to show how, in the wake of the exhaustion of traditional metaphysics, the notion of the event has come to the fore in an unprecedented way, with key implications for philosophy, ontology, ethics, and theories of selfhood.
Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics has opened the way for phenomenological and ontological interpretations of the event, which I propose to investigate in this work. A philosophy that no longer relies on a metaphysics of substance can begin to pay attention to how phenomena happen and can describe these events phenomenologically. Being itself no longer appears as the substantial or atemporal presence of the tradition but as the event of presence. Heidegger recognized that in the tradition being was indeed understood as presence, Anwesenheit. However, its proper eventfulness was neutralized in the reference to constant presence (beständige Anwesenheit), substantiality, Heidegger speaking of how in such tradition of substantiality the temporal meaning of Anwesenheit was “repressed” (abgedrängt).16 In fact, the very term Anwesenheit, presence, harbors the motion of an event: the an- in An-wesen or An-wesenheit suggests a movement from concealment to unconcealment, a coming into presence, in a word, an event of presence. This implies, in turn, a break with the model of constant presence, that is, with a kind of “stability” that suppresses the temporal happening in the phenomenon of presence. It is a matter of hearing again the temporal meaning of presence and breaking with the notion of a constant presence, that is, with the metaphysics of Vorhandendeit hat has governed the Western philosophical tradition.
Beginning with Nietzsche’s claim that the event exceeds causality