Thinking the Event. François Raffoul
(groundlessness) of all things, of the radical innocence of life and becoming. No intention, no design, no author, no cause, and no agent direct the event of a life that happens in a tragic and innocent play. This innocence and unaccountability of all things captures the sense of the event as groundless play of existence. Further senses of the event emerge once the metaphysical constructs of reason, causality, and subjectivity are deconstructed: event as innocence of becoming, as excess (to reason and subjectivity), as impersonal happening, as groundless existence, as the very advent of the world, as the interruption of otherness, as the “impossible” itself, ultimately as the inappropriable coming into presence of being. To think the event will amount to consider these senses. In the end, as Nancy puts it, thinking the event, the surprise of the event or the event as surprise, will amount to thinking being surprised, or “over-taken” (sur-prise) by the event, for the event always exceeds thinking. The event is both the origin and the end of thought: it ends it in its claims to mastery while opening it to the infinite work of interpretation.
The task of thinking the event leads to the following questions: what constitutes an event as an event? What does “to happen” mean? How can one describe the phenomenon of the event? Is the event even a phenomenon, if it is the case that a phenomenon is what appears while an event seems to evade the presence of a present being and to be properly invisible? Is there a concept of an event, or, on the contrary, is an event not always extraconceptual? In her 1946 essay “What Is Existential Philosophy?,”17 returning to the roots of existential philosophy, Hannah Arendt makes the radical claim that existence happens outside of thought. With that insight, a genuine thinking of the event in its eventfulness is made possible. Hannah Arendt argues that in the tradition the event in its sheer happening was suppressed and neutralized, reduced to causality, thought, reason, essence, or the meaning posited by the human mind. In her words, the “that” was subjugated to the “what,” and existence reduced to a concept or an essence, thereby negating its eventfulness. However, Arendt insists forcefully, “the What will never be able to explain the That” (WEP, 167). The “what” and the “that” are not homogeneous; the event of existence is extraconceptual. This opens the way for encountering the event of being as such, no longer mediated by a reason or a concept. The event is irreducible to the powers of “com-prehension” of the concept. It is in this sense that Hannah Arendt refers to Jaspers’s “border situations”: whether death, guilt, fate, or chance, these events provoke thought and “drive us to philosophize,” not because they can be thought, but precisely because they cannot. Arendt indeed speaks of the essential failure of thought, the failure to capture in a concept the event of existence: “Philosophic thought can never get around the fact that reality cannot be resolved into what can be thought.” The event happens outside of thought and is irreducible to it. It is as if thought became the thought of its own impossibility, a thought of the aporia: what it has to think cannot be resolved into thought. The very purpose of philosophic thought is not to reduce the event but instead to “heighten . . . the intellectually irresolvable” (WEP, 185).
The event happens outside of thought, yet while happening to it. This is the true aporia (and secret resource) of thought: what it has to think lies outside of it, forever inappropriable. The origin of thought cannot be appropriated by thought: “If thinking necessarily fails to grasp its beginning, perhaps it is because the beginning does not depend upon thought.” Otherwise put, “Philosophy fails in its search for a first concept, because beginning does not depend on it” (POE, 56). The event is “outside the concept” (hors-concept), a concept now placed in relation to an outside that will always remain inappropriable for it. As Deleuze stresses, it is a matter of “affirming the relation of exteriority that links thought to what it thinks” (POE, 51). Thought does not begin from itself, but is the traumatized response to an event. Events are always traumatic. As Derrida writes, an event is traumatic or it is not an event: “What is a traumatic event? First of all, any event worthy of this name, even if it is a ‘happy’ event, has within it something that is traumatizing. An event always inflicts a wound in the everyday course of history, in the ordinary repetition and anticipation of all experience.”18 At the origin of thought there is a singular accident, a trauma, an encounter, a violent shock. As Deleuze puts it, “Truth depends on an encounter with something that forces us to think and to seek the truth. . . . It is the accident of the encounter that guarantees the necessity of what is thought” (cited in POE, 56). The relation between thought and the event is radically contingent. Indeed, an encounter is not accountable by reason, not subject to the principle of sufficient reason: “An encounter is always inexplicable” (POE, 57). To think the event is to think such absolute contingency.19 No reasons will ever measure up to the happening of the event. “The analysis of conditions of possibility, even existential ones, will never suffice in giving an account of the act or the event. An analysis of that kind will never measure up to what takes place, the effectivity—actuality—of what comes to pass—for example, a friendship which will never be reduced to the desire or the potentiality of friendship.”20 Born from an accident, a contingent event, from chance, thinking is always “circumstantial,” event-based, an absolutely unnecessary phenomenon or occurrence. “Thought is born of chance” (POE, 57). When thought assumes its eventful origin, when it engages in “an authentic relation to the outside,” it gains its authentic vocation and “affirms the unforeseeable or the unexpected.” Now, the notion that philosophy is born out of an event that it does not control is “a shock to reason” in its quest for ultimate foundations. For “how is it supposed to find a foundation [assise] in that which defeats it, in the inexplicable or the aleatory?” The logic of foundation of the principle of reason leads to its very ungrounding, its “collapse” in an abyss. Thought “stands on a movable ground that it does not control, and thereby wins its necessity.” In the end, what transpires is that “we cannot give the reason for an event” (POE, 57) because the event occurs outside of thought.
One finds in Nietzsche’s work an attempt to think this outsideness of the event with respect to thought with his claim that the event happens both outside and before the cause. Nietzsche frees the event from both causality and the belief in a subject or substrate. According to him, one of the constitutive errors of the metaphysical tradition has been its reliance on causality, the imposition of causes on every existence, on every event, as their substratum. “We have created a world of causes, a world of wills, and a world of spirits. All happening is considered a doing, all doing is supposed to be the effect of a will; the world is understood as a multiplicity of doers; a doer or subject ‘was imputed to everything that happened.’”21 Metaphysics creates a doer distinct from the deed and inverses the relation between cause and effect through the imaginary position of a cause beneath the event and the retroactive imputing of such cause to the event. In fact, far from preceding events as their substrate, causality follows the happening of the event, an “after the fact” reconstruction. There is a kind of “inversion of temporality,” an Umkehrung der Zeit, by which the event is said to follow the cause, when in fact, the cause is retroactively injected. “I’ll begin with dreams: a particular sensation, for instance, a sensation due to a distant cannon shot, has a cause imputed to it (untergeschoben) afterwards (nachträglich)” (TI, 32–33). Once the cause has been introduced, after the event, then, it is then alleged to exist prior to the event, an event that has now been transformed into necessity and meaning, a meaning that has been introduced: “In the meantime, the sensation persists in a kind of resonance: it waits, as it were, until the drive to find causes allows it to come into the foreground—not as an accident anymore, but as ‘meaning’” (TI, 32–33). What was first a sheer event, perceived outside of any causal network, is later integrated in the dream and reconstructed in terms of causation in the narration. The event is now said to be happening according to causality. In fact, one must invert this inversion and posit that the event happens before the cause. Only after something has happened can one begin to account for it causally. That something happens is the original fact. In a sense, as Claude Romano argues in Event and World, there is nothing before the event. “Pure beginning from nothing, an event, in its an-archic bursting forth, is absolved from all antecedent causality.”22 An event, as he continues, “has no cause, because it is its own origin” (EW, 42).
The