Principle of causality as being equivalent.” Although not every reason is a cause, nonetheless, “the Principle of causality belongs within the orbit of the principle of reason” (GA 10, 33/PR, 21). We see here how the principle of reason is caught in a quest for foundation, which ultimately, as Heidegger would show in The Principle of Reason, proves self-destructive or self-deconstructive. The principle, which states that “nothing happens without a cause sufficiently determined a priori,” proves impossible to fulfill, and it self-destructs. For, on the one hand, the principle of natural causality contradicts itself since no first cause is attained: the more it seeks to fulfill itself, the more it engages in the infinite regress that will prove its deconstruction; on the other hand, if one posits the first foundation that is causa sui, then one also reveals an abyss beneath it. The ground, in order to be the first ground, cannot itself have a ground and is therefore groundless. The principle of sufficient reason self-deconstructs, which I will return to in chapter 2.
The Event Outside of Thought
In addition to this enframing of events within causality, a further reduction of events to thought occurs by referring them to a constituting subjectivity. Arendt claims that Husserl attempted to reestablish the ancient identity between being and thought through his notion of an intentional consciousness: insofar as the intentionality of consciousness ensures that the transcendental ego always has its object before it, the happening phenomenon has been reduced to what can be apprehended of it. Intentionality ensures the reduction of the event to consciousness, thereby maintaining the identity of being and thought. Arendt writes: “As a conscious being I can conceive of all beings, and as consciousness I am, in my human mode, the Being of the world. (The seen tree, the tree as object of my consciousness, does not have to be the ‘real’ tree; it is in any case the real object of my consciousness.)” (WEP, 164–165). In addition to the rational enframing of the event, there is thus also a reduction of the event to a transcendental consciousness or subject, which keeps mastery of events through its constitutive power. Insofar as the transcendental subject objectifies phenomena under its gaze, events will be reduced to objects for my subjectivity. Thus, for Sartre, everything that happens, happens to me, and what happens to me happens through me. Sartre reduces the alterity and surprise of the event as it is immediately appropriated by the self in its responsible engagement. The event is immediately taken on by the subject. What happens to me happens through me because everything concerns me and because I am the one by whom the world takes on a meaning. When something happens in the world, I am called to respond and to answer for it: I am responsible for it. Any event becomes a call to my responsibility: I am engaged by the event. Even if a war is declared by another, “everything takes place as if I bore the entire responsibility for this war.”11 Everything that happens is mine, says Sartre, and nothing human is foreign to me: “By this we must understand first of all that I am always equal to what happens to me qua man, for what happens to a man through other men and through himself can only be human” (BN, 708). There is no nonhuman state of things, Sartre insists, which means there is no radical alterity in the world and 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 foreignness. Any event is immediately mine and taken over by my freedom, and there are no accidents 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 everything that seems to haunt and threaten it at every step, the accidents and events that happen to me from without, events of which I am not the cause. At this point, nothing is allowed to escape either the principle of reason or the constitutive powers of subjectivity.
It is at this juncture, where events seem to have been absorbed by reason and an appropriating subjectivity, that Arendt seeks to reawaken what she calls the “philosophical shock” (WEP, 165), the shock by which precisely thought realizes it is not in possession of its objects, but is rather exposed to an event that is irreducible to it: thought is exposed to an alterity that happens to it, which both interrupts it and sets it in motion. In fact, one also recalls here, paradoxically, Sartre’s rebellious cry against the dissolution of reality in consciousness in his short essay, “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology.” Rejecting the reduction of “a table, a rock, a house” to the contents of consciousness, rejecting what he calls a “digestive philosophy” that constantly attempts to trap things in its web, Sartre insisted that one cannot “dissolve” things in consciousness: “You see this tree, to be sure. But you see it just where it is: at the side of the road, in the midst of the dust, alone and writhing in the heat, eight miles from the Mediterranean coast. It could not enter into your consciousness, because it is not of the same nature as consciousness.”12 What appears here is the radical exteriority of the event to thought, which places thought in a state of shock. It is the very shock of which Deleuze speaks to account for the origin of thought. “Something must force thought, shocking it and drawing it into a search.”13 Thinking always begins from an event that comes from without: at the origin of thought there is not some rational principle, but an event, an accident, an encounter, a violent shock that calls on thought by its very outsideness. “Something must force thought”: not a “natural disposition” but rather “a fortuitous and contingent incitation derived from an encounter” (POE, 56). This encounter has no necessity, no reason: it is external, an event through which thought enters in relation with what does not depend from it. The relation between thought and its outside is contingent and cannot be derived from the connections it makes. As François Zourabichvili reminds us, for Deleuze it is a matter “of affirming the relation of exteriority that links thought to what it thinks” (POE, 51). The true beginning is an event that is “outside concept” (hors-concept), a concept now placed in relation with an outside that will always remain inappropriable for it. As Nancy explains, thought is not appropriative, not appropriation, not even inscription, but ex-scription,14 expropriated by the event.
This, indeed, is the challenge to reason: thinking is born from a contingent event, from chance, and is always “circumstantial,” dependent on events, that is, on an absolutely unnecessary phenomenon. “Thought is born of chance,” “relative to an event that happens unexpectedly to thought,” and therefore, “Whether it is a question of thinking or of living, it is always a matter of the encounter, the event, and therefore of the relation as exterior to its terms” (POE, 57). Thought is always in a state of crisis, Deleuze stating “that the act of thinking necessarily puts subjectivity into crisis, and that necessity, far from fulfilling the wishes of an already constituted thinking subject, can only be conquered in the state of a thought outside of itself, a thought that is absolutely powerful only at the extreme point of its powerlessness” (POE, 52). One encounters an event outside reason. The event of an encounter is not subject to the principle of sufficient reason: “An encounter is always inexplicable” (POE, 57). To think the event is to think such absolute inexplicability and contingency.15
The well-known paradigm of such encounter outside of reason is the case of friendship, as described by Michel de Montaigne between him and Étienne de La Boétie. “If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed except by answering: because it was he; because it was I” (Si on me presse de dire pourquoi je l’aimais, je sens que cela ne se peut exprimer qu’en répondant: parce que c’était lui; parce que c’était moi).16 As Marion comments, the event of this friendship occurs “all at once, without warning or anticipation, according to an arrival without expectation,”17 and without reason. The event of friendship is a fact (it “imposes itself”), a fact and a chance irreducible to reason. Therefore, no reasons will ever measure up to the fact of the encounter, to the chance happening of friendship. As Derrida puts it in The Politics of Friendship, “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,
