of the material basis of life and the idealization of an abstract principle, constructed after the fact, and mistakenly and retroactively posited as cause and origin. The inversion of cause and effect reflects the inversion of material existence into an ideality, an inversion that Nietzsche in turn would precisely seek to invert. Based on such inversion and abstraction, causality is made to play the role of the foundation of events. How does this happen? Through the imaginary position of a cause beneath the event, through the retroactive imputing of such cause to the event. Of course, and I will return to this question shortly, one needs to bear in mind that the doer as such is also a fiction and that in fact the very opposition between a doer and a deed is an error. This error itself rests upon what appears here as a retroactive attribution of a cause to an event by way of an inversion of temporality.
The error of causality pertains to this phenomenon of a retroactive assigning of the cause to the event, which Nietzsche describes as an inversion of temporality, an Umkehrung der Zeit. The focus of Nietzsche’s analysis bears on the peculiar temporality of cause assigning and the reversal of temporality that takes place in the process of an a posteriori imputation of a cause. Nietzsche calls this phenomenon the error of “false causality,” once again pointing to the invention of an imaginary causality to give an account of the event. This delusion lies in the retroactive assigning of a cause, presenting the paradoxical temporality of an after-the-fact (re)construction that is then posited as having existed before the event. “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 said to exist prior to the event, an occurrence that has now been given an intelligibility: “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, 33). As Nietzsche explains, the sensation then becomes part of “a whole little novel in which precisely the dreamer is the protagonist.” Everyone knows the experience in a dream when the dreamer hears a sound that then becomes included in the narrative in a causal way. What was first a sheer event, perceived outside any causal network, is then integrated in the dream and reconstructed as causal origin in the narration. The event has been reconstructed and is now said to be happening according to causality (one recalls here Kant’s analogies of experience, in which it is “deduced transcendentally” that events occur according to the law of causality). Of course, the cause was produced after the fact and then reinjected as that from which the event occurred. “The cannon shot shows up in a causal way, and time seems to flow backward. What comes later, the motivation, is experienced first, often with a hundred details that flash by like lightning; the shot follows. . . . What has happened? The representations generated by a certain state of affairs were misunderstood as the cause of this state of affairs” (TI, 33).
Now, one must invert this inversion of temporality and posit that the event happens before the cause. Only after something has happened can one begin to look for causes. That something happens is the original fact. In that sense, there is nothing before the event. This is why Claude Romano states, in Event and World: “Pure beginning from nothing, an event, in its an-archic bursting forth, is absolved from all antecedent causality,”8 or also: “An event has no cause, because it is its own origin” (EW, 42). It is traditionally admitted that events are determined by prior causes, and we saw how Kant insisted that “everything that happens presupposes a previous state, upon which it follows without exception according to a rule.”9 But do events simply follow predetermined sequences? If this was the case, would they still be events in the proper sense? Instead, there is the possibility of recognizing that 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 events because its occurrence has transformed the very context that existed and introduced a new one. Indeed, as Claude Romano explains, “an event is nothing other than this impersonal reconfiguration of my possibilities and of the world” (EW, 31). With the event, a new self and a new world come to be. Therefore, as Jean-Luc Marion writes, the event is disconnected from the cause, has no cause: “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.”10 The event in the proper sense exceeds causal orders, “any horizon of meaning and any prior condition. . . . It is a pure bursting forth from and in itself, unforeseeable in its radical novelty, and retrospectively establishing a rupture with the entire past” (EW, 42). A new understanding of temporality is here called for: not a ruled sequence unfolding from the past to the present, but a surge coming from the future, transforming the entire complex of temporality, and indeed transforming the past itself. Ultimately causality proves inadequate to the eventfulness of the event. Does the very eventfulness of the event not precisely point to a certain excess with respect to the enframing of causality? Can an event worthy of its name be even conditioned by a causality? Or should one not assume, as Jean-Luc Marion invites us to do, the excess of the event 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.”11
The event happens first. The cause is added after the fact. “In summa: an event is neither effected nor does it effect. Causa is a capacity to produce effects that has been super-added to the events” (WP, 296). There are no causes: the cause is added after the fact as an interpretation (Nietzsche speaks of an “interpretation by causality” as a “deception,” WP, 296) insofar as it is sought. The law of causality “has been projected by us into every event.” For Nietzsche, what he significantly calls the “drive to find causes” arises out of a need. Causality is not the order of things but a subjective quest, a subjective need. The drive to produce a cause arises out of a perception of a lack (lack of intelligibility, lack of understanding) that needs to be supplemented. In fact, the event manifests the lack of cause in such a way that we are driven to seek it at all costs: “It’s never enough for us just to determine the mere fact that we find ourselves in such and such a state: we admit this fact—become conscious of it only if we’ve given it some kind of motivation” (TI, 33). The cause itself is lacking. An event, in its eventfulness and givenness, is indeed happening devoid of a cause: it happens first, from and as itself. Phenomenologically, the event happens in a noncausal way, in an anarchic irruption disrupting any order (we recall here how Kant described freedom as rebellious to causality, as lawless), with a meaning that is either missing, partial, or delayed, still to come, en souffrance. The response to this “suffering” is the drive to find causes, or rather, causal interpretations. We never “find” actual causes (there are no such things), but invent causal (mis)interpretations, which ultimately are nothing but memories and mental associations with other past events. Causality is a remembering. “Memory, which comes into play in such cases without our knowing it, calls up earlier states of the same kind, and the causal interpretations that are rooted in them—but not their causation” (TI, 33). Nietzsche sees a lack of reason at the root of all our cause-seeking: “Most of our general feelings—every kind of inhibition, pressure, tension, and explosion in the play and counterplay of the organs, and in particular the state of the nervus sympaticus [sympathetic nervous system]—arouse our drive to find causes: we want to have a reason for feeling that we’re in such and such a state—a bad state or a good state” (TI, 33). It is not enough to simply stay with the fact that has occurred. What is lacking is a reason, a ground, a cause, for our existence and our feelings. What is felt is then nothing else than the groundlessness of existence itself, and a cause would provide a ground that could provisionally suture the lack. A cause then becomes the placeholder of a lack, the placeholder of a nothing.
