the event of its manifestation. Nonetheless, this distinction between the ontical and the ontological cannot be taken as a simple separation, for as will be seen, ontical phenomena, and indeed things, manifest ontological potency. In turn, being cannot happen without beings, even though being is not a being. I shall return to this issue as it pertains to a thinking of the event.
Phenomenology is rigorously approached as ontology, that is, as Heidegger understands it, in its “possibility.” Indeed, for Heidegger, phenomenology is not exclusively connected to the phenomenological movement founded by Husserl. This is how he presents the issue in this passage from Being and Time, beginning with an ambiguous homage to Husserl that is immediately followed by a distancing with his former mentor: “The following investigation would not have been possible if the ground had not been prepared by Edmund Husserl, with whose Logische Untersuchungen phenomenology first emerged. Our comments on the preliminary conception of phenomenology have shown that what is essential in it does not lie in its actuality as a philosophical ‘movement.’ Higher than actuality stands possibility. We can understand phenomenology only by seizing upon it as a possibility” (SZ, 38). He would also insist years later, in the seminar on the lecture “Time and Being,” that phenomenology does not represent “a particular school of philosophy” but must be understood as “something which permeates [waltet] every philosophy.”12 In “My Way to Phenomenology” (1963), Heidegger reiterates the same point: “And today? The age of phenomenological philosophy seems to be over. It is already taken as something past which is only recorded historically along with other schools of philosophy. But in what is most its own phenomenology is not a school. It is the possibility of thinking, at times changing and only thus persisting, of corresponding to the claim of what is to be thought” (GA 14, 101/TB, 82). Last, in a 1969 supplement to that 1963 text, Heidegger referred to the aforementioned passage of Being and Time: “In the sense of the last sentence, on can already read in Being and Time (1927) pp. 62–63: ‘its (phenomenology’s) essential character does not consist in being actual as a philosophical school. Higher than actuality stands possibility. The comprehension of phenomenology consists solely in grasping it as possibility’” (GA 14, 102/TB, 82).
Now, one might venture to suggest that to follow this injunction to take phenomenology to its most extreme possibility might lead to approaching it as a phenomenology of the event. This appears in the 1927 course where, as mentioned prior, Heidegger distinguishes three main elements in the conception of the phenomenological method: (a) the phenomenological reduction (Reduktion); (b) the phenomenological construction (Konstruktion); and (c) the phenomenological destruction (Destruktion). A brief reconstruction of each of these features will reveal their relevance to a thinking of the event.
(a) The expression “phenomenological reduction,” although borrowed from Husserl, is nonetheless understood very differently by Heidegger. As he clarifies from the outset: “We are thus adopting a central term of Husserl’s phenomenology in its literal wording, though not in its substantive intent” (GA 24, 29/21, emphasis mine). In fact, as early as the 1925 course Prolegomena to the History of the Concept of Time,13 Heidegger had already distanced himself from the Husserlian conception of reduction. In that course, he equates transcendental reduction with an abstraction (Absehen-von, Absehung), not only from the reality of consciousness, but also from the individuation of its lived experiences and ultimately from being itself: whether in the transcendental reduction, in which the question of the being of intentionality is not raised, or in the so-called eidetic reduction, in which the individuation (Vereinzelung) of experiences is bracketed, it is the question of the being of being that is not posed. Husserlian reduction is characterized by Heidegger as a forgetting of the question of being because Husserl’s project is marked by a prior orientation toward an absolute science of consciousness. “Husserl’s primary question is simply not concerned with the character of the being of consciousness. Rather, he is guided by the following concern: How can consciousness become the possible object of an absolute science? The primary concern which guides him is the idea of an absolute science” (GA 20, 147/107). In the final analysis, according to Heidegger, the very notion of a transcendental reduction is a fundamentally Cartesian undertaking: “This idea, that consciousness is to be the region of an absolute science, is not simply invented; it is the idea which has occupied modern philosophy ever since Descartes” (GA 20, 147/107). Consequently, the project of returning to pure consciousness, carried out through the various stages of the reduction, rests upon a subjectivist presupposition and can lay no claim to being an authentic phenomenological enterprise. “The elaboration of pure consciousness as the thematic field of phenomenology is not derived phenomenologically by going back to the matters themselves but by going back to a traditional idea of philosophy.”14 To that extent, as Heidegger is not afraid to affirm that Husserlian phenomenology is . . . “unphenomenological!” (GA 20, 178/128).
Nonetheless, Heidegger undertakes a positive reappropriation of the phenomenological reduction. In the context of a critical discussion of the epoché, Heidegger challenges the idea that the phenomenological bracketing of existence positing forecloses the very problematic of being. On the contrary, according to him, the “bracketing of the entity takes nothing away from the entity itself, nor does it purport to assume that the entity is not. This reversal of perspective [Umschaltung des Blickes] has rather the sense of making the being of the entity present.” Thus, “This phenomenological suspension [Auschaltung] of the transcendent thesis has but the sole function of making the entity present in regard to its being. The term ‘suspension’ is thus always misunderstood when it is thought that in suspending the thesis of existence and by doing so, phenomenological reflection simply has nothing more to do with the entity. Quite the contrary: in an extreme and unique way, what really is at issue now is the determination of the being of the very entity” (GA 20, 136/99). On this account, the reduction applied in the epoché no longer forecloses the ontological problematic, but on the contrary opens it up as such. The reduction is no longer situated between world and ego, transcendence and immanence, but first of all occurs within the ontological difference. Thus reappropriated, the phenomenological reduction is therefore nothing other than the manifestation of the ontological difference itself. It then becomes possible to include the reduction into the concept of the method of ontology. If, for Husserl, the reduction was a kind of leading-back (Rück-führung) of the gaze from the natural attitude to transcendental consciousness as constitutive of the world, for Heidegger the reduction is a return from beings to being. “We call this basic component of phenomenological method—the leading-back or reduction of investigative vision from a naively apprehended being to Being—phenomenological reduction” (GA 24, 29/21). The phenomenological reduction is “the leading of our vision from beings back to being [die Rückführung des Blickes von Seienden zum Sein]” (GA 24, 29/21). The reduction is a way into being: it allows a shift from entities to their being, that is, to their happening as such. Most important, a phenomenology of the event is made possible by Heidegger’s reinterpretation of the phenomenological reduction as a reduction of beings (what is present) to their being (the event of their presence).
(b) Now, the motif of reduction as revelatory of the ontological difference and of the possibility of seizing being as event is not the sole element in the “method of ontology.” The reduction is in fact a merely negative process. It constitutes a sort of “leading-away” (Abwendung) from beings, proceeding from a “negative methodological measure” (GA 24, 29/21). Beginning with beings (for ontology has an ontical basis: being is always the being of a being, it “belongs to the being”; GA 24, 22/17), the phenomenological gaze turns away from them, abstracts from them. Now, to be sure, this abstraction has its own necessity: in order to grasp a being in its being, one must begin by turning away from it. “Apprehension of being . . . always turns, at first and necessarily, to some being; but then, in a precise way, it is led away from that being and led back to its being” (GA 24, 28–29/21). This is why the reduction in the sense of a leading-away of the gaze must be “completed” by another, positive, element of the method, which Heidegger calls the phenomenological
