factical experience. This consideration by itself already constitutes a radical break with the Husserlian conception of reduction, which, by bracketing the natural attitude, claims to gain access to a pure field of phenomenological investigation. For Heidegger, because of its ontical foundation, ontology is marked by a constitutive “impurity.” By his emphasis on the facticity of constructive reduction, Heidegger points to (as early as in his early lectures on the hermeneutics of life) the limits of a conception of phenomenology that claims to gain access to a pure (transcendental) field. Rather, phenomenology is situated in a certain facticity. Furthermore, the very manner in which Heidegger defines this facticity, as the inescapable basis of phenomenological research, indicates a significant opposition to Husserlian phenomenology. “This commencement is obviously always determined by the factual experience of beings and the range of possibilities of experience that at any time are peculiar to a factual Dasein, and hence to the historical situation of a philosophical investigation” (GA 24, 30/22). Phenomenology no longer provides access to a pure field of essence, but is rooted in a factical and historical experience. Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggested that phenomenology is not to be construed as a philosophy of essences, but rather as a philosophy that situates itself in the facticity of existence and ultimately is about such facticity: “And yet phenomenology is also a philosophy that places essences back within existence and thinks that the only way to understand man and the world is by beginning from their ‘facticity.’”18 The young Heidegger explained that “a philosophical interpretation which has seen the main issue in philosophy, namely, facticity, is (insofar as it is genuine) factical and specifically philosophical-factical.”19 If it is the case that facticity is the very horizon of philosophizing, and is an irreducible phenomenon for philosophy, then facticity cannot be reduced, appropriately conceived through an intellectual operation or idealistic reduction. This emphasis on facticity severs the connection to any philosophy of essence. As such, the abandonment of such references to essence allows one to seize the phenomenon of being as a happening, as an event.
The motif of deconstruction, as it intervenes in Heidegger’s understanding of the concept of phenomenology, constitutes a break with any reference to a philosophy of essence or substance and opens the way for the emergence of a problematic of the event. Deconstructive phenomenology does not give access to a pure field of essences, but to being, which is precisely not a substance but instead happens. In fact, the three fundamental features of the phenomenological method (reduction, construction, deconstruction) reveal that phenomenology as such should be approached as a phenomenology of the event, in the following senses: (a) as reduction, it reveals that phenomenology is not simply about phenomena (things, entities), but about their being, that is, the event of their coming into presence. (b) As construction, it reveals that there is a domain that is specific to being as event and that a specific mode of thinking must be attuned to it, a thinking of being that is distinct from a thinking related to beings (one recalls here how Heidegger, in The Principle of Reason, often referred to the realm of being as being accessed only through a “leap,” a Satz in das Sein20). “Construction” designates a thinking of the event of being as such, always reached in a leap from the domain of entities, a leap that as it were is the site of the event. (c) Finally, deconstruction, as just alluded to, reveals how the event of presence is always caught in systems attempting to suppress it; further, it reveals the lack of essence (facticity) to which phenomenology is assigned. As such, being is not a substance that precisely never happens and only “remains the same” as constant presence but an event lacking any prior support or substrate. It becomes necessary to explore further and more concretely the connection between phenomenology and event and, indeed, the very notion of a phenomenology of the event.
Event and Phenomenology
Seized in its ownmost possibility, phenomenology may well prove to be a phenomenology of the event. In her article “Phenomenology of the Event: Waiting and Surprise” (PE), Françoise Dastur reveals the connection between phenomenology and event, indeed develops the resources to understand phenomenology as a phenomenology of the event. She first begins to challenge the tendency in contemporary thought to oppose phenomenology to a thinking of the event on account of the conceit that phenomenology would be a thinking of the present being while the event is not a being but instead simply happens, that is, passes and passes away. As Vladimir Jankélévitch wrote, “One doesn’t say that events are, nor that they are not, but only that they happen or occur, appear in disappearing, are born and die in the same instant . . .”21 This view is echoed by Jean-Luc Marion in Negative Certainties where, playing on the proximity between the French expressions passer (to pass) and se passer (to happen, literally: to pass of oneself), he stresses that the event “passes—and thus disappears, without subsisting, enduring, or persisting.”22 The event is not, but passes, and passes away (or perhaps also turns, as one speaks of a turn of events). Is the past not always what has passed, that is, a past event? On account of this understanding of the event as happening and passing, always “a supplement of being,” some commentators have argued that the event cannot belong to an ontology or, indeed, to a phenomenology taken to be a phenomenology of the present being.23
Jean-Luc Nancy explains that to the extent that the event is not a present being, that it is “not ‘presentable,’” it then necessarily “exceeds the resources of any phenomenology.”24 Yet he immediately adds, significantly, that “the phenomenological theme in general has never been more magnetized by anything else.” This suggests that even though the event can be seen as an excess to phenomenology, it nonetheless gives itself as what phenomenology may ultimately be concerned with. Dastur argues against those (she explicitly names Levinas and Derrida) who gesture toward a beyond of phenomenology in their attempt to give thought to the otherness of the other, for event and otherness inhabit phenomenology: “The question is not to oppose radically a thinking of being or essence to a thinking of the other or of the accident. Rather it is a matter of showing how a phenomenology of the event constitutes the most appropriate accomplishment of the phenomenological project. It is not the destitution or the impossibility of phenomenological discourse, as some thinkers of the radical exteriority of the Other—I mean Levinas, but also Derrida in his last writings—seem to believe” (PE, 183). On this account, phenomenology and thinking of the event are not to be opposed. “We should not oppose phenomenology and the thinking of the event. We should connect them; openness to phenomena must be identified with openness to unpredictability” (PE, 186). Let me explore this claim, which will lead to an understanding of how the event pertains to phenomenology, albeit as that which always interrupts and exceeds it.
Dastur begins her essay by recalling the predominantly essentialist tradition of Western philosophy, which, since Plato, has determined itself as a philosophy of substance that can only neutralize the event in its eventfulness, in its unpredictable and sudden occurrence. The question is: can philosophy—and in particular phenomenology—give thought and do justice to the eventfulness of the event? As Dastur asks from the outset: “Can philosophy account for the sudden happening and the factuality of the event if it is still traditionally defined, as it has been since Plato, as a thinking of the invariability and generality of essences?” (PE, 178). Several features of the event appear in this passage: first, it is made mention of the “sudden” character of the happening of the event, which connotes the unexpected surge of presence, discontinuous and interruptive, if not traumatic, breaking the “order of time” and introducing the new in the world. It is “sudden” as the event comes as a surprise, neither expected nor anticipated, not already belonging to an established thread or causal order. It is “sudden” as it constitutes a break or hiatus in temporality, in a radical experience of discontinuity. A further feature of the event is introduced with the notion of “factuality.” A “fact” stands in opposition to a reason or a cause: it is the presence of a pure “that,” without a reason or a why. An event does not happen via a reason or a rational procedure, but is simply a fact. Further, the event is contrasted with the “invariability” of essences. The event speaks of change, transformation, difference, becoming or “process,” of a time that is always, as Aristotle noted in Physics IV, only perceptible when a change has occurred.25 An event is always the happening
