An event is inseparable from the “each” of an “each time,” the scansion of what Nancy calls a “stroke of being” (BSP, 33), a singularity that is constitutive of the event. Through all of these motifs, one already can state that thinking the event will reveal its unsubstantial, “unessential,” or “accidental” character. There is no reference to an essence in an event, which is rather on the side of the “accident” of the “contingent.” The singularity, facticity, and discontinuity of the event point toward its radical contingency and its ungrounded character.
What is striking in this foray into the question of the event is how Dastur encounters and rephrases Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the extraconceptuality of existence. Dastur focuses her reflection on the notion of a “contingency of time”: “The question of time and of the contingency of time has always, as Edmund Husserl recalls at the beginning of his On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1991), constituted the most crucial problem for philosophy” (PE, 178). In what does this problem consist? In the difficulty of giving thought to a phenomenon (the event) that exceeds conceptual grasp and understanding, as if a thinking of the event were a thinking of what does not let itself be thought or comprehended: “This problem marks the limits of its [philosophy] enterprise of intellectual possession of the world. For time, which is, as Henri Bergson said, the stuff of which things are made, seems to escape conceptual understanding in a radical manner” (PE, 178). Echoing Hannah Arendt, Dastur posits that the event occurs outside conceptuality, breaking the pretensions of philosophy to imprison it in the thinkable. Thinking the event will amount to thinking this excess. Now, Dastur claims that this new way of thinking is phenomenology itself, against those who believe or claim to believe that in order to think the event one must leave phenomenology (or ontology) behind. “In taking this position I am arguing against those contemporary thinkers who have declared that the thinking of the event and the thinking of the other requires a mode of thinking other than the phenomenological one.” One may wonder: why appeal to phenomenology in the attempt to think the event? Because “there can be no thinking of the event which is not at the same time a thinking of phenomenality” (PE, 187). The following will explore this claim further.
The whole problem hinges on the question of the relation between time and change. Following Merleau-Ponty, one is invited to reject both the idealist and realist “solutions” to the problem of time, which consist in locating time either on the side of consciousness alone or on the contrary in the things themselves. Although a consciousness is required to perceive a succession between a before and an after (which is why one cannot place time in reality alone), time itself cannot be entirely encapsulated in consciousness alone, for precisely consciousness cannot embrace temporality as a whole, as it is “the essence of time to be incompletely present to consciousness, to remain incompletely constituted, as Husserl would say” (PE, 179). Consciousness cannot include time in its realm or dominate temporality, for although not entirely immersed in time, consciousness is nonetheless affected by the passage of time. Ultimately, what is decisive in this discussion is the recognition that time is not an accomplished reality that could be situated within a region of being, whether reality or consciousness. The “error” of both realism and idealism is to consider the different parts of time as already realized, either in the object or in the subject. However, time does not have the substantial completeness of a being. Rather, time “is a process which is always in becoming,” always “of the order of the process, the passage, and that which comes” (PE, 179), and thus, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, “never finished” (jamais chose faite). This is why neither realism nor idealism are adequate approaches to the problem of time: “Therefore realism (which immerses the subject in time to the point of destroying all possibility of a time-consciousness) and idealism (which places consciousness in a position of over-viewing a time which no longer proceeds), are both unable to clarify what they pretend to explain, that is, the relation of consciousness to time” (PE, 179). What is important to stress is the transitory character of time, its nonessentiality, or, as Dastur phrases it, “its non-being or non-essence, which is not, but proceeds” (PE, 179). In other words, what is important is to stress the eventful character of time.
This nonessentiality of becoming indeed marks the character of the happening of time. Time happens, and neither realism nor idealism can account for such eventfulness. “Philosophy cannot succeed in accounting for the passage of time when it takes the form of a simple realism or idealism” (PE, 179). That is because they both presuppose an accomplished reality when in fact such “reality” must be traced back to the event of its formation (and deformation), traced back to its happening and genesis. What matters is to recognize that time is not a given reality, but the happening of being, and this is what thought—phenomenology—must accommodate. More precisely, what thought must “welcome” is the eventful and discontinuous character of time. “This ‘true’ philosophy, which would be neither realist nor idealist, should be able to account for the discontinuity of time and for the fact that there are, for us, events” (PE, 179). At this juncture, phenomenology should assume its vocation as a phenomenology of the event. “Such a philosophy,” Dastur writes, “should be able to explain the discontinuity of time, or what we could name the structural eventness [éventualité
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