has opened the way for phenomenological and ontological interpretations of the event, which I propose to investigate in this work. A philosophy that no longer relies on a metaphysics of substance can begin to pay attention to how phenomena happen and can describe these events phenomenologically. Being itself no longer appears as the substantial or atemporal presence of the tradition but as the event of presence. Heidegger recognized that in the tradition being was indeed understood as presence, Anwesenheit. However, its proper eventfulness was neutralized in the reference to constant presence (beständige Anwesenheit), substantiality, Heidegger speaking of how in such tradition of substantiality the temporal meaning of Anwesenheit was “repressed” (abgedrängt).16 In fact, the very term Anwesenheit, presence, harbors the motion of an event: the an- in An-wesen or An-wesenheit suggests a movement from concealment to unconcealment, a coming into presence, in a word, an event of presence. This implies, in turn, a break with the model of constant presence, that is, with a kind of “stability” that suppresses the temporal happening in the phenomenon of presence. It is a matter of hearing again the temporal meaning of presence and breaking with the notion of a constant presence, that is, with the metaphysics of Vorhandendeit hat has governed the Western philosophical tradition.
Beginning with Nietzsche’s claim that the event exceeds causality and is not based on some substrate, I will attempt to develop a phenomenology of the event, giving thought to its very eventfulness. Nietzsche spoke of the radical unaccountability (groundlessness) of all things, of the radical innocence of life and becoming. No intention, no design, no author, no cause, and no agent direct the event of a life that happens in a tragic and innocent play. This innocence and unaccountability of all things captures the sense of the event as groundless play of existence. Further senses of the event emerge once the metaphysical constructs of reason, causality, and subjectivity are deconstructed: event as innocence of becoming, as excess (to reason and subjectivity), as impersonal happening, as groundless existence, as the very advent of the world, as the interruption of otherness, as the “impossible” itself, ultimately as the inappropriable coming into presence of being. To think the event will amount to consider these senses. In the end, as Nancy puts it, thinking the event, the surprise of the event or the event as surprise, will amount to thinking being surprised, or “over-taken” (sur-prise) by the event, for the event always exceeds thinking. The event is both the origin and the end of thought: it ends it in its claims to mastery while opening it to the infinite work of interpretation.
The task of thinking the event leads to the following questions: what constitutes an event as an event? What does “to happen” mean? How can one describe the phenomenon of the event? Is the event even a phenomenon, if it is the case that a phenomenon is what appears while an event seems to evade the presence of a present being and to be properly invisible? Is there a concept of an event, or, on the contrary, is an event not always extraconceptual? In her 1946 essay “What Is Existential Philosophy?,”17 returning to the roots of existential philosophy, Hannah Arendt makes the radical claim that existence happens outside of thought. With that insight, a genuine thinking of the event in its eventfulness is made possible. Hannah Arendt argues that in the tradition the event in its sheer happening was suppressed and neutralized, reduced to causality, thought, reason, essence, or the meaning posited by the human mind. In her words, the “that” was subjugated to the “what,” and existence reduced to a concept or an essence, thereby negating its eventfulness. However, Arendt insists forcefully, “the What will never be able to explain the That” (WEP, 167). The “what” and the “that” are not homogeneous; the event of existence is extraconceptual. This opens the way for encountering the event of being as such, no longer mediated by a reason or a concept. The event is irreducible to the powers of “com-prehension” of the concept. It is in this sense that Hannah Arendt refers to Jaspers’s “border situations”: whether death, guilt, fate, or chance, these events provoke thought and “drive us to philosophize,” not because they can be thought, but precisely because they cannot. Arendt indeed speaks of the essential failure of thought, the failure to capture in a concept the event of existence: “Philosophic thought can never get around the fact that reality cannot be resolved into what can be thought.” The event happens outside of thought and is irreducible to it. It is as if thought became the thought of its own impossibility, a thought of the aporia: what it has to think cannot be resolved into thought. The very purpose of philosophic thought is not to reduce the event but instead to “heighten . . . the intellectually irresolvable” (WEP, 185).
The event happens outside of thought, yet while happening to it. This is the true aporia (and secret resource) of thought: what it has to think lies outside of it, forever inappropriable. The origin of thought cannot be appropriated by thought: “If thinking necessarily fails to grasp its beginning, perhaps it is because the beginning does not depend upon thought.” Otherwise put, “Philosophy fails in its search for a first concept, because beginning does not depend on it” (POE, 56). The event is “outside the concept” (hors-concept), a concept now placed in relation to an outside that will always remain inappropriable for it. As Deleuze stresses, it is a matter of “affirming the relation of exteriority that links thought to what it thinks” (POE, 51). Thought does not begin from itself, but is the traumatized response to an event. Events are always traumatic. As Derrida writes, an event is traumatic or it is not an event: “What is a traumatic event? First of all, any event worthy of this name, even if it is a ‘happy’ event, has within it something that is traumatizing. An event always inflicts a wound in the everyday course of history, in the ordinary repetition and anticipation of all experience.”18 At the origin of thought there is a singular accident, a trauma, an encounter, a violent shock. As Deleuze puts it, “Truth depends on an encounter with something that forces us to think and to seek the truth. . . . It is the accident of the encounter that guarantees the necessity of what is thought” (cited in POE, 56). The relation between thought and the event is radically contingent. Indeed, an encounter is not accountable by reason, not subject to the principle of sufficient reason: “An encounter is always inexplicable” (POE, 57). To think the event is to think such absolute contingency.19 No reasons will ever measure up to the happening of the event. “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, the effectivity—actuality—of what comes to pass—for example, a friendship which will never be reduced to the desire or the potentiality of friendship.”20 Born from an accident, a contingent event, from chance, thinking is always “circumstantial,” event-based, an absolutely unnecessary phenomenon or occurrence. “Thought is born of chance” (POE, 57). When thought assumes its eventful origin, when it engages in “an authentic relation to the outside,” it gains its authentic vocation and “affirms the unforeseeable or the unexpected.” Now, the notion that philosophy is born out of an event that it does not control is “a shock to reason” in its quest for ultimate foundations. For “how is it supposed to find a foundation [assise] in that which defeats it, in the inexplicable or the aleatory?” The logic of foundation of the principle of reason leads to its very ungrounding, its “collapse” in an abyss. Thought “stands on a movable ground that it does not control, and thereby wins its necessity.” In the end, what transpires is that “we cannot give the reason for an event” (POE, 57) because the event occurs outside of thought.
One finds in Nietzsche’s work an attempt to think this outsideness of the event with respect to thought with his claim that the event happens both outside and before the cause. Nietzsche frees the event from both causality and the belief in a subject or substrate. According to him, one of the constitutive errors of the metaphysical tradition has been its reliance on causality, the imposition of causes on every existence, on every event, as their substratum. “We have created a world of causes, a world of wills, and a world of spirits. All happening is considered a doing, all doing is supposed to be the effect of a will; the world is understood as a multiplicity of doers; a doer or subject ‘was imputed to everything that happened.’”21 Metaphysics creates a doer distinct from the deed and inverses the relation between cause and effect through the imaginary position of a cause beneath the
