the self, far from designating some substantial ego, itself must be understood as arising from an event. In that sense, the self as such is an event, coming to be as a response to the eventfulness of being. It will be necessary, in our understanding of the event, to think together the impersonality of the event with the arising and responding of a self, as if the es gibt was the site of an I to be, a self that is corresponding with an otherwise impersonal phenomenon. In this respect, one ought not to be too quick to set apart the impersonality of the event with the selfhood that is engaged by it. The event is impersonal, happens of itself, but it engages a self that consists precisely in the reception of such event, in which the I suffers the “shock” of the event. What is at stake here in the task of thinking the event is to reveal how the self itself is an event, happening, as it were, in and from the happening of being. The self cannot be presupposed as a pregiven or preconstituted subject but rather originates in and as an event.
This selfhood, however, is not appropriative, not synonymous with the possessive appropriation of otherness in an absolute “at-home,” since to be a self is to be exposed to an event that remains inappropriable for it. Derrida insists that the experience of the event is always that of an inappropriable: “The undergoing [l’épreuve] of the event, that which in the undergoing or in the ordeal at once opens itself up to and resists experience, is, it seems to me, a certain inappropriability of what comes or happens [ce qui arrive]” (PTT, 90, trans. slightly modified). For Arendt the event always remains outside of thought, happening from without, a pure “that” that no “what” can ever explain. This is why we will have to approach the event in terms of such inappropriability, an expropriation or “secret” to which we are exposed. Heidegger indicated the irreducible expropriation (Enteignis) at the heart of the event (Ereignis), going so far as to state: “Expropriation points towards what is most proper to the event.”28
II.
In chapter 1, I attempt to reconstitute the twisting free of the event from the demands of rational thought. I have indicated how the event has traditionally been understood within a philosophy of causality, subjectivity, and reason and how its eventfulness was neutralized by the postulate that events happen according to causality. In contrast with this tradition, which ultimately places the event under the requirements of the principle of sufficient reason, I follow the emergence of a thinking of the event after Kant (but in a sense already with Kant), drawing from Hannah Arendt’s 1946 essay “What Is Existential Philosophy?” Hannah Arendt argues that in the tradition the event of existence was neutralized by and reduced to the power of the concept, a project that culminates in Hegel’s work. Even in Husserlian phenomenology, the notion of an intentional consciousness establishes the reduction of the happening phenomenon to what a consciousness can transcendentally constitute: the event is not allowed to escape the constitutive powers of subjectivity. To think the event in its eventfulness will require a break with that reduction of being to thought, that is, with the postulated identity of being with thought in which the event is made to conform to the power of the concept and of consciousness.
Arendt evokes the “philosophical shock,” the very shock or wonder (thaumazein) that is at the origin of thinking and philosophy. The event happens outside of thought and remains inappropriable for it. This is, for instance, the shock of the resistance of singularity to conceptual generality. An event is each time singular, a singularity that interrupts the mastery of thought and the form of conceptuality. Derrida speaks of the event as “what comes to pass only once, only one time, a single time, a first and last time, in an always singular, unique, exceptional, irreplaceable, unforeseeable, and incalculable fashion” (R, 135). It is the shock of an event that does not occur within a pregiven structural whole, such as “the world,” but “pierces” its horizon. It is the shock of facticity in the face of thought, the “that” before the “what.” It is the shock of sheer existence before meaning. In each case, the event exceeds the form of the concept. I follow this freeing of the event from the power of the concept in Arendt’s reading of Kant, in particular in: (a) his account of synthetic judgments; (b) his refutation of the ontological proof of God’s existence; and (c) his notion of transcendental freedom.
I pursue in chapter 2 this emergence of the event outside of the dominance of causality and subjectivity by showing how for both Nietzsche and Heidegger, the event escapes the schemes of causality, subject or substrate, and reason. Two fundamental errors stand in the way of letting the event come forth in its eventfulness: the reliance on causality and the belief in the subject. With respect to causality, instead of the event following the cause, I suggest that the event is the original phenomenon. Events do not simply follow predetermined sequences. An event “worthy of the name” represents the surge of the new through which precisely it does not “follow” from a previous cause. A new understanding of temporality is here required: not a ruled sequence coming from the past to the present, but an eventful temporality, coming from the future, disrupting the causal networks, and transforming the entire complex of temporality, indeed transforming the past itself. Another conception of the event is called for, no longer anchored in a cause-substrate, but happening without ground.
This groundlessness of the event is revealed by Heidegger in his course, The Principle of Reason, in which he reflects on a principle that is precisely supposed to ground events: the principle of reason (der Satz vom Grund). As noted, it is paradoxically the very claim of the principle of reason, that is, that all events must be founded in reason, that turns out to be itself without reason and thus groundless. An abyss is here formed, which is the abyss (Ab-grund) of the ground that, in order to be the ground, must itself be without a ground. To the question of “why,” which asks for reasons and foundations, Heidegger opposes the “answer” of the because through his citing of the sixteenth-century poet and mystic Angelus Silesius:
The rose is without why: it blooms because it blooms,
It pays no attention to itself, asks not whether it is seen
The rose is without why, but blooms because it blooms. For Heidegger, that tautology, far from saying nothing, says everything, that is, the entire eventful facticity of the being: it happens as it happens. The event becomes the highest reason. The reason given is harbored entirely within the fact of the being, that is, within the being itself, “the fact of its being a rose or its rose-being [ihr Rose-sein]” (GA 10, 84/PR, 57, trans. slightly modified). We are asked to leave the why (the cause) for the because (the event). Heidegger cites Goethe, who wrote in his Collected Sayings from 1815: “How? When? and Where?—The gods remain mute! You stick to the because and ask not why?” (GA 10, 185/PR, 126). The because (weil) is, as ground, groundless. In contrast with the why, always in quest of foundations, the because remains groundless. “What does ‘because’ mean? It guards against investigating the ‘why,’ therefore, against investigating foundations. It balks at founding and getting to the bottom of something. For the ‘because’ is without ‘why,’ it has no ground, it is ground itself” (GA 10, 186/PR, 127). The event of being is groundless, without reason, without a why.
In chapter 3, I investigate the phenomenological senses of the event revealed by this dismantling—deconstruction—of the metaphysical categories of causality, subjectivity, and reason/ground. Once the event is no longer referred to the demands of the principle of reason, no longer anchored in a subject-cause, it becomes possible to let it give itself in its eventfulness, in the way it happens each time. “Thinking the event” would here mean not subjecting it to reason, but letting it be (especially if thinking itself is approached as a kind of letting, letting-be or Gelassenheit29), and indeed grasping phenomenality itself as an event. Following Heidegger in paragraph 7 of Being and Time, phenomenology is a bringing to light of the phenomenality of phenomena, that is, the event of their givenness. Phenomenology is concerned, not
