Each time, “being” is always a stroke or blow (un coup) of being. This could also be said in this way: the essence of being is the event. Being happens each time as a “stroke of being”: “a lash, blow, beating, shock, knock, an encounter, an access” (BSP, 33). The event of existence is and can only be singular: there is no “general” or continuous existence. Indeed, “each time” does not mean “always” and in fact indicates the interruption of any continuity. Any “constancy” is derived from the interruption of the event, from the succession of an “each time” that is not unlike what Merleau-Ponty wrote of time, which he compared it to a fountain whose renewed thrust can give the appearance of permanence: “We say that there is time as we say that there is a fountain: the water changes and the fountain remains, because the form is preserved; the form is preserved because each successive burst takes up the functions of the previous one.”35
I further explore how the event can be articulated in terms of possibility. Derrida stresses that any event must be structured around the possibility of a perhaps. “There is no event, to be sure, that is not preceded and followed by its own perhaps,” he writes.36 The perhaps or the maybe of the event is the primary and irreducible form of experience, the primary tense of being. This perhaps represents the most authentic sense of the event: “the thought of the ‘perhaps’ perhaps engages the only possible thought of the event” (PF, 29). This is indeed what Heidegger showed when he explained that Dasein’s being is its own possibility. “As a being, Dasein always defines itself in terms of a possibility which it is” (SZ, 43). Dasein is a being that never “is” what it is (as a present-at-hand being), but is instead approached in terms of an event that is in the process of happening. The event is tied to the possible, to the event of an existence that is each time “to be.” Nonetheless, I will in chapter 8 radicalize this thinking of the possible by showing how possibility needs to be located in an exposure to the “im-possible,” as if the possible was “possibilized” by the impossible. Indeed, a possibility that would be merely possible can only be a neutralization of the irruptive nature of the event. “For a possible that would only be possible (non-impossible), a possible surely and certainly possible, accessible in advance, would be a poor possible, a futureless possible, a possible already set aside, so to speak, life-assured” (PF, 29). Such a possible would not be eventful, but the predetermined realization of a prior plan or program. If the event must be approached first on the side of the possible, it must be recognized that the impossible proves to be the secret resource of the possible. “If all that arises is what is already possible, and so capable of being anticipated and expected, that is not an event. The event is possible only coming from the impossible” (PM, 74).
I pursue this thinking of the event of being in terms of a reflection on presence. As noted, Heidegger approaches being as an event, as the event of presence. Instead of supposing an underlying permanent substance and foundation, it is a matter of understanding being as the event of givenness (and withdrawal), as well as a letting. Indeed, “letting” is for Heidegger the “deepest meaning of being.” For an event happens of itself so that an event is never prepared, produced, or made, but precisely let be. To the letting of being corresponds the fundamental disposition of thinking as Gelassenheit, as letting-be. “Thinking the event” would mean here: letting . . . the letting, letting the letting be. Through a close reading of the 1962 lecture “On Time and Being” and other texts of that late period, such as Four Seminars, I engage Heidegger’s approach to being as event of presence (Anwesenheit) or presencing (Anwesen). What then appears is how the proper of time and the proper of being involve the event (Ereignis) of the givenness of the es gibt, that is to say, the event of being and time and the human being as recipient of such event. This is why in a last section, I show how the self happens in and though the event of being, a self that is no longer the substantial subject of the tradition, but the one who is the recipient of the event of being, happening through the happening of being. The thinking of being approached from the giving of Ereignis leads to a pure thinking of the event, that is, to the eventfulness of the event, an eventfulness that nonetheless always entails an irreducible expropriation.
In chapter 7, I explore such expropriation in the happening of the event in terms of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls a withdrawal of essence. This withdrawal is apparent in the fact that nothing preexists the event of being, no principle, arche, or prior substance. “Being absolutely does not preexist; nothing preexists; only what exists exists” (BSP, 29). To that extent, being is nothing but the event of itself and does not refer to any other instance than its own happening. The event is no longer anchored in a principle that itself would not be happening. Preceded by nothing and grounded in no essence, the event can only come as a surprise. Indeed, for Nancy, the surprise is not the mere accompanying aspect of an event, but its defining characteristic (“What makes the event an event is not only that it happens, but that it surprises,” BSP, 159), going so far as to write that “the event surprises or else it is not an event” (BSP, 167). The event cannot unfold predictably, following an essence, a direction, or some principle, but can only happen “by way of surprise” (BSP, 159). Thinking the event here would mean thinking the surprise, which immediately reverses into: thinking is surprised by the event; surprised, or, to follow literally the French, sur-prise: “over-taken.” Nancy writes that “philosophy is surprised thought” (BSP, 165).
I unfold this essencelessness of the event in terms of what Nancy calls the “creation of the world.” In spite of its theological provenance, the motif of “creation,” certainly used provocatively by Nancy,37 is to be taken in a radically nontheological way as a creation “without a creator.”38 In fact, creation is even characterized as the nodal point in a deconstruction of Christianity to the extent that it is a creation ex nihilo, a nothing in which God as author disappears. Nancy suggests that the God of ontotheology, in a peculiar kenosis or self-emptying, was “progressively stripped of the divine attributes of an independent existence and only retained those of the existence of the world considered in its immanence” (CW, 44). Creation, understood is a nontheological sense, is the mark of the event of the world: the world is not given, not resting on some prior principle of arche, but exists rigorously as the event of itself, as creation of itself. This is why Nancy clarifies that “the world is not given” and that, in fact, “the world is its own creation” (CW, 109).
In a third section, I explore this thinking of the event in terms of abandonment, which designates the unsubstantial character of an event as deprived of principles, ground and arche, a condition or rather “incondition” in which we find ourselves in the wake of the exhaustion of metaphysical principles and from which we are called to think. Nancy characterizes existence as abandonment and sheer exposure, a “leaving” or “abandonment” of any prior essence. It is “from an abandonment that being comes forth: we can say no more. There is no going back prior; being conveys nothing older than its abandonment.”39 The only ontology that remains, according to Nancy, is precisely no longer an ontotheology, but an ontology characterized by the feature of abandonment, that is, abandonment as the sole predicate of being. Abandonment must not only be understood as an abandonment by but also an abandonment to a law, Nancy clarifies. One finds here the motif of law and obligation intertwined with that of “abandoned being.” The event of being amounts to a being-obligated: to be is having to be, obligated and called to be. One can speak of a categorical imperative of the event of being: one must be! A certain dignity, or ethicality, is hence conferred to the event of being, which is always a call that one must answer.
Finally, I explore the extent to which this event of being is always—each time—the event of a coexistence, as for Nancy being rigorously means: being-with. Nancy approaches such being-with as an event in his rethinking of democracy, of what one may call the event of democracy. Nancy’s claim is that it is a matter of understanding democracy “metaphysically,” and not in its traditional exhausted sense as a political regime. “Democracy is first of all a metaphysics and only afterwards a politics.”40
