as a power of imagining, of invention, without subject or mastery and in excess of identity of any given form. Democracy is not only in excess of the political, it is also in excess of itself, that is, of its own idea, form, or concept, precisely to the extent that it is first of all an event, which, as seen with Arendt, always exceeds its own concept. Therein lies what Nancy calls the “inadequacy” of democracy, an inadequacy with respect to itself that Nancy refers to Derrida’s “democracy to come” in a perspective that combines the eventful character of democracy with its incompleteness and perfectibility. I argue that such incompletion or inadequation—indeed différance—must be also thought from the eventful character of democracy.
In chapter 8, I focus on the inappropriability of the event, a motif that has been a constant thread in the course of this work. As I have hoped to show, the event permeates every instance of being and existence to such an extent that to be means: to happen. And yet, it remains inappropriable, frustrating any attempt to reduce it to a present being or an identity. It only happens, in the flash of a disjointed, discontinuous, and anachronic temporality preventing any gathering in a present. The event has, as it were, the structure of the trace as Derrida describes it: “The trace is not a substance, a present existing thing, but a process that is changing all the time. It can only reinterpret itself and always, finally, it is carried away” (PM, 159). The event remains inappropriable, resistant to anticipation and even to comprehension, irreducible to reason. It “belongs to an atemporal temporality, to a duration that cannot be grasped: something one can neither stabilize, establish, grasp [prendre], apprehend, or comprehend. Understanding, common sense, and reason cannot seize [begreifen], conceive, understand, or mediate it.”41 As such, the event constitutes a challenge to reason and understanding: “The event is what comes and, in coming, comes to surprise me, to surprise and to suspend comprehension: the event is first of all that which I do not first of all comprehend. Better, the event is first of all that I do not comprehend. The fact that I do not comprehend: my incomprehension.”42 For Derrida, an event is always inappropriable. I discuss the presence of this inappropriable in terms of what Derrida calls the “secret” (note that the French secret translates in Derrida’s text Heidegger’s Geheimnis). Through the leitmotif repetition of the expression “il y a là un secret” or “il y a là du secret,” “there is something secret” (literally, there is there something secret), Derrida seeks to emphasize that it is first a matter of recalling, not what the secret would be, but rather that there is a secret at all; as if, through this shift from the “what” to the “that” of the secret, it was a matter of remembering, or removing from its necessary oblivion, the presence of a secret in the experience of the event.
I then engage Derrida’s thinking of the “im-possible” as it pertains to the event. Indeed, for Derrida, “only the impossible happens” (PM, 87). In what was to be his last appearance on television, in June 2004 with France 3, answering the question of the journalist who had asked him what deconstruction is, Derrida replied: “deconstruction is what happens [la déconstruction, c’est ce qui arrive],” and then he added: “that is to say, the impossible.” The impossible, he concluded, is “the only thing that happens [la seule chose qui arrive]”!43 This is no hyperbole, but a rigorous understanding of the intertwining between the possible and the impossible as it pertains to the event. “‘The impossible is what takes place.’ Madness. I am tempted to say of this utterance, itself impossible, that it touches on the very condition of thinking the event. There where the possible is all that happens, nothing happens, nothing that is not the impoverished unfurling or the predictable predicate of what finds itself already there, potentially, and thus produces nothing new, not even accidents worthy of the name ‘event’” (OT, 57). As I alluded to prior, the impossible becomes the secret resource of the possible and the condition of any event “worthy of the name.”
Finally, in a concluding chapter, I sketch the contours of an “ethics of the event” and how the happening of the event opens onto a welcome to what comes in the event, a saying yes to being overtaken and taken away by its secret. Here appear the thematics of a hospitality to the event. Throughout this work, it has been an issue of freeing the pure eventfulness of the event from the traditional attempts to neutralize it, whether through the demands of a principle of reason or through the position of a willful ego, of letting the event give itself. The happening of the event is the coming of the arrivant, an arrival that is welcomed by an original hospitality. Indeed, the ethics of the event, as I approach it here, is to be taken as an ethics of hospitality, a welcome of the event in its irruptive coming. I am, before the event, caught by surprise, and without resources, an absolute weakness before its happening. In fact, an event exposes the utter vulnerability of the one who is exposed to it, the powerlessness and radical passivity of the one to whom it happens. Derrida writes that the event “is there, before us, without us—there is someone, something, that happens, that happens to us, and that has no need of us to happen (to us). And this relation to the event or alterity, as well as to chance or the occasion, leaves us completely disarmed; and one has to be disarmed. The ‘has to’ says yes to the event: it is stronger than I am.”44 The ethics of the event would designate this vulnerability, this unconditional openness to the other. From such exposure to the otherness of the event, always happening from without, one understands better in what sense the event weighs on thought from the outside (how it exscribes it) and how thought is nothing but the thinking of this shock, in wonder before it, even if it means never being able to comprehend or appropriate it.
The Neutralization of the Event
In her 1946 essay “What Is Existential Philosophy?,”1 returning to the roots of existential philosophy, Hannah Arendt makes the radical claim that the event of existence is a phenomenon that takes place outside of thought. With that insight, which posits the exteriority of existence with respect to thought, a genuine thinking of the event in its eventfulness is made possible. This possibility is born out of a break with reason’s claims to encapsulate or enframe the real, which has been the dream of the entire philosophical tradition culminating with Hegel. Precisely commenting on Hegel’s system as an attempt to encompass the whole of reality in thought, Arendt writes: “With a comprehensiveness never achieved before him, Hegel provided a philosophical explanation for all the phenomena of nature and history and brought them together in a strangely unified whole.” In so doing, she continues, thought became a “prison for reality” (WEP, 164). The eventfulness of the event is thereby reduced to the demands of reason. Such attempt to reduce events to what thought can grasp is best represented, according to Arendt, in Hegel’s work, “the last word of all Western philosophy,” in the sense that it accomplishes the ancient identification of being and thought. In Hegel’s well-known expression in his preface to Elements of the Philosophy of Right, “what is rational is real, and what is real is rational (Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig).”2 Now, according to Arendt, the origin of existential philosophy is to be situated in the rupture with this postulate of an identity between being and thought. What those existential philosophers “were rebelling against, and despairing of,” she writes, “was philosophy itself, the postulated identity of thought and being” (WEP, 164). Whether in the form of materialisms or idealisms, whether by affirming the primacy of matter or on the contrary the primacy of the mind, all traditional systems of thought agree on this identity, and they all attempt “to re-establish the unity of thought and Being” (WEP, 164). Existential philosophy breaks with that supposed identity, through which the event is neutralized and made to conform to the form of thought.
Never has this neutralization of the event to thought appeared so clearly as in the reduction of events to causality in Kant’s theoretical philosophy. With Kant, one sees how events are conceived in terms of and on the basis of causality, how their independence
