Thinking the Event. François Raffoul

       Introduction

      I.

      Engaging in the project of “thinking the event” consists in undertaking a philosophical inquiry into what constitutes an event as an event, its very eventfulness: not what happens, not why it happens, but that it happens, and what does “happening” mean. Not the eventum, what has happened, but the evenire, the sheer happening of what happens. However, at the outset of such a work, one is immediately confronted with the following obstacle: the event has traditionally been understood and neutralized within a philosophy of substance or essence, a metaphysics of causality, subjectivity, and reason—in a word, subjected to the demands of rational thought. An event is interpreted either as the accident of a substrate or substance, as the effect or deed of a subject or an agent, or else it is ordered and organized according to causality, if it is not included within fate or a rational order. In all instances, it answers to the demands of the principle of sufficient reason, which states that no event happens without a cause or a reason. In the words of Leibniz, the “great” principle of natural philosophy and key metaphysical principle of truth is “the principle of sufficient reason, namely, that nothing happens without a reason why it should be so rather than otherwise.”¹ Leibniz posits that events must conform to the principle of sufficient reason and that no event can occur without a reason or a ground: in fact, every event must be as it were prepared in advance to be the event that it is, conditioned by a determinant reason: “For the nature of things requires that every event should have beforehand its proper conditions, requirements and dispositions, the existence of which makes the sufficient reason of such an event.”² Such reason can be a cause, as the principle of sufficient reason merges with a “principle of causality,” which states that every event is caused to be the event that it is. Indeed, Leibniz includes in the principle of reason a principle of causality: “Nothing is without reason, or no effect is without a cause.”³ Although not every reason is a cause, every cause is a reason.

      Ultimately, as Heidegger demonstrates in his 1955–1956 lecture course, The Principle of Reason, the principle of reason self-deconstructs because it cannot apply to itself its own requirements without undermining itself: if the principle of reason states that everything that happens must have a reason, then what is the reason for the principle of reason? Does the principle of reason have a reason? “Indeed the principle of reason is, as a principle, not nothing. The principle is itself something. Therefore, according to what the principle itself tells us, it is the sort of thing that must have a reason. What is the reason for the principle of reason?” (GA 10, 17/PR, 11). Does the principle of reason have a reason? Nothing could be less certain. “Nihil est sine ratione. Nothing is without reason, says the principle of reason. Nothing—which means not even this principle of reason, certainly it least of all. It may then be that the principle of reason, that whereof it speaks, and this speaking itself do not belong within the jurisdiction of the principle of reason. To think this remains a grave burden. In short it means that the principle of reason is without reason. Said still more clearly: ‘Nothing without reason’—this, which is something, is without reason” (GA 10, 27/PR, 17, emphasis mine). One divines here how the principle of reason is caught in a circle (What is the reason of the principle of reason? What is the foundation of a foundation?) that will throw it into a self-deconstruction, that is, into the abyss of its own impossible foundation.

      Indeed, in order to be a ground, the ground must itself be without foundation and therefore groundless. This led Gilles Deleuze to speak of the paradoxical nature of the logic of grounding, of the “comical ungrounding” of the principle of reason: “But who still speaks of a foundation, when the logic of grounding or the principle of reason leads precisely to its own ‘ungrounding,’ comical and disappointing.”⁴ The principle of reason does collapse (“run aground”) at the very place of its impossible foundation, “there where,” as Derrida puts it in Rogues, “the Grund opens up onto the Abgrund, where giving reasons [rendre-raison] and giving an account [rendre-compte]—logon didonai or principium reddendae rationis—are threatened by or drawn into the abyss.”⁵ Heidegger revealed this self-deconstructive aspect of the principle of reason by following the logic of the question “why?”: “Whenever we pursue the ground/reason of a being, we ask: why? Cognition stalks this interrogative word from one reason to another. The ‘why’ allows no rest, offers no stop, gives no support” (GA 10, 185/PR, 126, my emphasis). The question “why?” seeking a foundation, in fact reveals an abyss, betraying that reason itself may lack a rational basis. Kant spoke of reason as a drive, a Trieb, of an “interest” of reason (Interesse der Vernunft), thereby pointing to a certain nonrational basis of reason, which led Derrida to ask: “The honor of reason—is that reason? Is honor reasonable or rational through and through? The very form of this question can be applied analogically to everything that evaluates, affirms, or prescribes reason: to prefer reason, is that rational or, and this is something else, reasonable? The value of reason, the desire for reason, the dignity of reason—are these rational? Do these have to do wholly with reason?” (R, 120). Is reason rational? Is the principle of reason rational? Does reason have a reason? These questions reveal the aporia harbored in the principle of reason.

      In fact, each time unpredictable and incalculable, an event always exceeds or “suspends”⁶ the demands of the principle of sufficient reason. As Jacques Derrida states, an event can only challenge the principle of sufficient reason “insofar as reason is limited to ‘giving an account’ (reddere rationem, logon didonai).” It is not a matter of complying with the demands of such reason rendering, but instead of not “denying or ignoring this unforeseeable and incalculable coming of the other.”⁷ No longer placed under the authority of the principle of sufficient reason, the event must be rethought as the incalculable and unpredictable arrival of what will always remain other—and thus inappropriable—for the one to whom it happens. In that sense, the event also comes as an excess in relation to the subject and can only “naturally take by surprise not only the addressee but also the subject to whom and by whom it is supposed to happen.”⁸ It would then be a matter, in order to give thought to the event in its eventfulness, of freeing the event from the demands of the principle of sufficient reason.

      A clarification is necessary at the outset: by the project of “thinking the event,” I do not mean the appropriation by thought of the event, under the authority of the principle of reason. Thinking here is not appropriative, not “in-scription,” but rather, as Jean-Luc Nancy calls it, “ex-scription.”⁹ The event remains outside of thought, “exscribed” in it. “Thinking the event” means to give thought to its very eventfulness, its sheer happening, which necessarily exceeds both reason and subjectivity. Indeed, one could say that the event, in its disruptive and unpredictable happening, exceeds both the concept and the anticipation of a subject. This is why a further obstacle in the attempt to think the event is the predominance of transcendental modes of thought, which claim to provide prior conditions of possibility for experience and for the occurrence of events. Indeed, it may well be the case that events are precisely eventful when not preorganized or prepared by some transcendental conditions, or anticipated by a transcendental subject, when they break or “pierce” the horizon provided by transcendental conditions. Not being made possible by a prior condition, the event, as Jean-Luc Nancy points out, “must not be the object of a programmatic and certain calculation. . . . It must be the possibility of the impossible (according to a logic used often by Derrida), it must know itself as such, that is to say, know that it happens also in the incalculable and the unassignable.”¹⁰ An event cannot be reduced to what can happen: it does not happen because it can happen, but rather happens without being made possible in advance and to that extent can be called “impossible,” Jean-Luc Marion

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