Thinking the Event. François Raffoul

happen without things “sheltering” it. With respect to thing and world, one can state that things become events by participating in a world that is never given but exists only as happening. “The world worlds,” Heidegger writes in “The Origin of the Work of Art.”³¹ This verbality of the world reveals that the world is not given but is an event that happens, each time, by way of things. This is shown in Being and Time, where Heidegger describes things, not as discrete, separate, individual entities, but as constitutive and formative of a world. Things that appear within the world are not first simply “present-at-hand” (vorhanden), as Heidegger calls them, but must be taken instead as “ready-to-hand” (zuhanden), that is, as participating in the event of the world. Further, Heidegger presents in Being and Time what could be called a “thingly self,” that is, a self that comes to itself from things, revealing that the event of selfhood is inscribed in things.

      Things are thus events. I analyze Heidegger’s rethinking of the thing in later texts, where it is precisely taken in its eventful and verbal sense. Heidegger seems to recognize that a thing is indeed properly an event, and to that extent, he offers a verbal form for the term, dingen, Das Dingen, at the risk of stretching the limits of language: the “thing things,” Das Ding dingt, the thing is a thing insofar as it “things.” As he puts it in the essay “The Thing”: “The jug presences [west] as a thing. The jug is the jug as a thing. But how does the thing presence? The thing things [Das Ding dingt].”³² The thing as noun becomes the thing as a verb: to thing, the “thinging” of the thing. The thing is neither the Roman res, nor the medieval ens, nor an object, and nor a present-at-hand entity. Rather, the thing is a thing insofar as it happens, that is, insofar as “it things”: “The presence of something present such as the jug comes into its own, appropriatively manifests and determines itself, only from the thinging of the thing” (GA 7, 179/PLT, 175). The being of the thing lies in its eventfulness, not in objective presence. This presencing of things is the way in which the thing harbors, shelters, the event of presence. There are no things prior to such thinging; rather, there is a thing insofar as there is “thinging.” Things are properly events, and this reveals in turn that events are “thingly.”

      In chapters 5 and 6, I explore the thematic of an “event of being” and how the event comes forth as the main feature of being. In the wake of the deconstruction of the categories of reason and causality that have in the tradition enframed and neutralized the event in its eventfulness, I noted how it became possible to do justice to the phenomenon of the event, indeed to grasp phenomenology itself as a phenomenology of the event. Now, according to Heidegger, the original phenomenon of phenomenology is being itself. Unlike his former mentor, Husserl, Heidegger does not define phenomenology in relation to consciousness but to the event of being. “With regard to its subject-matter, phenomenology is the science of the being of entities—ontology.”³³ Phenomenology is approached as the very method of ontology, and the phenomena are to be referred not to a constituting consciousness, but to the event of being as such. Now, if on the one hand phenomenology is to be recognized as a phenomenology of the event, and if on the other hand the distinctive original phenomenon of phenomenology is being as such, then it becomes possible to finally grasp being itself as event, as opposed to some substantial ground. Indeed, Heidegger develops a powerful thought of the event, seizing being itself as eventfulness and temporal happening, as presence and presencing. By approaching being in distinction from beings, and in particular in distinction from any reference to a supreme being, substrate, or substance (which in the ontotheological tradition had determined the meaning of being), Heidegger makes it possible to approach being as an event, away from the tradition of substantiality and the metaphysical categories of atemporal permanent presence. Levinas rightly underlined this fundamental contribution of Heidegger’s thought: namely, to have grasped being no longer as a noun, but as a verb. In one of his last classes taught at the Sorbonne, on November 17, 1975, he explained: “The most extraordinary thing that Heidegger brings us is a new sonority of the verb ‘to be’: precisely its verbal sonority. To be: not what is, but the verb, the ‘act’ of being.”³⁴ Heidegger understands being as event: being, as such, happens. In this way, it becomes clear that it is not necessary to go beyond being, beyond ontology, to think the event (as some allege), for being itself happens as an event.

      In chapter 5, I follow Heidegger’s critique of substantiality so as to reveal the eventfulness of being, which he approached in his early works as the proper motion or “unrest” (Unruhe) of “factical life.” Understanding being itself as event was made possible, first, by deconstructing the inadequate mode of substantiality, and further, by revealing the motion and eventfulness of historical life. I trace the retrieval of the eventfulness of life in Heidegger’s early work on history and in his thematization of “hermeneutical life,” which displays a motion or motility (Bewegtheit) that always involves a radical expropriation, which Heidegger names “ruinance.” I identify several features: (a) Being (which Heidegger approaches in these early texts terminologically as “life” and “factical life”) is not some substantial presence, but an event and a happening. (b) This event is irreducible and the ultimate phenomenon: it is not anchored in any other reality that itself would not be happening. (c) This event is marked by an expropriation or negativity, an expropriation or “ruinance” already identified in the thematic of the event occurring “outside” of thought. (d) To such event is assigned thought as the counter-event or response to its coming.

      In chapter 6, I pursue this thinking of the event of being by first developing its temporal dimension. In Heidegger’s early work, “factical life” (later renamed “Dasein”) is described in terms of a temporal singularity as each time its own (Jeweiligkeit). Dasein is each time the being it has to be. I elaborate this logic of the each, revealing key features of the event: singularity, discontinuity, and difference. In Being Singular Plural, Nancy insists on the singularity of being, understood in terms of the temporal givenness of an “each time,” suggesting that being itself happens “au coup par coup,” blow by blow, going so far as to claim that the essence of being is the stroke or the shock of the instant (le coup). 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