Читать книгу Thinking the Event - François Raffoul - Страница 13
ОглавлениеThe Concept of Phenomenology
The dismantling—deconstruction—of the metaphysical conceptual apparatus of causality, subjectivity, and reason, as it structured the traditional reduction and neutralization of the event, opens the way for a phenomenological investigation into the eventfulness of the event. Once the event is no longer referred to the demands of the principle of reason, no longer anchored in a subject-cause, and no longer ordered according to a causal order, it becomes possible to let it give itself to thinking, in its proper eventfulness. “Thinking the event” would here mean no longer subjecting the event to reason, but letting it be (in particular if thinking itself is approached as a kind of letting-be or Gelassenheit1), and in fact grasping phenomenality itself as event, if it is the case, as Françoise Dastur argues, that “there can be no thinking of the event which is not at the same time a thinking of phenomenality.”2 Phenomenality could then be rethought, no longer as objectivity, but as an eventful field. If thinking the event means to give thought to the being of the event, not to what happens, nor to why it happens, but to the fact that it happens, then an encounter with phenomenology becomes unavoidable. Indeed, Heidegger states in Being and Time that phenomena are never simply the given, but instead the event of givenness. This from the outset suggests that phenomenality is to be taken as an eventful phenomenality and phenomenology as a phenomenology of the event.
Are phenomena events in the proper sense? As just mentioned, a phenomenon, that is, the phenomenon with which phenomenology is concerned, cannot be reduced to an empirical intuition, an ontical given. In fact, Heidegger rejects explicitly the Kantian notion of an “empirical intuition” to designate the phenomenon with which phenomenology is concerned.3 The phenomenon cannot be reduced to the category of the given and is instead defined from the outset by Heidegger in paragraph 7 of Being and Time as an event, that is, the event of givenness. The phenomenon must be approached in its verbal sense as that which shows or manifests itself of itself and from itself: “Thus we must keep in mind that the expression ‘phenomenon’ signifies that which shows itself in itself, the manifest” (SZ, 28). The phenomenon is “the-showing-itself-in-itself (das Sich-an-ihm-selbst-zeigen)” (SZ, 31), which indicates that by phenomenon Heidegger means the verbal sense of an appearing, and not simply an appearance. The term phenomenon has its roots in the Greek verb phainestai and means “to appear,” “to show itself.” As a middle-voice construction of phaino, phainestai means to bring to light, to place in brightness, where something can become visible and manifest. Phainomenon, in the plural ta phainomena, derives from the verb phainô, which means to light up, to make visible. The word phaos-phôs, light, has the same root: the adverb phainomenôs means manifestly or visibly. A phenomenon is what appears, what shows itself.4 The phenomenon is approached by Heidegger in its verbal sense, that is, as that which shows or manifests itself of itself and from itself, and not simply as the ontical given or as the entity.
The term phenomenology is formed from two Greek words, phainomenon and logos. Phenomenology is a bringing to light of the phenomena in their original givenness, a legein, a “letting something be seen [sehen lassen]” (SZ, 34). (I note here again how the motif of letting, lassen, is inscribed in phenomenology itself and in fact is inherent in the givenness of the phenomenon proper. It will always be a matter of letting the phenomenon give itself, and not of making it appear or constituting it via the intentional powers of a subjectivity.) Now, if phenomenology is a “letting be seen,” then the phenomenon of phenomenology cannot be that which is simply apparent or manifest; the phenomenon, precisely as that which is to be made phenomenologically visible, must be approached as that which not show itself (while nonetheless belonging to what shows itself, for Heidegger also stresses that “‘behind’ the phenomena of phenomenology there is essentially nothing else,” SZ, 36): “What is it that must be called a ‘phenomenon’ in a distinctive sense? What is it that by its very essence is necessarily the theme whenever we exhibit something explicitly? Manifestly, it is something that proximally and for the most part does not show itself at all: it is something that lies hidden, in contrast to that which proximally and for the most part does show itself; but at the same time it is something that belongs to what thus shows itself, and it belongs to it so essentially as to constitute its meaning and its ground” (SZ, 35). Heidegger shows that the very concept of phenomenology, insofar as it is defined, as noted prior, as a “letting something be seen,” necessarily implies the withdrawal of the phenomenon. “And just because the phenomena are proximally and for the most part not given, there is need for phenomenology” (SZ, 36), Heidegger writes provocatively. Phenomenology, in its very essence, is thus a phenomenology of what does not appear, to refer to Heidegger’s characterization of the most authentic sense of phenomenology as a phenomenology of the inapparent (Phänomenologie des Unscheinbaren) in the 1973 Zähringen seminar. “We are here in the domain of the inapparent: presencing itself presences. . . . Thus understood, phenomenology is a path that leads away to come before . . . and it lets that before which it is led show itself. This phenomenology is a phenomenology of the inapparent.”5 The original phenomenon is what does not appear, not behind what appears (as if it was a noumenal reality), but in what appears. The original phenomenon is the inapparent.6
Now, for Heidegger, what does not appear in what appears is being: “Yet that which remains hidden in an egregious sense, or which relapses and gets covered up again, or which shows itself only ‘in disguise,’ is just not this entity or that, but rather the being of beings” (SZ, 38).7 The phenomenon in the authentic sense designates the being of entities, not the entity itself. With that claim, Heidegger severs the connection between the phenomenon and the ontic (although the ontic still retains the movement and eventfulness of being: a being is what it is only by virtue of being; it would not be a being otherwise and could not be present except for the movement of presence that brought it forth and that it manifests). The phenomenon is not simply the given, not the entity, but what does not appear in what appears, and which for that reason calls for and requires a phenomenology, Heidegger speaking in his course on Plato’s Sophist of “a constant struggle against the tendency to cover over residing at the heart of Dasein.”8 Since for Heidegger being is never a being or a thing, but the event of the coming into presence of such beings, one can already suspect that a phenomenon in the proper phenomenological sense means “event.”9 The task then becomes to understand phenomenology as a phenomenology of the event, which is the purpose of this chapter.
Let me first clarify the concept of phenomenology. At first, phenomenology can be understood as an approach that opposes the dogmatic constructions of theories that are detached from the primordial meaning of phenomena. The very idea of phenomenology is that of a return to the “things themselves”—to the phenomena—via a dismantling of artificial conceptual constructs that obstruct the original givenness of phenomena. In section 7 of Sein und Zeit, Heidegger explains: “The term ‘phenomenology’ expresses a maxim which can be formulated as ‘To the things themselves!’ It is opposed to all free-floating constructions [freischwebenden Konstruktionen],” that is, to all “accidental findings,” to conceptions which only seem to have been demonstrated . . . [and] to those pseudo-questions [Scheinfragen] which parade themselves as ‘problems,’ often for generations at a time” (SZ, 27–28). The full concept of phenomenology implies a twofold movement: on the one hand, a distancing from derivative conceptual constructions, and on the other, a positive inquiry into the being of the phenomenon. To this twofold aspect, Heidegger will add a third in the 1927 lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, where he distinguishes three fundamental features of phenomenology: reduction, construction, and destruction (Destruktion). We will see how these three features, as Heidegger defines them, open the way for an understanding of phenomenology as a phenomenology of the event.
In that 1927 course, Heidegger begins by defining phenomenology as the very method of ontology, allowing him to grasp the phenomena (in contrast with Husserl), not in relation to a constituting consciousness, but to the event of being as such. Indeed, Heidegger stresses that phenomenology is concerned about the being of phenomena, their modes of givenness, their happening. Unlike his former mentor, Heidegger defines phenomenology in relation to ontology, as giving us access to the being of beings. The opposition that Husserl established between phenomenology and ontology, or rather the “bracketing” of ontological themes in the transcendental phenomenological reduction, is a foreclosure of ontology that can be said to be rooted in the determination of phenomenology as a transcendental idealism, that is, in the subjection of phenomenology to a traditional (Cartesian) idea of philosophy. For Heidegger, on the contrary, as he already stated in Being and Time, ontology and phenomenology are not two distinct disciplines, for indeed phenomenology is the “way of access to the theme of ontology” (SZ, 35). Heidegger is very clear on this point: “With regard to its subject-matter, phenomenology is the science of the Being of entities—ontology” (SZ, 37). In turn, and most importantly, ontology itself “is only possible as phenomenology” (SZ, 35, modified). In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger defines phenomenology as an “a priori knowledge” of being.10 Phenomenology is that mode of knowledge that seeks to bring out the a priori structures of being and to that extent is distinct from all ontical sciences. If being appears as the a priori of beings, in the sense that it determines beings as beings, phenomenology “as a science of Being is fundamentally distinct in method from any other science” (GA 24, 28/20). These sciences are positive sciences, sciences of beings; phenomenology, for its part, is a “pure apprehension of Being” (GA 24, 28/19). It is an ontology.
Now, this ontological understanding of phenomenology will prove crucial for our thinking of the event, for the emphasis shifts from phenomena (things) to the being of these phenomena (their happening or eventfulness), from phenomena to phenomenality. As alluded to earlier, phenomenology consists in showing, not the appearance itself, but the event of its appearing. Jean-Luc Marion clarifies, “If in the realm of metaphysics it is a question of proving, in the phenomenological realm it is not a question of simply showing (since in this case apparition could still be the object of a gaze, therefore a mere appearance), but rather of letting apparition show itself in its appearance according to its appearing.”11 This is what Marion calls phenomenality or manifestation, which, I should note from the outset, is a self-manifestation, that is, not initiated by some agent or subject but happening from itself. “The privilege of appearing in its appearance is also named manifestation—manifestation of the thing starting from itself and as itself, privilege of rendering itself manifest, of making itself visible, of showing itself” (BG, 8). Phenomenology is turned toward the self-showing of the phenomenon as such, not to the appearance per se. It is turned toward the event of its manifestation. Nonetheless, this distinction between the ontical and the ontological cannot be taken as a simple separation, for as will be seen, ontical phenomena, and indeed things, manifest ontological potency. In turn, being cannot happen without beings, even though being is not a being. I shall return to this issue as it pertains to a thinking of the event.
Phenomenology is rigorously approached as ontology, that is, as Heidegger understands it, in its “possibility.” Indeed, for Heidegger, phenomenology is not exclusively connected to the phenomenological movement founded by Husserl. This is how he presents the issue in this passage from Being and Time, beginning with an ambiguous homage to Husserl that is immediately followed by a distancing with his former mentor: “The following investigation would not have been possible if the ground had not been prepared by Edmund Husserl, with whose Logische Untersuchungen phenomenology first emerged. Our comments on the preliminary conception of phenomenology have shown that what is essential in it does not lie in its actuality as a philosophical ‘movement.’ Higher than actuality stands possibility. We can understand phenomenology only by seizing upon it as a possibility” (SZ, 38). He would also insist years later, in the seminar on the lecture “Time and Being,” that phenomenology does not represent “a particular school of philosophy” but must be understood as “something which permeates [waltet] every philosophy.”12 In “My Way to Phenomenology” (1963), Heidegger reiterates the same point: “And today? The age of phenomenological philosophy seems to be over. It is already taken as something past which is only recorded historically along with other schools of philosophy. But in what is most its own phenomenology is not a school. It is the possibility of thinking, at times changing and only thus persisting, of corresponding to the claim of what is to be thought” (GA 14, 101/TB, 82). Last, in a 1969 supplement to that 1963 text, Heidegger referred to the aforementioned passage of Being and Time: “In the sense of the last sentence, on can already read in Being and Time (1927) pp. 62–63: ‘its (phenomenology’s) essential character does not consist in being actual as a philosophical school. Higher than actuality stands possibility. The comprehension of phenomenology consists solely in grasping it as possibility’” (GA 14, 102/TB, 82).
Now, one might venture to suggest that to follow this injunction to take phenomenology to its most extreme possibility might lead to approaching it as a phenomenology of the event. This appears in the 1927 course where, as mentioned prior, Heidegger distinguishes three main elements in the conception of the phenomenological method: (a) the phenomenological reduction (Reduktion); (b) the phenomenological construction (Konstruktion); and (c) the phenomenological destruction (Destruktion). A brief reconstruction of each of these features will reveal their relevance to a thinking of the event.
(a) The expression “phenomenological reduction,” although borrowed from Husserl, is nonetheless understood very differently by Heidegger. As he clarifies from the outset: “We are thus adopting a central term of Husserl’s phenomenology in its literal wording, though not in its substantive intent” (GA 24, 29/21, emphasis mine). In fact, as early as the 1925 course Prolegomena to the History of the Concept of Time,13 Heidegger had already distanced himself from the Husserlian conception of reduction. In that course, he equates transcendental reduction with an abstraction (Absehen-von, Absehung), not only from the reality of consciousness, but also from the individuation of its lived experiences and ultimately from being itself: whether in the transcendental reduction, in which the question of the being of intentionality is not raised, or in the so-called eidetic reduction, in which the individuation (Vereinzelung) of experiences is bracketed, it is the question of the being of being that is not posed. Husserlian reduction is characterized by Heidegger as a forgetting of the question of being because Husserl’s project is marked by a prior orientation toward an absolute science of consciousness. “Husserl’s primary question is simply not concerned with the character of the being of consciousness. Rather, he is guided by the following concern: How can consciousness become the possible object of an absolute science? The primary concern which guides him is the idea of an absolute science” (GA 20, 147/107). In the final analysis, according to Heidegger, the very notion of a transcendental reduction is a fundamentally Cartesian undertaking: “This idea, that consciousness is to be the region of an absolute science, is not simply invented; it is the idea which has occupied modern philosophy ever since Descartes” (GA 20, 147/107). Consequently, the project of returning to pure consciousness, carried out through the various stages of the reduction, rests upon a subjectivist presupposition and can lay no claim to being an authentic phenomenological enterprise. “The elaboration of pure consciousness as the thematic field of phenomenology is not derived phenomenologically by going back to the matters themselves but by going back to a traditional idea of philosophy.”14 To that extent, as Heidegger is not afraid to affirm that Husserlian phenomenology is . . . “unphenomenological!” (GA 20, 178/128).
Nonetheless, Heidegger undertakes a positive reappropriation of the phenomenological reduction. In the context of a critical discussion of the epoché, Heidegger challenges the idea that the phenomenological bracketing of existence positing forecloses the very problematic of being. On the contrary, according to him, the “bracketing of the entity takes nothing away from the entity itself, nor does it purport to assume that the entity is not. This reversal of perspective [Umschaltung des Blickes] has rather the sense of making the being of the entity present.” Thus, “This phenomenological suspension [Auschaltung] of the transcendent thesis has but the sole function of making the entity present in regard to its being. The term ‘suspension’ is thus always misunderstood when it is thought that in suspending the thesis of existence and by doing so, phenomenological reflection simply has nothing more to do with the entity. Quite the contrary: in an extreme and unique way, what really is at issue now is the determination of the being of the very entity” (GA 20, 136/99). On this account, the reduction applied in the epoché no longer forecloses the ontological problematic, but on the contrary opens it up as such. The reduction is no longer situated between world and ego, transcendence and immanence, but first of all occurs within the ontological difference. Thus reappropriated, the phenomenological reduction is therefore nothing other than the manifestation of the ontological difference itself. It then becomes possible to include the reduction into the concept of the method of ontology. If, for Husserl, the reduction was a kind of leading-back (Rück-führung) of the gaze from the natural attitude to transcendental consciousness as constitutive of the world, for Heidegger the reduction is a return from beings to being. “We call this basic component of phenomenological method—the leading-back or reduction of investigative vision from a naively apprehended being to Being—phenomenological reduction” (GA 24, 29/21). The phenomenological reduction is “the leading of our vision from beings back to being [die Rückführung des Blickes von Seienden zum Sein]” (GA 24, 29/21). The reduction is a way into being: it allows a shift from entities to their being, that is, to their happening as such. Most important, a phenomenology of the event is made possible by Heidegger’s reinterpretation of the phenomenological reduction as a reduction of beings (what is present) to their being (the event of their presence).
(b) Now, the motif of reduction as revelatory of the ontological difference and of the possibility of seizing being as event is not the sole element in the “method of ontology.” The reduction is in fact a merely negative process. It constitutes a sort of “leading-away” (Abwendung) from beings, proceeding from a “negative methodological measure” (GA 24, 29/21). Beginning with beings (for ontology has an ontical basis: being is always the being of a being, it “belongs to the being”; GA 24, 22/17), the phenomenological gaze turns away from them, abstracts from them. Now, to be sure, this abstraction has its own necessity: in order to grasp a being in its being, one must begin by turning away from it. “Apprehension of being . . . always turns, at first and necessarily, to some being; but then, in a precise way, it is led away from that being and led back to its being” (GA 24, 28–29/21). This is why the reduction in the sense of a leading-away of the gaze must be “completed” by another, positive, element of the method, which Heidegger calls the phenomenological construction. In the phenomenological construction, a positive approach to the event of being as such becomes possible. The phenomenological method must positively manifest the being of beings, not as the mere positive “counter-part” of the reduction, but more radically as what was always implied by the reduction. The “leading-back” [Rückführung] of the gaze, Heidegger explains, “expressly requires us to be led toward [Hinführung] Being; it thus requires guidance [Leitung]” (GA 24, 29/21). Heidegger calls this “positive” determination of the method “phenomenological construction.” The term construction may be deceptive in light of the opposition of phenomenology to any “conceptual construction.” Indeed, Heidegger generally reserves this term to designate the dogmatic and artificial constructs of theories that conceal the primordial meaning of phenomena, of “the things themselves.”15 In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, however, this term is intended positively as the active elucidation of the structure of being [Seinsverfassung], the anticipatory projection of the being of a being in understanding. In fact, already in Sein und Zeit, Heidegger had evoked the task of a “phenomenological construction [phänomenologischen Konstruktion]” of the existential constitution of historicity, adding to the term construction an explanatory note: “projection” (SZ, 375). Let me explain this term: in section 42 of Being and Time, Heidegger designates the structure of care as an “ontological construction [ontologische Konstruktion],” one that is precisely opposed to “a mere fabrication” (SZ, 197). Indeed, being is not accessible as a being, it cannot be “found” somewhere, like a thing or an immediate given; it must rather give rise to a particular access, a specific and positive understanding, an understanding projection. As defined in Sein und Zeit, understanding essentially has the character of a project, or better, projection. Being must in some sense be “projected,” brought into view, that is, “constructed,” Heidegger explaining for instance that the question of the meaning of being must be “constructed” (gestellt; SZ, 5, trans. slightly modified). More precisely, beings are projected (constructed) in terms of their being. To construct in this context means to manifest being primordially. As one reads in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics: “But construction here does not mean: free-floating thinking-out of something. It is instead a projecting in which the preliminary guidance as well as the taking-off of the projection [der Absprung des Entwurfs] must be predetermined and protected. . . . The fundamental-ontological construction is distinguished by the fact that it should expose the inner possibility of something which, precisely as what is best known, thoroughly masters all Dasein.”16 The phenomenological method, taken in the sense of an a priori knowledge of being, now has a positive meaning; it is an act of construction, that is, a making-manifest of the being of beings. It is a matter of “constructing” the being of beings, of revealing its eventfulness.
(c) The conceptual interpretation of being and its structures, the “reductive construction,” does not yet exhaust the meaning of the phenomenological method. One further element is necessary, for the structures of the being of beings are not accessible in some kind of immediate clarity and are not presented to some pure, contemplative, and in that sense abstract gaze. As noted, the event is caught in epistemological and metaphysical concepts that neutralize its eventfulness. Everything takes place as if such eventfulness was covered over by the metaphysical categories of cause, subject, and substance, as if the eventfulness of the event did not appear but remain concealed behind an inadequate metaphysics of foundation, reason, and substantiality. Indeed, Heidegger stresses that Dasein’s self-interpretation is inscribed in a certain conceptual heritage that structures it and provides it with its categories and its modes of apprehension. In paragraph 6 of Being and Time, where he defines his project as a “destruction of the history of ontology,” Heidegger emphasizes that any understanding of being—above all, any preunderstanding of being that is specific to Dasein—remains in a certain tradition due to the essential historicality of that entity. Dasein is an entity that cannot be explicated except through its own historicality. Dasein always understands itself from within an inherited tradition in which it has “grown up.” “Whatever the way of Being it may have at the time, and thus with whatever understanding of Being it may possess, Dasein has grown up into and in a traditional way of interpreting itself: in terms of this it understands itself proximally, and, within a certain range, constantly” (SZ, 20). This is why the question of the meaning of being is a historical question: the “question [of the meaning of being] thus brings itself to the point where it understands itself as historiological [historisch]” (SZ, 21). To raise the question of being implies engaging one’s own tradition. Dasein’s relation to the tradition, however, is far from transparent. On the contrary, tradition withholds from delivering its content to Dasein’s everyday being. Or, rather, it delivers it only as a “result,” that is, through the covering over in “self-evidence” (SZ, 21) of the primordial sources of the categories that have been handed down. The tradition is described by Heidegger as an obstacle (it “blocks our access to those primordial ‘sources’ from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have in part been quite genuinely drawn”; SZ, 21, emphasis mine), as an uprooting (“Dasein has had its historicality so thoroughly uprooted by tradition that it confines its interests to the multiformity of possible types, directions, and standpoints of philosophical activity in the most exotic and alien of cultures; and by this very interest it seeks to veil the fact that it has no ground [Bodenlosigkeit] of its own to stand on”; SZ, 21, emphasis mine), and as an obliteration or omission of the origin (“Indeed [the tradition] makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and it makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand”; SZ, 21). Tradition is described as a concealment of origins.
This situation reveals that the access to the event of being (and to the being of the event) requires a deconstructive passage through an inauthentic tradition. A thinking of the event will never go without a deconstruction of the obstacles that obstruct its eventfulness. “If the question of being is to have its own history made transparent, then this hardened tradition must be loosened up, and the concealments which it has brought about must be dissolved. We understand this task as one in which by taking the question of being as our clue, we are to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of being—the ways which have guided us ever since” (SZ, 22). In this sense, the inquiry aims “to go back to the past in a positive manner and make it productively its own” (SZ, 21), but this reappropriation of the ontological grounds will take the form of a deconstruction (Destruktion) of an improper tradition. Deconstruction must be integrated into the concept of method of phenomenology. This is why Heidegger adds to the reductive construction a destruction. “Construction in philosophy,” Heidegger explains, “is necessarily deconstruction [Konstruktion der Philosophie ist notwendig Destruktion]” (GA 24, 31/23, trans. modified). A thinking of the event of being must assume its deconstructive character. “There necessarily belongs to the conceptual interpretation of being and its structures, that is, to the reductive construction of being, a destruction. . . . Only by means of this destruction can ontology fully assure itself in a philosophical way of the genuine character of its concepts” (GA 24, 31/22–23). Destruction should be taken, literally, as a dis-obstruction or dismantling of what obstructs phenomenological vision and thus cannot be identified with a destruction or negative undertaking. It represents rather a positive reappropriation of the tradition since it returns to the sources of the concepts handed down by this tradition. “Construction in philosophy is necessarily destruction, that is to say, a de-construction of traditional concepts carried out in a historical recursion to the tradition. And this is not a negation of the tradition or a condemnation of it as worthless; quite the reverse, it signifies precisely a positive appropriation of tradition” (GA 24, 31/23).17
Further, deconstruction manifests the historicity and facticity of being. This facticity is apparent in the context of the phenomenological method’s “starting point,” which, as noted, “begins” with beings in order to reach, by an “aversive” movement, their being. The peculiar genesis of this movement, its “impure” beginnings, so to speak, inescapably affects the concept of being that is sought with a certain nonessentiality. The starting point is “obviously always determined by the factual experience of beings” (GA 24, 30/22), and phenomenological research, too, is “determined” (GA 24, 31/22) by this factical experience. This consideration by itself already constitutes a radical break with the Husserlian conception of reduction, which, by bracketing the natural attitude, claims to gain access to a pure field of phenomenological investigation. For Heidegger, because of its ontical foundation, ontology is marked by a constitutive “impurity.” By his emphasis on the facticity of constructive reduction, Heidegger points to (as early as in his early lectures on the hermeneutics of life) the limits of a conception of phenomenology that claims to gain access to a pure (transcendental) field. Rather, phenomenology is situated in a certain facticity. Furthermore, the very manner in which Heidegger defines this facticity, as the inescapable basis of phenomenological research, indicates a significant opposition to Husserlian phenomenology. “This commencement is obviously always determined by the factual experience of beings and the range of possibilities of experience that at any time are peculiar to a factual Dasein, and hence to the historical situation of a philosophical investigation” (GA 24, 30/22). Phenomenology no longer provides access to a pure field of essence, but is rooted in a factical and historical experience. Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggested that phenomenology is not to be construed as a philosophy of essences, but rather as a philosophy that situates itself in the facticity of existence and ultimately is about such facticity: “And yet phenomenology is also a philosophy that places essences back within existence and thinks that the only way to understand man and the world is by beginning from their ‘facticity.’”18 The young Heidegger explained that “a philosophical interpretation which has seen the main issue in philosophy, namely, facticity, is (insofar as it is genuine) factical and specifically philosophical-factical.”19 If it is the case that facticity is the very horizon of philosophizing, and is an irreducible phenomenon for philosophy, then facticity cannot be reduced, appropriately conceived through an intellectual operation or idealistic reduction. This emphasis on facticity severs the connection to any philosophy of essence. As such, the abandonment of such references to essence allows one to seize the phenomenon of being as a happening, as an event.
The motif of deconstruction, as it intervenes in Heidegger’s understanding of the concept of phenomenology, constitutes a break with any reference to a philosophy of essence or substance and opens the way for the emergence of a problematic of the event. Deconstructive phenomenology does not give access to a pure field of essences, but to being, which is precisely not a substance but instead happens. In fact, the three fundamental features of the phenomenological method (reduction, construction, deconstruction) reveal that phenomenology as such should be approached as a phenomenology of the event, in the following senses: (a) as reduction, it reveals that phenomenology is not simply about phenomena (things, entities), but about their being, that is, the event of their coming into presence. (b) As construction, it reveals that there is a domain that is specific to being as event and that a specific mode of thinking must be attuned to it, a thinking of being that is distinct from a thinking related to beings (one recalls here how Heidegger, in The Principle of Reason, often referred to the realm of being as being accessed only through a “leap,” a Satz in das Sein20). “Construction” designates a thinking of the event of being as such, always reached in a leap from the domain of entities, a leap that as it were is the site of the event. (c) Finally, deconstruction, as just alluded to, reveals how the event of presence is always caught in systems attempting to suppress it; further, it reveals the lack of essence (facticity) to which phenomenology is assigned. As such, being is not a substance that precisely never happens and only “remains the same” as constant presence but an event lacking any prior support or substrate. It becomes necessary to explore further and more concretely the connection between phenomenology and event and, indeed, the very notion of a phenomenology of the event.
Event and Phenomenology
Seized in its ownmost possibility, phenomenology may well prove to be a phenomenology of the event. In her article “Phenomenology of the Event: Waiting and Surprise” (PE), Françoise Dastur reveals the connection between phenomenology and event, indeed develops the resources to understand phenomenology as a phenomenology of the event. She first begins to challenge the tendency in contemporary thought to oppose phenomenology to a thinking of the event on account of the conceit that phenomenology would be a thinking of the present being while the event is not a being but instead simply happens, that is, passes and passes away. As Vladimir Jankélévitch wrote, “One doesn’t say that events are, nor that they are not, but only that they happen or occur, appear in disappearing, are born and die in the same instant . . .”21 This view is echoed by Jean-Luc Marion in Negative Certainties where, playing on the proximity between the French expressions passer (to pass) and se passer (to happen, literally: to pass of oneself), he stresses that the event “passes—and thus disappears, without subsisting, enduring, or persisting.”22 The event is not, but passes, and passes away (or perhaps also turns, as one speaks of a turn of events). Is the past not always what has passed, that is, a past event? On account of this understanding of the event as happening and passing, always “a supplement of being,” some commentators have argued that the event cannot belong to an ontology or, indeed, to a phenomenology taken to be a phenomenology of the present being.23
Jean-Luc Nancy explains that to the extent that the event is not a present being, that it is “not ‘presentable,’” it then necessarily “exceeds the resources of any phenomenology.”24 Yet he immediately adds, significantly, that “the phenomenological theme in general has never been more magnetized by anything else.” This suggests that even though the event can be seen as an excess to phenomenology, it nonetheless gives itself as what phenomenology may ultimately be concerned with. Dastur argues against those (she explicitly names Levinas and Derrida) who gesture toward a beyond of phenomenology in their attempt to give thought to the otherness of the other, for event and otherness inhabit phenomenology: “The question is not to oppose radically a thinking of being or essence to a thinking of the other or of the accident. Rather it is a matter of showing how a phenomenology of the event constitutes the most appropriate accomplishment of the phenomenological project. It is not the destitution or the impossibility of phenomenological discourse, as some thinkers of the radical exteriority of the Other—I mean Levinas, but also Derrida in his last writings—seem to believe” (PE, 183). On this account, phenomenology and thinking of the event are not to be opposed. “We should not oppose phenomenology and the thinking of the event. We should connect them; openness to phenomena must be identified with openness to unpredictability” (PE, 186). Let me explore this claim, which will lead to an understanding of how the event pertains to phenomenology, albeit as that which always interrupts and exceeds it.
Dastur begins her essay by recalling the predominantly essentialist tradition of Western philosophy, which, since Plato, has determined itself as a philosophy of substance that can only neutralize the event in its eventfulness, in its unpredictable and sudden occurrence. The question is: can philosophy—and in particular phenomenology—give thought and do justice to the eventfulness of the event? As Dastur asks from the outset: “Can philosophy account for the sudden happening and the factuality of the event if it is still traditionally defined, as it has been since Plato, as a thinking of the invariability and generality of essences?” (PE, 178). Several features of the event appear in this passage: first, it is made mention of the “sudden” character of the happening of the event, which connotes the unexpected surge of presence, discontinuous and interruptive, if not traumatic, breaking the “order of time” and introducing the new in the world. It is “sudden” as the event comes as a surprise, neither expected nor anticipated, not already belonging to an established thread or causal order. It is “sudden” as it constitutes a break or hiatus in temporality, in a radical experience of discontinuity. A further feature of the event is introduced with the notion of “factuality.” A “fact” stands in opposition to a reason or a cause: it is the presence of a pure “that,” without a reason or a why. An event does not happen via a reason or a rational procedure, but is simply a fact. Further, the event is contrasted with the “invariability” of essences. The event speaks of change, transformation, difference, becoming or “process,” of a time that is always, as Aristotle noted in Physics IV, only perceptible when a change has occurred.25 An event is always the happening of a change, of an otherness. In turn, such change constitutes the event of temporality: it does not take place within an already established order of time, but indeed constitutes an original, eventful temporality. Finally, Dastur also points to another feature of the event, namely its singularity. An event is always singular: just as there is no “general” existence, there are no “general” events. An event is inseparable from the “each” of an “each time,” the scansion of what Nancy calls a “stroke of being” (BSP, 33), a singularity that is constitutive of the event. Through all of these motifs, one already can state that thinking the event will reveal its unsubstantial, “unessential,” or “accidental” character. There is no reference to an essence in an event, which is rather on the side of the “accident” of the “contingent.” The singularity, facticity, and discontinuity of the event point toward its radical contingency and its ungrounded character.
What is striking in this foray into the question of the event is how Dastur encounters and rephrases Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the extraconceptuality of existence. Dastur focuses her reflection on the notion of a “contingency of time”: “The question of time and of the contingency of time has always, as Edmund Husserl recalls at the beginning of his On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1991), constituted the most crucial problem for philosophy” (PE, 178). In what does this problem consist? In the difficulty of giving thought to a phenomenon (the event) that exceeds conceptual grasp and understanding, as if a thinking of the event were a thinking of what does not let itself be thought or comprehended: “This problem marks the limits of its [philosophy] enterprise of intellectual possession of the world. For time, which is, as Henri Bergson said, the stuff of which things are made, seems to escape conceptual understanding in a radical manner” (PE, 178). Echoing Hannah Arendt, Dastur posits that the event occurs outside conceptuality, breaking the pretensions of philosophy to imprison it in the thinkable. Thinking the event will amount to thinking this excess. Now, Dastur claims that this new way of thinking is phenomenology itself, against those who believe or claim to believe that in order to think the event one must leave phenomenology (or ontology) behind. “In taking this position I am arguing against those contemporary thinkers who have declared that the thinking of the event and the thinking of the other requires a mode of thinking other than the phenomenological one.” One may wonder: why appeal to phenomenology in the attempt to think the event? Because “there can be no thinking of the event which is not at the same time a thinking of phenomenality” (PE, 187). The following will explore this claim further.
The whole problem hinges on the question of the relation between time and change. Following Merleau-Ponty, one is invited to reject both the idealist and realist “solutions” to the problem of time, which consist in locating time either on the side of consciousness alone or on the contrary in the things themselves. Although a consciousness is required to perceive a succession between a before and an after (which is why one cannot place time in reality alone), time itself cannot be entirely encapsulated in consciousness alone, for precisely consciousness cannot embrace temporality as a whole, as it is “the essence of time to be incompletely present to consciousness, to remain incompletely constituted, as Husserl would say” (PE, 179). Consciousness cannot include time in its realm or dominate temporality, for although not entirely immersed in time, consciousness is nonetheless affected by the passage of time. Ultimately, what is decisive in this discussion is the recognition that time is not an accomplished reality that could be situated within a region of being, whether reality or consciousness. The “error” of both realism and idealism is to consider the different parts of time as already realized, either in the object or in the subject. However, time does not have the substantial completeness of a being. Rather, time “is a process which is always in becoming,” always “of the order of the process, the passage, and that which comes” (PE, 179), and thus, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, “never finished” (jamais chose faite). This is why neither realism nor idealism are adequate approaches to the problem of time: “Therefore realism (which immerses the subject in time to the point of destroying all possibility of a time-consciousness) and idealism (which places consciousness in a position of over-viewing a time which no longer proceeds), are both unable to clarify what they pretend to explain, that is, the relation of consciousness to time” (PE, 179). What is important to stress is the transitory character of time, its nonessentiality, or, as Dastur phrases it, “its non-being or non-essence, which is not, but proceeds” (PE, 179). In other words, what is important is to stress the eventful character of time.
This nonessentiality of becoming indeed marks the character of the happening of time. Time happens, and neither realism nor idealism can account for such eventfulness. “Philosophy cannot succeed in accounting for the passage of time when it takes the form of a simple realism or idealism” (PE, 179). That is because they both presuppose an accomplished reality when in fact such “reality” must be traced back to the event of its formation (and deformation), traced back to its happening and genesis. What matters is to recognize that time is not a given reality, but the happening of being, and this is what thought—phenomenology—must accommodate. More precisely, what thought must “welcome” is the eventful and discontinuous character of time. “This ‘true’ philosophy, which would be neither realist nor idealist, should be able to account for the discontinuity of time and for the fact that there are, for us, events” (PE, 179). At this juncture, phenomenology should assume its vocation as a phenomenology of the event. “Such a philosophy,” Dastur writes, “should be able to explain the discontinuity of time, or what we could name the structural eventness [éventualité
