Thinking the Event. François Raffoul

is the imposition of causes on every existence, on every event, as their substratum: causality is the alleged substrate of the event. The belief in causality involves the belief in the subject. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche stresses the fictitious nature of the ego, which is only a word: “And as for the ‘I’! That has become a fable, a fiction, a play on words: it has completely and utterly ceased to think, to feel, and to will!” (TI, 32). Nietzsche recalls that these concepts are products of our invention; “There are simply no mental causes at all! . . . We have invented a world of causes, a world of will . . . we have constituted the ego as a cause” (TI, 32). Events are constructed as actions; actions, constructed as deed, are distinguished from doers. A doer is then constructed as subject: an agent distinct from the act is invented. All happening “was a doing, all doing the effect of a willing; for it, the world became a multitude of doers, a doer (a ‘subject’) was imputed to everything that happened” (TI, 32). This belongs to the prejudices of reason, which “sees actors and actions everywhere” (TI, 20), which “believes in the will as an absolute cause,” which believes in the “I,” and so on. Ultimately, an ontology of causation is enforced everywhere, by which “being is thought into things everywhere as a cause, is imputed to things” (TI, 20). Nietzsche insists that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming,” that the doer “is merely a fiction added to the deed.”¹² In paragraph 17 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche analyses the supposition of a subject under thinking and denounces it as a fiction. There is a threefold belief: that motives are the antecedents of an act; that thoughts are caused; and that the I is such a cause. First, in a quasi-phenomenological observation, describing a “small terse fact,” Nietzsche notes that a thought does not come from some I-substrate but instead originates from itself, and comes when it comes. “With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small terse fact, which these superstitious minds hate to concede—namely, that a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish” (BGE, 24). It is false to state that the I is the cause of thinking, or even that the I is in a position of subject. The notion of the “I think” as principle and foundation, as it has been established in modern philosophy since Descartes, is said by Nietzsche to be contrary to the facts: “it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think’” (BGE, 24). Even the “it” (in the expression “a thought comes when it wishes”) is misleading, for it might suggest that there is some entity, that is, some substrate, at the basis of thinking. “It thinks: but that this ‘it’ is precisely the famous old ‘ego’ is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an ‘immediate certainty’” (BGE, 24). The notion of an underlying subjectivity is contrary to the facts, an unphenomenological construction.

      The alleged “simplicity” of the “I think” is likewise deceiving, a seduction of words. Nietzsche challenges the reliance on the notion of an immediate certainty (the immediacy and evidence of the “I think”). In Beyond Good and Evil (paragraph 16), Nietzsche speaks of the belief of those “harmless self-observers” in the superstition of the “I will” or the “I think,” “as though knowledge here got hold of its object purely and nakedly as ‘the thing in itself,’ without any falsification on the part of either the subject or the object” (BGE, 23). However, the very expressions “immediate certainty,” “absolute knowledge,” and “thing in itself” all involve a contradictio in adjecto, a contradiction in terms, since all certainty is constructed, all knowledge is for us and therefore not absolute, and the thing in itself cannot be “in itself” since that would mean absolutely independent from us to the point where we would not even notice it! If one analyzed the process that is expressed in this sentence, ‘I think,’ one would find many claims therein that are impossible to establish or even less prove, “for example, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an ‘ego,’ and, finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking—that I know what thinking is” (BGE, 23). Unlike what Descartes asserted, the “I think” is anything but “simple.” In fact, these “simple truths” are more like decisions, “for if I had not already decided within myself what it is, by what standard could I determine whether that which is just happening is not perhaps ‘willing’ or ‘feeling’? In short, the assertion ‘I think’ assumes that I compare my state at the present moment with other states of myself which I know, in order to determine what it is; on account of this retrospective connection with further ‘knowledge,’ it has, at any rate, no immediate certainty for me” (BGE, 23). Instead of immediate certainties, there are the following questions: “From where do I get the concept of thinking? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an ego, and even of an ego as cause, and finally of an ego as the cause of thought?” (BGE, 24). All these notions are constructs for Nietzsche, which he understands in terms of the constitutive role of language in thinking. The subject begins to appear as a linguistic construct.

      Indeed, an underlying substantial ego is not a phenomenological fact, but a metaphysical idol, and ultimately for Nietzsche a linguistic prejudice. The substantialist egology of the Cartesian tradition harbors an implicit metaphysics of grammar. “One infers here according to the grammatical habit: ‘thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently—’” (BGE, 24). Metaphysical idols are but grammatical structures: “formerly, one believed in the soul as one believed in grammar and the grammatical subject” (BGE, 67). The difference between a doer and the deed, that is, the position of an agent or subject beneath the event, is made possible by a “seduction of language.” Nietzsche clarifies this dependency of a metaphysics of subjectivity on language in The Will to Power. Starting with a critique of the positivists’ view that “there are only facts,” Nietzsche recalls that precisely all there is are not “facts,” but interpretations. The statement that claims that everything is subjective is also an interpretation (this is why, I should note in passing, the statement “there are only interpretations” does not mean “everything is subjective,” and Nietzsche’s perspectivism is not a subjectivism or a relativism). By claiming that all there is are interpretations, and that even the subjective is an interpretation, Nietzsche is casting doubt on the belief in the subject. This is why he continues by stating that an interpretation does not require an interpreter. “Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention, hypothesis” (WP, 267). The subject is “not something given,” that is, not a fact. What is the subject in this case? It is, it is “something added and invented and projected behind what there is” (WP, 267). In the following paragraphs, Nietzsche approaches the notion of “subject” as both the Cartesian metaphysical cause of thought and as a word, that is, as the linguistic “I,” in each case in order to stress their fictitious nature. He states, “However habitual and indispensable this fiction [of the subject] may have become by now—that in itself proves nothing against its imaginary origin” (WP, 268). The metaphysical notion of subjectivity as substrate rests upon the linguistic motif of the subject, and not the other way around: “The concept of substance is a consequence of the concept of the subject: not the reverse!” This means that the metaphysician notion of substance rests upon the subject as a linguistic construct. Nietzsche had previously established that the “I” is a word that we set up “at the point at which our ignorance begins,” a horizon of our knowledge and not a truth. This is why, after recalling the metaphysical Cartesian motif of (belief in) substantiality (“‘There is thinking: therefore there is something that thinks’: this is the upshot of all Descartes’ argumentation. But that means positing as ‘true a priori’ our belief in the concept of substance”), he adds that such a belief “is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed” (WP, 268).

      This impersonality here revealed (“there is” thinking), an impersonality that is constitutive of the event as such, leads us to consider impersonal, subjectless sentences such as “it rains.” If the event has no subject underlying it, whether as a cause or substrate, then the danger is to substantify the “it” in such expressions, as if it designated some substrate distinct from