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