Thinking the Event. François Raffoul

is why Claude Romano states, in Event and World: “Pure beginning from nothing, an event, in its an-archic bursting forth, is absolved from all antecedent causality,”⁸ or also: “An event has no cause, because it is its own origin” (EW, 42). It is traditionally admitted that events are determined by prior causes, and we saw how Kant insisted that “everything that happens presupposes a previous state, upon which it follows without exception according to a rule.”⁹ But do events simply follow predetermined sequences? If this was the case, would they still be events in the proper sense? Instead, there is the possibility of recognizing that an event, “worthy of the name,” as Derrida would say, represents the surge of the new through which precisely it does not “follow” from a previous cause. By introducing the new in the world, indeed by bringing forth a new world, does an event not disqualify prior causal contexts and networks? To that extent, an event could not be “explained” by prior events because its occurrence has transformed the very context that existed and introduced a new one. Indeed, as Claude Romano explains, “an event is nothing other than this impersonal reconfiguration of my possibilities and of the world” (EW, 31). With the event, a new self and a new world come to be. Therefore, as Jean-Luc Marion writes, the event is disconnected from the cause, has no cause: “the event does not have an adequate cause and cannot have one. Only in this way can it advance on the wings of a dove: unforeseen, unusual, unexpected, unheard of, and unseen.”¹⁰ The event in the proper sense exceeds causal orders, “any horizon of meaning and any prior condition. . . . It is a pure bursting forth from and in itself, unforeseeable in its radical novelty, and retrospectively establishing a rupture with the entire past” (EW, 42). A new understanding of temporality is here called for: not a ruled sequence unfolding from the past to the present, but a surge coming from the future, transforming the entire complex of temporality, and indeed transforming the past itself. Ultimately causality proves inadequate to the eventfulness of the event. Does the very eventfulness of the event not precisely point to a certain excess with respect to the enframing of causality? Can an event worthy of its name be even conditioned by a causality? Or should one not assume, as Jean-Luc Marion invites us to do, the excess of the event with respect to causality? Marion speaks of “the character and the dignity of an event—that is, an event or a phenomenon that is unforeseeable (on the basis of the past), not exhaustively comprehensible (on the basis of the present), not reproducible (on the basis of the future), in short, absolute, unique, happening. We will therefore call it a pure event.”¹¹

      The event happens first. The cause is added after the fact. “In summa: an event is neither effected nor does it effect. Causa is a capacity to produce effects that has been super-added to the events” (WP, 296). There are no causes: the cause is added after the fact as an interpretation (Nietzsche speaks of an “interpretation by causality” as a “deception,” WP, 296) insofar as it is sought. The law of causality “has been projected by us into every event.” For Nietzsche, what he significantly calls the “drive to find causes” arises out of a need. Causality is not the order of things but a subjective quest, a subjective need. The drive to produce a cause arises out of a perception of a lack (lack of intelligibility, lack of understanding) that needs to be supplemented. In fact, the event manifests the lack of cause in such a way that we are driven to seek it at all costs: “It’s never enough for us just to determine the mere fact that we find ourselves in such and such a state: we admit this fact—become conscious of it only if we’ve given it some kind of motivation” (TI, 33). The cause itself is lacking. An event, in its eventfulness and givenness, is indeed happening devoid of a cause: it happens first, from and as itself. Phenomenologically, the event happens in a noncausal way, in an anarchic irruption disrupting any order (we recall here how Kant described freedom as rebellious to causality, as lawless), with a meaning that is either missing, partial, or delayed, still to come, en souffrance. The response to this “suffering” is the drive to find causes, or rather, causal interpretations. We never “find” actual causes (there are no such things), but invent causal (mis)interpretations, which ultimately are nothing but memories and mental associations with other past events. Causality is a remembering. “Memory, which comes into play in such cases without our knowing it, calls up earlier states of the same kind, and the causal interpretations that are rooted in them—but not their causation” (TI, 33). Nietzsche sees a lack of reason at the root of all our cause-seeking: “Most of our general feelings—every kind of inhibition, pressure, tension, and explosion in the play and counterplay of the organs, and in particular the state of the nervus sympaticus [sympathetic nervous system]—arouse our drive to find causes: we want to have a reason for feeling that we’re in such and such a state—a bad state or a good state” (TI, 33). It is not enough to simply stay with the fact that has occurred. What is lacking is a reason, a ground, a cause, for our existence and our feelings. What is felt is then nothing else than the groundlessness of existence itself, and a cause would provide a ground that could provisionally suture the lack. A cause then becomes the placeholder of a lack, the placeholder of a nothing.

      The need for causes arises out of a fear. If causality is rooted in the drive to find causes, in turn this drive responds to a fear, and finding a cause appeases our fears. This is why Nietzsche insists that knowledge is about seeking to make the unfamiliar familiar, reducing the alien character of the pure event and thereby increasing our sense of control. “There is no such thing as a sense of causality, as Kant thinks. One is surprised, one is disturbed, one desires something familiar to hold on to” (WP, 297). The drive to causality is the drive to transform something unfamiliar into something familiar, a motivation that lends itself to a psychological analysis and genealogy by Nietzsche: “A psychological explanation of this error.— Tracing something unfamiliar back to something familiar alleviates us, calms us, pacifies us, and in addition provides a feeling of power. The unfamiliar brings with it danger, unrest, and care—our first instinct is to do away with these painful conditions. First principle: some explanation is better than none” (TI, 33). What is considered “true” is most often what makes us feel good, and the first representation that explains the unknown as familiar feels so good that one considers it true: “Proof of pleasure (‘strength’) as criterion of truth” (TI, 33). In The Gay Science, Nietzsche further characterizes this making-familiar of knowledge. In paragraph 355, for instance, entitled “The origin of our concept of ‘knowledge,’” Nietzsche asks: “What is it that the common people take for knowledge? What do they want when they want ‘knowledge’? Nothing more than this: something strange is to be reduced to something familiar” (GS, 300). Even in the philosophical tradition, Nietzsche insists, knowledge is a factor of appropriation of the unknown, that is, the unfamiliar. “And we philosophers—have we really meant more than this when we have spoken of knowledge? What is familiar means what we are used to so that we no longer marvel at it, our everyday, some rule in which we are stuck, anything at all in which we feel at home” (GS, 300). What could drive such a quest? Clearly no longer in this context some disinterested concern for knowledge as objective truth about things in themselves. Rather, a fear before the alien and uncanny character of the pure event. “Look, isn’t our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover under everything strange, unusual, and questionable something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who attain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?” (GS, 300–301).

      Causality is a fiction created out of fear. “Thus, the drive to find causes is conditioned and aroused by the feeling of fear” (TI, 34). The question “why,” the leading question of the principle of reason, is born out of that fear. The cause alleviates that fear. A proof of this is that the cause given is always something familiar, something we already know, so that “the new, the unexperienced, the alien, is excluded as a cause” (TI, 34). And the “fact that something already familiar, something we have experienced, something inscribed in memory is posited as the cause, is the first consequence of this need” (TI, 34, trans. slightly modified). What matters in the position of a causality is to suppress the feeling of the strange, that is, the eventfulness of the event as ungrounded. This is why another motif in the tradition that has served to suppress the groundlessness of the event is that of the subject, a subjectum or ground. It