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178 Hypatia
How, asks Françoise Dastur, can philosophy account for the sudden happening
and the factuality of the event? Dastur asks how phenomenology, in particular the
work of Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty, may be interpreted as offering such
an account. She argues that the “paradoxical capacity of expecting surprise is always
in question in phenomenology,” and for this reason, she concludes, “We should not
oppose phenomenology and the thinking of the event. We should connect them; open-
ness to phenomena must be identified with openness to unpredictability.” The article
offers reflections in these terms on a phenomenology of birth.
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? This is the general question
from which I will begin. The question of time and of the contingency of time
has always, as Edmund Husserl recalls at the beginning of his On the Phenom-
enology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1991), constituted the most cru-
cial problem for philosophy. This problem marks the limits of its enterprise of
intellectual possession of the world. For time, which is, as Henri Bergson said,
the stuff of which things are made,2 seems to escape conceptual understanding
in a radical manner.
As Maurice Merleau-Ponty shows in his Phenomenology of Perception (1962),
philosophy can give neither a realist nor an idealist solution to the problem
of time. It does not succeed in locating it either in things themselves or in
consciousness. If, on the one hand, we consider time to be no more than a
that is, to the birth of the object which consciousness constitutes as its op-
posite.
Husserl cannot remain on the level of a static phenomenology which could
only account for the already constituted object, for what is empirically given.
Very early on he feels compelled to develop a genetic phenomenology whose
task is to elucidate the process at the origin of the opposition of subject and
object. The entire phenomenology of temporality that Husserl develops in his
Lessons in 1905 can be considered as a phenomenology of the advent of the
subject to itself. For what is at stake in these Lessons is to bring to light what
Husserl calls “what is ultimately and truly absolute” (Husserl 1962, 216): this
enigmatic intimacy of consciousness and time at the origin of the double
constitution of world and subject. Such a task is paradoxical. It means allowing
the appearance of the conditions of all appearing and bringing to light the
process of “the segregation of the ‘within’ and the ‘without’” (Merleau-Ponty
1968, 118) which Merleau-Ponty says is “never finished” (jamais chose faite)
(1968, 237), but, on the contrary, always in becoming. Husserl tries in his Les-
sons to reconstitute “after the event,” with the help of such concepts as pro-
tention, retention, and original impression, the movement of the temporal-
ization which remains in itself invisible. In this regard he remains in close
proximity to Kant, who had always affirmed the invisibility of time and who
defined schematism, the process by which consciousness constitutes the ob-
ject, as “an art concealed in the depths of human soul” (Kant 1933, 183).
The phenomenology of the becoming of subject and world can therefore
only be a phenomenology of the inapparent (Phänomenologie des Unschein-
baren), to quote one of Heidegger’s expressions from his last seminar in 1973
(Heidegger 1977, 137). But in his structure of eventuality this inappearance
or invisibility of time does not refer to a level transcending perception. On the
contrary, it refers to the genesis of perception itself. The limit that phenom-
enology encounters here is not external but internal. It can only be discovered
in and by the phenomenological attitude. For such an invisibility is not, as
Merleau-Ponty rightly underlines, an absolute invisibility, but the invisibility
of this world. It is the dimension of invisibility which is implied in the visible
itself and which can therefore only be discovered within the visible (1968,
225). This is the reason why, in his unfinished last book The Visible and the
Invisible (1968), Merleau-Ponty sketches the outlines of an “ontology from
within” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 225), of an “endo-ontology” (226) which con-
stitutes the true achievement of his Phenomenology of Perception (1962).
But is such a phenomenology of becoming, which identifies itself with an
ontology which remains internal to phenomenality, and which pretends to let
the dynamic character of phenomenality appear, already in itself a phenom-
enology of the event? For is it possible to think the coming of time, its advenire,
its coming up to us, without properly thinking its sudden rise, its coming out of
182 Hypatia
itself, which refers to the Latin verb evenire, literally ex-venire, from which the
word “event” comes?
But what is an event, in fact? At first, we can only define it as what was not
expected, what arrives unexpectedly and comes to us by surprise, what de-
scends upon us, the accident in the literal meaning of the Latin verb accido
from which the word accident derives. The event in the strong sense of the
word is therefore always a surprise, something which takes possession of us
in an unforeseen manner, without warning, and which brings us towards an
unanticipated future. The eventum, which arises in the becoming, constitutes
something which is irremediably excessive in comparison to the usual repre-
sentation of time as flow. It appears as something that dislocates time and gives
a new form to it, something that puts the flow of time out of joint and changes
its direction.
So the event appears as that which intimately threatens the synchrony
of transcendental life or existence, in other words, the mutual implication of
the different parts of times: retention and protention for Husserl; thrownness
and project (Geworfenheit und Entwurf ) for Heidegger. The exteriority of the
event introduces a split between past and future and so allows the appear-
ance of different parts of time as dis-located. The event pro-duces, in the literal
meaning of the word, the difference of past and future and exhibits this dif-
ference through its sudden happening. The event constitutes the “dehiscence”
of time, its coming out of itself in different directions, which Heidegger calls
“ekstasis,” the fact that it never coincides with itself, and which Levinas names
dia-chrony (Levinas 1987, 32). For the event, as such, is upsetting. It does not
integrate itself as a specific moment in the flow of time. It changes drastically
the whole style of an existence (Husserl 1970a, 31). It does not happen in a
world—it is, on the contrary, as if a new world opens up through its happening.
The event constitutes the critical moment of temporality—a critical moment
which nevertheless allows the continuity of time.
This non-coincidence with oneself which allows the possibility of being
open to new events, of being transformed by them or even destroyed by them,
is also that which makes of the subject a temporal being, an ex-istant being, a
being which is able constantly to get out of itself. Openness to the accident is
therefore constitutive of the existence of the human being. Such an openness
gives human being a destiny and makes one’s life an adventure and not the
anticipated development of a program.
It becomes clear that a phenomenology which obeyed its own injunction
to return to things themselves could not be content to remain an “eidetic”
phenomenology—the thinking of what remains invariable in experience. It
must become, according to the young Heidegger’s terminology, a “hermeneu-
tics of facticity”6: an interpretation of all that can be found in existence and is
not reducible to ideality, which is essentially variable and transitory. Such a
Françoise Dastur 183
Against all expectation, even if it has been partially expected and antici-
pated, such is in fact the “essence” of the event. Based on this we could say
without paradox that it is an “impossible possible.” The event, in its internal
contradiction, is the impossible which happens, in spite of everything, in a
terrifying or marvelous manner. It always comes to us by surprise, or from that
side whence, precisely, it was not expected. The difficult task of phenomenol-
ogy is therefore to think this excess to expectation that is the event. The phe-
nomenology of eventuality is in a similar position to the phenomenology of
mortality. Death, as an event, is also that which always happens against all
expectation, always too early, something impossible that nevertheless hap-
pens. It comes to us without coming from us. It takes place in the impersonal
manner of this event that happens also to others and it is the most universal
event for living beings. One could say that death is the event par excellence,
except that it is never present, it never presently happens. It does not open up
a world, but rather closes it forever. It does not constitute a blank or gap inside
temporality or a diachronic moment which could be the origin of a new con-
figuration of possibilities. It is the simple, simultaneous destruction of syn-
chrony and diachrony. That is why death, far from being an event, has been
legitimately defined by Heidegger as the possibility par excellence (Heidegger
1962, 307). Death remains for us a possibility that we will never realize, not
even in suicide, which is only a way of escaping the essential passivity of death
which defines human existence most deeply (see Heidegger 1962, 299–311).
But if death is for us the pre-eminent possibility, as Heidegger says, this
184 Hypatia
the loss of world and the breaking of the ordinary coherence of experience.8
S/he is therefore condemned to terror and to the impossibility of communicat-
ing with things and other human beings. Such a subject has lost the ability of
opening oneself to eventuality and of experiencing the reconfiguration of pos-
sibilities that a new and unexpected event requires from us. For it is the event
itself which requires integration in a new configuration of possibilities. One
does not decide freely to change one’s world, or to become converted. We can
speak of the event neither in the active nor in the passive voice. It can change
us and even “happen” to us only if we are in the right disposition. This is pre-
cisely the “disposition” which is missing in the psychotic person.
We can speak about the event only in the third voice and in a past time,
in the mode of “it happened to me.” We never experience the great events of
our life as contemporaneous. This is quite clear as far as the first great event of
our life is concerned. We did not ask for our birth, and this is testimony to the
fact that we are not at the origin of our own existence. To be born means that
we are conditioned by a past that was never present to us. It can only be ap-
propriated by us later, by assuming these determinations of our existence that
we have not chosen. There is therefore a surprise in us in relation to our birth.
It is the permanent surprise of being born which is constitutive of our being.
It is testimony to the uncontrollable character of this proto-event. In each
new event there is a repetition of the proto-event of birth. It is as if we re-
experience, in a new event, this radical novelty of what happens for the “first
time,” as well as the impossibility of coinciding with the event itself, which in
its sudden apparition disconnects the past from the future.
The existing being has no control over such a surprise and it is in a way the
event which gives the order here, but to be ordered requires the collaboration
of the one who obeys. One is not completely passive in relation to the event,
even if its meaning still remains obscure. We keep trying to give a meaning to
it. It is only in relation to this attempted interpretation of everything that
happens (and this interpretative behavior is nothing other than the being in
the world of the human) that an event can be experienced as a trauma. Husserl
and Heidegger both saw a passivity within our intentional activity itself and a
facticity of existence which can only be assumed and not chosen. Husserl did
so with his theory of passive genesis or synthesis. Heidegger did so by tightly
connecting facticity as the being thrown to the world of the human being and
existentiality as the incorporation of facticity into the configuration of the
project of this prospective being that Heidegger calls man.
We should not oppose phenomenology and the thinking of the event. We
should connect them; openness to phenomena must be identified with open-
ness to unpredictability. This paradoxical capacity of expecting surprise is
always in question in phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty declares in The Visible
and the Invisible that “philosophy has never spoken . . . of the passivity of our
Françoise Dastur 187
activity, as Valéry spoke of a body of the spirit” (1968, 221). This passivity of our
activity is nothing other than the process of temporalization which happens in
us as thinking beings without being the product of our thought. For as Merleau-
Ponty underlines, “I am not even the author of that hollow that forms within
me by the passage from the present to the retention, it is not I who makes
myself think any more than it is I who makes my heart beat” (1968, 221).
New as our initiatives may be, they come to be born in this field of being that
is human spirit, in which something, or the absence of something, can be
inscribed. A great, contemporary French phenomenologist, Henri Maldiney,
created a new word, “transpassibilité,” to express our capacity to undergo events,
insofar as this implies for us an active opening to a field of receptivity (Mal-
diney 1991, 114). To lack the capacity to open oneself to what happens, no
longer to welcome the unexpected, is in fact a mark of psychosis.
Phenomenology privileges neither the interiority of expectation nor the
exteriority of surprise. It establishes as preliminary to experience neither the
receptivity of the subject nor the activity of the object. It tries to think the
strange coincidence of both. One could demonstrate that Heidegger tried to
think this almost unthinkable coincidence of Being and “man.” He attempted
this by means of the word Ereignis. Ereignis means not only “happening” (the
ordinary meaning of the word in German) but also, following its double ety-
mology in both popular and scientific use, “appropriation” and “appearing to
view.” 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. There can
be no thinking of the event which is not at the same time a thinking of phe-
nomenality.
NOTES
We very warmly thank the editor of Études Phénoménologiques for permission to re-
produce this version of the article. Ed.
1. Lecture given in Prague, September 1998, in the seminar organized by the
Institute of Philosophy. Simplified English version of “Pour une phénoménologie de
l’événement: l’attente et la surprise,” Études Phénoménologiques 25, 1997: 59–75.
2. See, for example, Bergson (1963, 71–72) and Bergson (1944, 371–72).
3. See, in this regard, the remarkable article by Claude Romano, “Le Possible et
l’événement” (Romano 1993), from which I have drawn much inspiration.
4. Here, the reader should be aware of differences between the connotations of
éventualité in the sense given to this word by Françoise Dastur here and eventuality in
English. Eventualité, in this context, refers more generally to possibility, chance, un-
certainty, contingency, and the hypothetical, whereas the English eventuality refers
either to that which ultimately results, or to a possible, fixed event. Ed.
188 Hypatia
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