Politics of the Event: Time, Movement, Becoming by Tom Lundborg

Author:Tom Lundborg [Lundborg, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Public Policy, City Planning & Urban Development, History & Theory, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781136503825
Google: 1FbFBQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17544319
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

6 Another politics of the event

What history grasps in an event is the way it’s actualized in particular circum-stances; the event’s becoming is beyond the scope of history.

Gilles Deleuze1

The main assumption underpinning this chapter is very straightforward: there is no reason why the concept of the historical event should stop us from exploring other ways of encountering the event, hence other ways of relating to time, change, movement, and becoming. Considering the violence done in the name of the historical event, what is the point of keeping it? What is the point of keeping “9/11” or “September 11” as a border in time that is continuously reproduced in order to legitimize the violent practices of response that characterize not just the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also more mundane forms of security practices that have penetrated and altered the conditions of everyday life, for example through increased surveillance? Following Maja Zehfuss: “If the memory of September 11 is so overpowering that we agree to have our own lives overturned, our freedoms vis-à-vis the state undermined, our values moved by our own states’ policies, then I think we should forget September 11.”2 And following Jenny Edkins, we need “a way of responding that attempts to avoid a rapid return to previous forms of security, safety and sovereign power.” We need “a form of response that does not re-enter the same cycle of security and trauma.”3 In light of such arguments, the aim of this chapter is to forget 9/11 and the historical event, in order to explore alternative encounters with the event – encounters that do not submit to the standard lines and limits of history and instead open up to something completely different.

In order to explore alternative encounters with the event this chapter focuses on a dimension of Deleuze’s philosophy that previously in this book has only figured in the background. Earlier chapters have mainly been concerned with examining two parallel and interacting processes or sides: the pure event and the historical event, the virtual and the actual, Aion and Chronos, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, immanence and transcendence, expression and content, the articulable and the visible, and so on. This is also how much of Deleuze’s philosophy is constructed – as an interaction between two separate yet mutually implicated sides or processes. However, there is another aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy, which refers to something that appears to go beyond the interaction between two parallel processes or sides. In the previous chapter this aspect was briefly touched upon in relation to the “outside” – a space from which the diagrams of power emerge but which nevertheless eludes the capture of those diagrams. To repeat a quote from the previous chapter, the outside “does not merge with any diagram, and continues instead to ‘draw’ new ones. In this way the outside is always an opening on to a future: nothing ends, since nothing has begun, but everything is transformed.”4 The outside, in this sense, can also be said to escape the borders in time that are inscribed in the production of the historical event.

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