Thinking the Event by François Raffoul

Author:François Raffoul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2020-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

6The Event of Being

Event and Possibility

As seen in prior chapters, phenomenology should be taken as a phenomenology of the event, and as noted, according to Heidegger, the original phenomenon of phenomenology is being itself. This twofold premise leads to engaging the task of understanding being itself as event. This was made possible in Heidegger’s early work through the deconstruction of the inadequate ontology of Vorhandenheit and substantiality and the revealing of the motion and eventfulness of historical life. In fact, Heidegger develops a powerful thought of the event, seizing being itself as eventfulness and temporal happening, as the very event of presence. As Levinas often underlined, the fundamental contribution of Heidegger’s thought is to have grasped being no longer as a noun, as a substantive, but in its verbality and eventfulness. In one of his last classes taught at the Sorbonne, on November 17, 1975, Levinas explained: “I will recall here some fundamental motifs of Heidegger’s thought: I. The most extraordinary thing that Heidegger brings us is a new sonority of the verb ‘to be’: precisely its verbal sonority. To be: not what is, but the verb, the ‘act’ of being. (In German, the difference is easily drawn between Sein [to be] and Seiendes [beings], and the latter word does not have in German the foreign sonority that the French étant [a being] carries, such that Heidegger’s first French translators had to set it between quotation marks.) This contribution is what is unforgettable in the work of Heidegger.”1 Being is not a substance, but an event, a “doing,” a “happening.” One could say, in an impossible English: being is not, but being be-ings.

Being “is” not, but happens. By approaching being in distinction from beings (as early as Being and Time: “The being of beings ‘is’ not itself a being”),2 and in particular in severing the understanding of being from any reference to a supreme being, substrate, or substance (senses that in the ontotheological tradition have determined the meaning of being), Heidegger is able to consider being in its eventfulness. This is indeed the import of the ontological difference, as Levinas saw very clearly: “The radical distinction between being and beings, the famous ontological difference. There is a radical difference between the verbal resonance of the word ‘being’ and its resonance as a noun. It is the difference par excellence. It is Difference” (God, Death, and Time, p. 122). Being itself is not a substance, but an event of presence, an event in which we human beings participate, to which we correspond and belong. Indeed, we happen through the happening of being. Heidegger’s thought determined itself as a thinking of the event of being. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to state that Heidegger’s constant concern was to give thought to the event of being, that is, to grasp being itself as an event. In the expression “event of being,” the genitive is clearly subjective. To speak of an “event of being” indicates that being, as such, happens. This

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