THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE EVENT: ONTOLOGY AND HISTORY

Abstract

Heidegger’s Ereignis is riddled with ambiguity. On the one hand, Ereignis is the event of appropriation, the retrieval of Dasein’s own proper, or Being; on the other hand, it is to be thought as a rupture and transformative break, the unconcealment or essencing of the truth of Being. The event is the name for the primordial co-belonging of the ontological and the historical, of the plunging of Being in Time, the last chapter in the History of Being. In this paper I argue that Badiou’s thinking of the event aims to address the tension, inherent in Heidegger’s project, between the ontological and the historical. First and foremost, (a) Badiou constructs a mathematical ontology, based on set-theory, which thinks of any situation in terms of its presentation, in the conjuncture of the void and the infinite. Secondly, (b) strictly speaking, ontology, which deals with the presentation and representation of multiplicities in a situation, according to a count as one, accounts for normal multiplicities, barring in essence the abnormality and disequilibrium between presentation and representation that constitutes an abnormal multiple, or, what Badiou calls an evental site. Thus, the event is barred from ontology, unforeseen from within the situation, which
unfolds according to its laws of presentation. Differently put, from the point of view of Being, the event is not; of the event ontology can say nothing. Thirdly and most importantly, (c) the event is neither an all-embracing totality of possibility or sense, nor a scriptural or linguistic effect. The event — far from being a name for Being itself, or the primordial co-belonging of Being and time — is an exception to Being, such that it is unforeseen from within the laws of possibility of any given world. The event is thus barred from ontology, but it is also subtracted from History.