INDIFFERENCE AND EVENT. HEIDEGGER, BADIOU, AND THE CRISIS OF HISTORICAL TIME

Abstract

How can we think the link between Heidegger’s Ereignis and Badiou’s évenement, i.e., the link between event as à-venir and event as er-äugen? This paper suggests tracing this link back to a diagnosis of modernity shared by Heidegger and Badiou, namely, the indifference which is to be thought as the result of an all-encompassing equivalence of anything with anything else. Consequently, the event is revealed as a figure of ‘rupture with indifference’. This conception has crucial temporal implications. An event as a break with indifference implies that in the mere presence of the ‘now’ that equates any moment to any other, there is no ‘present’. A present can only be created in a withdrawal from mere presence, and as such the present in modernity is absent. This idea seems to be challenged by François Hartog’s term ‘presentism’. According to Hartog, the present, far from being absent, is today omnipresent and it fabricates its own past and future. This omnipresence of the present suspends historical time altogether. Considering that the event as a rupture with indifference departs from a lack of present rather than an omnipresent present, the following question arises: How does the event as a rupture with indifference relate to presentism?