EVENT and its Mediation. Philosophical, Philological, Religious Studies, Literary and Cultural Theoretical Perspectives

REVELATION AS EVENT: RICOEURIAN DISCOURSE AND RICHIRIAN AFFECTIVITY IN THE INTERPRETATION OF BIBLICAL PREHISTORY

Robert Grzywacz — 2026-08-28

This study compares Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of symbolic and linguistic mediation and Marc Richir’s transcendental phenomenology in their distinct approaches to revelation through the act of reading biblical prehistory. For Ricoeur, reading involves the intentional exteriorization of discourse, achieving semantic autonomy by projecting a world of text. This interpretive process enables self-purification from narcissistic illusions. Analyzing Genesis,
Ricoeur emphasizes creation’s foundational but inaugurated character, separate from datable history. Biblical accounts are polyphonic, revealing creation as a fragile, broken order. Richir utilizes a hyperbolic phenomenological reduction to reach a realm anterior to symbolic structures. This primordial phenomenalization is connected to non-intentional phantasia, fundamentally driven by blind affectivity. Reading constitutes an affective event, employing
perceptive phantasia to facilitate empathy into characters’ non-positional emotional lives. Richir critiques the ‘false self’ and rejects the traditional interpretation of biblical prehistory. Through Melville, he interprets Ahab’s hunt for Leviathan as a tyrannical challenge to creation, demonstrating that Moby Dick embodies the sublime, negative figure of affectivity distorted by tyranny and self-hatred. The Billy Budd narrative exposes the inevitable horizon of tyranny underlying the socio-political order. The paper argues that both thinkers seek to liberate selfhood from narcissistic illusions. Ricoeur achieves this through reading as the symbolically mediated event. Richir instead demands an immediate appeal to affectivity.

THE NOTION OF SACRAMENTAL EVENT IN ERIK PETERSON’S ESCHATOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF ST. PAUL’S EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS

Lorenzo Pompeo — 2026-08-28

This article explores Erik Peterson’s theological reflections on the concept of the “sacramental event”, particularly through his interpretation of St. Paul’s Letters and the Pauline inspired notion of the new aeon. Firstly, it situates Peterson’s engagement with Paul as central to his break with Protestantism and his conversion to Catholicism, emphasizing how Paul’s eschatological vision shapes Peterson’s critique of political theology. The notion of the new aeon is introduced as a decisive element in Peterson’s thought, marking a radical temporal rupture inaugurated by Christ’s enthronement, which ends the old cosmos and establishes a new cosmic order. The paper then develops Peterson’s distinction between historical time and eschatological time, highlighting his use of the term Geschehen to describe the eschatological event as more than a chronological moment, namely, as the emergence of a new quality of time. Central to this
theology is the role of baptism, which Peterson understands not merely as a ritual but as the sacramental event that effectuates the believer’s passage from the old to the new aeon. This sacramental incorporation “in Christ” is both a present reality and an “eschatological reservation”, an anticipation of the future resurrection and full fulfilment. Peterson’s critique of Lutheran interpretations of the Gospel is also addressed, where he argues that Paul announces a cosmic
victory over original sin rather than private forgiveness. The article furthermore examines Peterson’s emphasis on the materiality and concreteness of the sacramental substances and their interaction with the believer’s body, contrasting this with modern philosophical tendencies that spiritualize the sacramental meaning. In conclusion, the article situates Peterson’s theology of the sacramental event within broader twentieth-century debates, highlighting its paradoxical character as an event where Christ is both revealed and concealed, historically present yet eschatologically awaited, thus offering a profound rethinking of the Christian conception of time and history

THE META-EVENT AND ONTOLOGICAL EKSTASIS: THE GENERATIVE LOGIC OF DIVINE DECISION IN SCHELLING’S PHILOSOPHY

Huimin Wu — 2026-08-28

Schelling’s philosophy has long been fragmented by the “myth of rupture”, with its stages (e.g., Philosophy of Nature, Philosophy of Freedom) deemed disconnected. This study argues for its inherent unity through the triadic “Latency-Contraction-Ekstasis” model rooted in Schelling’s “Ungrund” — a primordial unity transcending being and non-being. “Latency” denotes unmanifested potency in the Ungrund; “Contraction” describes potency’s selflimitation generating ontological difference; “Ekstasis” refers to domain-specific unfolding and return to unity. The model reenacts unconsciously in nature (magnetism, chemistry) and consciously in history, where “evil” emerges as an “ontological remainder” confirming divine decision. This reinterpretation dispels the rupture myth, supplements contemporary event ontology (Deleuze, Badiou), and revives freedom as “participation in being’s generation”.

THE EVENT OF THE HOLY: ON THE ESSENCE-TO-COME OF THE IMMEDIATE

Marlene Prosdocimo — 2026-08-28

This paper investigates the relationship between immediateness, its essence (as the “holy”) and the event, drawing on Heidegger’s Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. The article will begin by clarifying why the “immediate” can only be identified with “nature,”1 which is the “all-mediating mediatedness”. 2 Thus, the “immediate” coincides with the “mediatedness” (namely, mediation) of mediated beings. The analysis will then shift to the “holy” understood as the “essence of nature”, 3 so consequently, as the essence of the “immediate”. This will lead to the mode of presence of the holy: According to Heidegger, the holy is indeed “present as what is coming”. 4 The “immediate”, in its essence, is not an “already-been dimension” of the mediated. The holy, therefore, is not an event that has always already occurred, opening space for the emergence of mediated beings: The holy is given insofar as it is to come. This does not mean that the holy coincides with a future event, or with an impossibility that can never be. “Nature” arises from “chaos”, which corresponds to the “holy” itself. 5 The holy at the heart of the immediate is hence originary and has effectively begotten nature, being that which is coming. To grasp this dynamic, the issue of the “poetic word” as the event of the holy6 will be addressed. The poetic word does not refer to something that has been or will be: A generative dynamic is always ongoing, in which the poetic word corresponds to the event of the essencing of immediate mediation. This paper will demonstrate how, in the poetic word, “what is coming” has begotten — and continues to beget — the omnipresent immediate (mediation) in its difference from beings.

PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS OF EVENTS

Anton Sverdlikov — 2026-08-28

This paper advances a realist interpretation of the late Heidegger’s philosophy of being as event. My central claim is that Heidegger’s understanding of the event of openness undergoes a decisive transformation in the 1930s and thereafter: What was originally conceived as an existential structure of Dasein (the event of transcendence) becomes progressively deanthropocentrized. The event of unconcealment is no longer confined to human existence but is instead approached as a universal, even cosmological, occurrence — something that takes place with beings themselves, independently of their relation to human beings. In this respect, I argue, Heidegger’s discourse of the event can be understood as a distinctive form of metaphysics: not a metaphysics of presence, but a metaphysics of the event. While this event-metaphysics already carries a realist inclination, it remains weakened in Heidegger by his continuing insistence on the indispensability of Dasein for the event. Drawing on Eugen Fink’s cosmological reworking of Heidegger’s later thought, I argue that this commitment is not necessary and that Heidegger’s conception of the event can instead be interpreted in a radically realist manner. In Fink’s cosmological perspective, the event
assumes the character of a fully subject-independent occurrence. Building on these developments, I propose a systematic generalization that, I argue, possesses systematic significance in its own right and can be pursued independently of Heideggerian or phenomenological scholarship. I conclude by sketching two possible directions for such a metaphysics: A speculative, monistic conception of the event as singular reality, and an empiricist conception of reality as a plurality of finite events of appearing. Both approaches, I contend, provide resources for integrating phenomenological insights into ongoing debates in contemporary theoretical philosophy.

RETHINKING PHÝSIS AND TÉCHNE: TOWARD A TECHNICAL ONTOLOGY OF THE EVENT

Pietro Prunotto — 2026-08-28

This paper traces a set of connections between Martin Heidegger and Bernard Stiegler around the conceptual nexus of event and technology. It proceeds in three steps. First, it examines what is at stake in these themes within Heidegger’s thought, showing how the notion of the event represents the culmination of his effort to move beyond metaphysical foundations. Second, it highlights certain critical elements in Heidegger’s treatment of the relation between τέχνη and φύσις, which risk constraining his account of technicity within residual metaphysical structures. Finally, drawing on Aristotle’s notion of the “accidental cause”, the paper outlines the space for a singularity that can be described as the technical event. This is further clarified through Stiegler’s concept of the “invention of the human”, which theorizes the co-emergence of human being and technology. In this way, the paper argues that Stiegler both fulfils and develops beyond Heidegger’s project of rethinking the relation between human being, technology, and event.

“THINKING THE IMPOSSIBLE”: THE EVENT AS A POST-HEIDEGGERIAN DIVIDE IN FRENCH PHILOSOPHY

Simon Vincken — 2026-08-28

This paper argues that the concept of the Event in post-1960 French philosophy constitutes a dual reaction to Heidegger’s legacy, particularly concerning the problem of “thinking the impossible”. For Heidegger, the limits of thought are tied to the limits of being, raising the question of whether that which transcends being can be thought at all. Drawing on Garry Gutting’s Thinking the Impossible, the paper examines a key divide between two forms of skepticism: absolute and relative. Absolute skeptics — such as Levinas, Derrida, and Marion — argue that certain aspects of reality remain fundamentally beyond conceptual grasp. Their Event is an irreducible rupture: Levinas’s ethical encounter, Derrida’s différance, and Marion’s saturated phenomenon all resist conceptual containment. Relative skeptics — like Deleuze and Badiou — treat the Event as conceptually challenging but not unthinkable. For them, Events prompt revisions of our frameworks: Deleuze’s ontological difference and Badiou’s evental rupture can be integrated within philosophical systems. The paper further explores Claude Romano’s position as a potential third path. Rejecting both ineffability and formal abstraction, Romano presents the Event as a lived transformation
that reshapes the subject’s temporal and spatial experience. By situating these divergent approaches within the legacy of Heidegger, the paper reveals a
deeper tension in post-Heideggerian thought: whether the impossible must remain conceptually inaccessible or can be rendered thinkable through renewed frameworks. In doing so, it clarifies the stakes of the Event as a philosophical concept and its role in mapping the fractures within contemporary thought.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE EVENT: ONTOLOGY AND HISTORY

Michalis Tegos — 2026-08-28

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.

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

Zanaan Akin — 2026-08-28

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?

TUMULTUOUS UNIVOCITY: BADIOU’S MISREADING OF BEING AND THE EVENT IN DELEUZE

Joshua Royles — 2026-08-28

Badiou argues that Deleuze fails to liberate the concept of difference by re-inscribing the multiple into the totality of the One. This suppression of difference is supposedly carried out at the expense of the radical uniqueness of the event, which, according to Badiou, has no immediate connection to being. I investigate how Badiou reaches this conclusion and then establish his interpretation of being and the event. For Badiou, being is a void; therefore, the event is a radical beginning or rupture entirely disconnected from being. Deleuze, on the contrary, maintains a deep connection between being and the event. Furthermore, he claims that being is univocal — said with one singular voice — even though it is always spoken with an endless number of diverse tones and timbres. Hence, for Deleuze, the event is a repetition of being, a clamorous oscillation between the repetition of the same and of difference. Next, I demonstrate how Badiou’s interpretation of Deleuze goes awry. While Badiou rightly describes Deleuze’s account of being as univocal, he misconceives Deleuze’s concepts of being and the event that are at once singular and multiple. Because the event simultaneously expresses singularity and multiplicity, the difference separating them is never sterilized or suppressed. Instead, it is through this very difference that they are produced and merge into one ontological plane. Deleuze’s concept of the Body without Organs allows for these different forces to occupy the same surface without silencing the clamour of being. The Body without Organs is irreparably cracked, though still one substance. Its two sides or attributes are held together through an irresolvable tension. Nonetheless, the different layers of being share the same lens. Therefore, Deleuze’s concept of being is not a repetition of the same that levels down difference but a repetition of the event that continually produces it anew.

THE EVENT AND THE PROBLEM OF TIME-CONSCIOUSNESS

Andrea Sipos — 2026-08-28

The event comes about suddenly and unpredictably, changing everything in our life; afterwards nothing will ever be the same. The time of its arrival can hardly be determined: Once we become aware of the metamorphosis, it has already happened. Although the event opens up a new future for us, it appears as a kind of past, therefore the meaning of the event is only accessible from its own posterity. The event seems to be quite a unique phenomenon with a rather complex temporality. What is the reason for that? In order to reply, we have to look at the different layers of its ‘constitution’. If it is true that first we grasp the sense of the event at the level of pure affects (spontaneous understanding) and only then can we find out its meaning through reason (reflection, cognition, interpretation), we have to draw the consequences with regard to time-consciousness in general. Naturally, we use words and expressions (such as metaphors) related to time, space, and movement in order to depict the quality (affectivity, intensity, direction) of our experiences. However, is it legitimate to link the description of phenomena with the dimension of time? This problem has been present since the foundation of phenomenology. Although Husserl puts the world time into brackets, he does not suspend the ‘existence’ of time as such, hence the notion of time is presupposed, so it is the horizon of time including its continuity and linear movement. I will argue that in the sphere of primordial impressions simply there is no time, as the lived experiences of originally affective nature are not temporal but have intensity. Consequently, to apprehend the temporality of the event, we can say at most that its genesis takes place in an affective ‘time’, which by contrast is not at all temporal.

MORAL IDENTITY AS EVENT AND RUPTURE

Attila Ákos Tóth — 2026-08-28

Classical ethical thought often conceives the moral subject as autonomous and rational, a self-sufficient agent guided by reason. Emmanuel Levinas and, in a related way, Bernhard Waldenfels challenge this image. For them, moral identity is not a stable possession but an event that interrupts and unsettles the subject’s prior self-understanding. At the heart of this reorientation lies responsibility — something not chosen but imposed. Responsibility precedes reflection, arriving as a demand that defines identity before the subject can consciously assume it. Moral identity, in this sense, is not secured but disrupted, marked by an encounter that obliges a response. For Levinas, this rupture occurs in the event-like appearance of the Other’s face. The face is not a sign to be interpreted but the immediate message: “Do not kill me!” It resists reduction to an object within my horizon and commands me irreversibly. My identity is nothing other than the duty to answer this appeal. Waldenfels, by contrast, situates the genesis of moral identity in the experience of the alien. The alien cannot be domesticated into familiar categories; it interrupts my world unexpectedly and demands a response I cannot fully prepare. Yet every answer remains incomplete, haunted by what escapes assimilation. Moral identity, for him, is a continual process of responding to what exceeds me, an identity constituted through rupture and never closed. Despite their different emphases, Levinas and Waldenfels converge on a decisive point: the moral subject is not grounded in autonomy or stability but in exposure to what arrives from beyond. Ethics is not the gradual cultivation of a sovereign self but the ongoing constitution of identity through disruptive events — whether the command of the Other or the intrusion of the alien.

RESPONSIBILITY AND EVENT. AN EVENT-ONTOLOGICAL OUTLINE

Péter Makai — 2026-08-28

The study examines the ontological and moral-philosophical interrelations between event and responsibility. It undertakes to develop an event-ontological approach in which being, event, and process are not sharply distinguished from one another, but rather interpenetrate — perichoretically — as mutually enfolded elements. The event is not a rupture in the rigid order of substances, but a process interwoven with the fabric of being, giving rise to the dynamism and metamorphosis of ontological structures. The acts and events that determine the structure and horizon of human existence are of decisive significance; some of these reach us in the form of acts performed by others. The second main thesis of the study is that the person’s being is not a static given, but an ontic possibility that becomes actualized in the contingencies of encounter and of taking responsibility. Its medium is the field of influence referred to as the proximity field, and its form is the so-called alternal responsibility — one that stands neither on the ground of abstract duty (Kant) nor on that of radical otherness (Lévinas), and is grounded not merely in consequences or norms, but in the concrete and addressing presence of the second person, the ‘you.’The existence and unfolding of the person fundamentally depend on whether someone assumes responsibility for that person. This active and supportive response opens the dynamic field of sacrifice and reciprocity. The background of the inquiry is provided by a branch of realist phenomenology — referred to here as noumenology — which conceives reality not as a construction of consciousness, but as an order that calls for response. Reality exists in itself and unfolds as a multiplicity of challenges that bear an addressing character. According to the conclusion, the event is not a radical rupture but a metamorphosis — an ontological arc or wave that, in certain cases, tends toward the other person. At the same time, the contingency of the event renders visible the weight of our freedom and responsibility: Personal existence is not a necessity but a possibility that reveals itself anew — again and again.

MIDDLE VOICE AND MEDIALITY — PHILOSOPHICAL POSSIBILITIES AND LINGUISTIC CONSTRAINTS?

Zsuzsanna Lurcza — 2026-08-28

This paper explores how languages that do not conform to the active–passive verbal diatheses can offer alternatives to subject-centered modes of thought. Benveniste noted that, in the ancient Indo-European middle voice, processes occur not outside but within the subject. Due to the marginalization of the middle voice, Benveniste emphasized the need for a new grammar of action. But can we conceive a grammar that is not organized around the subject? Nietzsche critiques the belief in the centrality of the grammatical subject: Language imposes the subject–predicate structure onto reality, suggesting an acting subject, whereas in fact, there is only happening. In constructions such as der Blitz blitzt, a pseudo-subject is grammatically forced. Heidegger’s verbal ontology — die Welt weltet, die Sprache spricht, das Nichts nichtet, das Ereignis ereignet — does not aim to unmask linguistic illusion but rather presents language as an event that discloses Being. If we attempt to rehabilitate the ‘philosophy of the middle voice’ against the binary opposition of active and passive voices, a fundamental question remains: Are we capable of distancing ourselves from this binarity at the level of language? Old Chinese, Japanese, and Korean do not clearly align with the active–passive verbal division. Byung-Chul Han describes Old Chinese as a language characterized by indifference to the active-passive distinction, as well as emptiness, absencing, and selflessness. In Korean, omitting the agent or patient evokes a sense of unfolding events. Japanese also has a verbal category (jihatsu) that expresses spontaneous action without an explicit subject. My thesis is that, although both the middle voice and Old Chinese, Korean, and Japanese are free from a strict active–passive opposition, in the case of the middle voice, the happening is internalized within the subject, whereas in the above-mentioned Far Eastern languages it is subjectless. In the light of Far Eastern languages, the middle voice, the problem of the subject, and the binary subject–object dichotomy, all embedded in language, appear in a new light.

A TYPOLOGY OF EVENTS

Lasma Pirktina — 2026-08-28

The following article first examines the origins of event thinking in continental philosophy. It is a relatively new topic and is essentially connected to the critique of the subject in postmodernity. The subject has lost its unity, transparency, rationality, and power of cognition and action. It has become a passive receiver. This transformation of the world and the image of the subject is also expressed in event philosophy and is continued by it. Event philosophy confronts the subject, which has become passive, with the Other, which comes unpredictably and uncontrollably and changes everything. Nevertheless, the concept of an event is ambiguous. There is no unified continental philosophy of the event. This article attempts to present some essential approaches. It focuses primarily on the phenomenological-hermeneutic, structuralist-poststructuralist, and metaphysical or negative-ontological approaches to the study of events. Finally, the article presents the typology of events developed by the author. It is an attempt to classify various events according to their structures. The goal of this project is, on the one hand, to preserve the diversity of the event. A typology consciously works against a totalitarian and uniform philosophy of events. On the other hand, it works structurally, not limiting itself to specific events but grouping individual events into types. Within this theoretical framework, the events of life become more organized and visible. Life is illuminated.

“DEATH IS NOT AN EVENT IN LIFE. DEATH IS NOT LIVED THROUGH.” (TLP 6.4311) – DEATH AS AN EVENT AND AS THE BOUNDARY OF THE WORLD IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

Ulrich Arnswald — 2026-08-28

Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, is an intellectual giant whose work is not only proving enduring but is even more flourishing today than during his lifetime. Only one of his works was published during his lifetime, but it made him a legend in the world of philosophy: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. One sentence in the Tractatus that urgently requires interpretation is TLP 6.4311, in which he asserts: “Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through.” This sentence is surrounded by other sentences that allow for an analysis of what Wittgenstein refers to as ‘an event in life’ on the one hand and ‘the experience of death’ on the other. Wittgenstein’s thesis that ‘death is not an event in life’ has far-reaching consequences: If death is not an event in life, then it does not belong to the world. Although death is neither part of the world nor an event in life, it forms a boundary for the living and their experience. With death, temporality ends, which also points to this boundary. The philosopher does not assign any value to death. Death is neither positive nor negative, but simply a neutral event. Life only acquires meaning through death. In view of the reality of death, ethical questions are also considered, because every person must die as a human being and face death itself. With death, not only life ends, but also the world. The world ceases to exist because the subject ceases to live. Thus, the precondition for the world is no longer given. The existence of the subject ends. Wittgenstein reveals himself to be a transcendental idealist, since the transcendental subject does not belong to the world but is a condition of the world that ends with the death of the subject.

EXTENSIONALIST ONTOLOGY AND EVENT INDIVIDUATION: BASED ON QUINE’S LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION OF HERACLITUS’S THEORY OF RIVER

Yuewen Hu — 2026-08-28

Taking Quine’s logical reconstruction of Heraclitus’s Theory of River “No one can step into the same river twice” as its starting point, this paper critically explores the potential explanatory power of Quine’s extensionalist ontology for the problem of event individuation. While Quine himself never explicitly endorsed the ontological status of event, his two criterion of ontological commitment and his criterion of spatiotemporal continuity for an entity provide a unique analytical tool for grounding event individuation. By analyzing Quine’s distinction between river (as four-dimensional spatiotemporal continuum) and river stage (as instantaneous component), this paper argues that reducing event individuation to the demarcation of spatiotemporal regions offers a way to bypass longstanding controversies in traditional event metaphysics. The diachronic identity of an event does not depend on changes in attribute (such as the
replacement of water molecules or differences in flow states), but is solely determined by the continuity of the spatiotemporal region (the integrity of the four-dimensional trajectory).1 This criterion not only addresses identity disputes arising from the confusion of entity and attribute but also provides a unified logical framework for the individuation of event. The study further points out that Quine’s theory resolves traditional metaphysical dilemmas through the
semantic ascent strategy, transforming the issue of event identity into the delineation of spatiotemporal regions at the level of linguistic logic, thereby offering a methodological paradigm for naturalistic metaphysics. The conclusion highlights that although Quine’s theory does not directly address event
ontology, his extensionalist framework, by rigorously rejecting intensional standards, provides a logically parsimonious and metaphysically lightweight alternative for event individuation. This reconstruction not only deepens the analytic philosophical interpretation of the river theory but also furnishes methodological insights for contemporary debates in event theory regarding the role of spacetime and criteria of identity.

VIOLENT HERMENEUTICS: AI AND THE WEAK TECHNICAL EVENT

Marc Heimann — 2026-08-28

This paper investigates how large language models (LLMs), particularly those based on transformer architectures, inadvertently restage key insights from Heidegger’s and Lacan’s theories of language while simultaneously revealing their limitations. By foregrounding the associative and metaphorical dynamics at the heart of both LLMs and continental accounts of language, the essay situates machine learning within a broader hermeneutic framework. It discusses how vectorial associationism parallels Heidegger’s alsrelation and how attention mechanisms resonate with Lacanian metaphor, enabling local reconfigurations of meaning. Yet, unlike human language, the model’s ‘worlding’ remains a contingent performance under inscription, without an inner horizon of disclosure. What emerges is not Badiou’s Event but a weak technical event: a temporary redrawing of adjacency and accessibility within latent space. This fragility of articulation underscores the infrastructural role of metaphor, poetics, and style in shaping machine outputs, making literary practices newly central to the technological condition. In turn, I argue that human–AI interaction is best understood not through the lens of ideology or subjectivity, but as a form
of literacy or hermeneutics where inscription reorganizes the calculable field.

BREATHING AS EVENT IN POETRY

Csongor Lőrincz — 2026-08-28

The paper explores the interrelations and tensions between breathing, voice, and language, along with their effects on poetry’s performative aspects and reception. It emphasizes the twofold connection between breathing and language: On the one hand, breathing displays various physiological substructures of language, and, on the other hand, it is always a linguistic phenomenon formed by language. It outlines the contexts of anthropological and philosophical theories about breathing, and from there approaches some key concepts of poetic theory. The paper discusses the theoretical framework of the lyric and applies it to a poem by Ágnes Nemes Nagy, it focuses on the poetic principles of breath and breathing in modern poetry and lyric theory as effects of poetical events. The main question hereby is as follows: How can linguistic and bodily (im)materiality become a genuine textual event in literature (in poetry) and which kind of framework does it presuppose to achieve the characteristics of event also regarding repeatability? Since breathing owns a spiritual or kairotic meaning (cf. “Atemwende” in Paul Celan), it can be allegorized also as an event between history and a dimension beyond historical time — perhaps as an allegory of the
literary event as well?

PREPARING FOR AN IMPOSSIBLE EVENT: LINGUISTIC PERFORMATIVITY AND POETIC ADDRESS TO THE ABSOLUTE OTHER — READING RILKE WITH DERRIDA

Hajnalka Halász — 2026-08-28

The essay argues that an event, if it deserves the name, is singular, unrepeatable, and thus unmediable: It cannot be represented or secured by prior conventions. It can only be prepared for through an unconditional turning-toward. Following Derrida, I propose that lyric apostrophe is the figure of this preparation: Not a mechanism that enables the event but an exposure that keeps the future (the to-come) open to whatever arrives. Reading Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy, I analyze the poem’s address to the Earth as an exemplary scene. The apostrophe singled out from the elegy does not merely illustrate praise;
it presents, within the conventional act of concluding a covenant, the once-only character of a life’s traces — the singular marks of a singular life — which require attestation. Reframing apostrophe as preparation rather than mediation, the essay departs from standard accounts of lyric address. Here apostrophe does not establish a symmetrical exchange with a responsive addressee, nor does it fold time back into a reversible ‘now’. It stages an irreversible call in which the mortal addresses the mortal, and this address requires a witness: The Angel, who both threatens with erasure and promises the survival of the very trace it attests. Contrary to readings that construe the Angel as a timeless, undivided transcendence, I read — by bringing de Man and Gadamer into tension — the Angel as a real witness at once inner and outer, intra- and extratextual, not a guarantor of presence but the instance that exposes the trace and attests — without guaranteeing — to its survival.

CTHULHU’S RESURGENCE AS AN EVENT: MEDIATION AND PERFORMATIVITY IN CHINESE ONLINE NOVELS

Xiaoyue Zhang — 2026-08-28

In contemporary China, the Cthulhu Mythos has been reconfigured through online literature as a cultural practice that entwines critiques of neoliberal globalization with reflections on technological modernity. Drawing from Lovecraft’s motifs of ineffability and madness, Chinese online novels such as Lord of Mysteries and Dao of the Bizarre Immortal relocate cosmic horror into the narrative logic of time travel and digital mediation. The trope of transmigration destabilizes linear, progressivist temporalities and exposes the fragility of the rational order that underpins neoliberal techno-realism. Within this framework, madness ceases to be a pathological endpoint, as in classical Lovecraftian tales, and instead becomes a mode of action: protagonists negotiate fractured realities, oscillating between virtual and physical domains, and transform cognitive collapse into survival strategies. These works thus register the experiential conditions of the digital age, in which algorithmic systems dissolve the boundaries of subjectivity and cyberspace internalizes the asylum once located at society’s margins. At the same time, they gesture toward new symbolic orders by reframing irrationality as a performative practice through which meaning emerges from interactions between individual agency and networked technologies. In this way, Chinese Lovecraftian online fiction functions as a mediated response to cultural disorientation in the post-COVID era.

DELIVERED WORLD. THE ONTOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE EVENT IN GÜNTHER ANDERS’ CRITIQUE OF TELEVISION

Simon Angerer — 2026-08-28

As one of the earliest theorists of television, Günther Anders postulated a so-called ‘co-substantiality’ of man, technology and media almost ten years before Marshall McLuhan did. According to Anders, television has remodelled human’s way of being (Seinsweise) and established new modes of experience, unfolding far-reaching consequences for the degrees of reality of different spheres of being itself. These effects result from the characteristics of broadcast TV images, which are simultaneously present and absent and can therefore be described as phantoms. Hence, they are characterized by a peculiar ‘ontological ambiguity’,
which also concerns the metaphysical, ontological, phenomenological, and socio-critical dimensions of the event. In Anders’ understanding, television as a media technology plays a key role in the transformation of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) and the formation of a cultural environment that he labels as a post-ideological land of milk and honey (post-ideologisches Schlaraffenland), an argument that is quite prophetic considering subsequent media-historical developments. When Anders argues that events only become socially significant in their form of reproduction, this points to a change in the dynamics of the cultural-technical production and distribution of events. Furthermore, this very change points to an equally worth investigating coupling of a certain mediality with the criterion of eventfulness, whereby conventional forms of being of the event are displaced. This is because the matrix performance (Matrizenleistung) of broadcast events has comprehensive anthropological consequences. This article intendsto shed light on the formation of Anders’ concept of the event in its relation to that of media-events in its media-historical and philosophical contexts.

HAUNTED MEDIA: MOBILIZING RADIO DURING THE NOVEMBER REVOLUTION

Charlotte Reihs — 2026-08-28

Media technologies constitute an integral part of social events and play a significant role in modeling political and cultural transformations and interventions. The implementation of new mass media, such as the development of radio technology in the late 1910s, fundamentally changed modes and methods of mobilization of the public sphere. Radio was the first technological device that enabled live transmission of acoustic material and was able to simultaneously reach multiple recipients in different places. Thus it profoundly modified knowledge production and forms of protest. The emergence of new forms of media protests and mobilization strategies will be traced by focusing on one specific event of revolutionary unrest in the German Empire which used radio technology years before public broadcasting officially began: The so-called Funkerspuk (Haunting of Broadcasting). This ‘haunting’ event occurred in 1918 during the November Revolution, a period of drastic social, political and economic upheaval, when former soldiers, now organized as revolutionary Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, occupied the central news bureau of the German Empire and made use of the former military radio systems to proclaim the victory of the socialist revolution and to coordinate further political actions. From November 1918 to February 1919, they appropriated the state’s means of communication technology and were able to effectively challenge the state’s news monopoly by transmitting their own messages as well as alternative reports on current events. The revolutionaries used multiple media (broadcasts, telegrams, magazines, street rallies) as tools and techniques for socio-political agitation and extended the previous frameworks for mass mobilization both in practice and in theory. The presentation aims to shed light on a heterogeneous discursive network highly interconnecting media activism and governmental critique of power. Centering Funkerspuk as a media event allows the reconstruction of early media usage and ideological history of German radio during the interwar period — and beyond.