Thinking the Event [Paperback]

What happens when something happens? InThinking the Event, senior continental philosophy scholar Fran?ois Raffoul undertakes a philosophical inquiry into what constitutes an event as event, its very eventfulness: not what happens or why it happens, but that it happens, and what happening means. If, as Leibniz posited, it is true that nothing happens without a reason, does this principle of reason have a reason? For Raffoul, the event always breaks the demands of rational thought. Bringing together philosophical insights from Heidegger, Derrida, Nancy, and Marion, Raffoul shows how the event, in its disruptive unpredictability, always exceeds causality, subjectivity, and reason. It is that pure event, each time happening outside or without reason, which remains to be thought, and which is the focus of this work. In the final movement of the book, Raffoul takes on questions about the inappropriability of the event and the implications this carries for ethical and political considerations when thinking the event. In the wake of the exhaustion of traditional metaphysics, the notion of the event comes to the fore in an unprecedented way, with key implications for philosophy, ontology, ethics, and theories of selfhood.

Fran?ois Raffoul is Professor of Philosophy and French Studies at Louisiana State University. He is author ofThe Origins of Responsibilityand translator (with David Pettigrew) of Dominique Janicaud'sHeidegger in France.

Timely, provocative, carefully reasoned and argued, and astonishing in its scope. It is a hugely ambitious book that sets out to show how the notion of event in contemporary continental philosophy has utterly transformed not only our thinking of the event but also our thinking of thinking, that is to say, philosophy, ontology, ethics, and theories of human subjectivity.

This is a major contribution to philosophical scholarship on a topic that has become increasingly ls[