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The political event as a manifestation of the

incompleteness of society

Thinking the emergence of political event and the limits of its

meaningful articulation, based on the ontological and political

thought of Jean-Luc Nancy

Heraklitos Iosifides

Supervisor: dr. Aukje van Rooden

University of Amsterdam

Research Master Philosophy

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1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Introduction ... 2 1. Challenging democracy ... 4 (Mis)using a concept ... 4

The old totalitarianism ... 6

The new totalitarianism ... 8

The question(s) of the event ... 10

2. A first philosophy of the political event ... 12

Community or society? ... 12

Why community ... 14

An ontology of the event ... 18

3. Questions without answers ... 21

The political (in) common ... 21

The in-common of the political ... 23

4. Histories of the political event ... 27

The Paris Commune ... 27

The Arab Spring ... 29

The incompleteness of the political event and the incompleteness of a democratic “regime” ... 31

Conclusion ... 35

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Introduction

The—admittedly turbulent—last century, ended with the declaration of an end. After the fall of Iron Curtain, Western liberal democracy prevailed and presented itself as the culmination of the political evolution. Fukuyama (1992) reports that the effect of Western liberal democracy was not perceived as a mere transition or passing into a new period, but ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’ (Fukuyama, 1992: xi) which is a form free from irrationalities, internal contradictions (ibid.) and the one that allegedly ‘has survived intact until those days’(Fukuyama, 1992: 45). Fukuyama himself identifies with the Hegelian legacy by way of Alexandre Kojève. Kojève (1969) argued that the progress of history must lead toward the establishment of a ‘universal and homogenous State and to the absolute Knowledge that reveals complete Man realized in and by this State’ (Kojève, 1969: 139). That would be a post-political age which means practically, for the writer, ‘the disappearance of wars and bloody revolutions. And also the disappearance of Philosophy; for since Man himself no longer changes essentially’ (Kojève, 1969: 159). The disenchantment of such declarations reveals the need to redefine the being and sense of political event-ness and also revealed the impotency of theoretical schemes for the capturing of political events and their foresight.

My thesis will investigate the fragility of these declarations seek the complete articulation of an end (of revolutions, of the history of man, of political thought etc), focusing on the political event as a manifestation of the incompleteness of social reality and of all meaningful constructions or presuppositions that are intended to exhaust and completely master it by means of signification and intervening administration. I will refer mostly to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, his articulation of the meaning of being as a being-with and its possibilities, and his contribution to the discussion of the political as an element of our co-existence. To be able to designate the political event, I will, initially, present the conceptual way in which the political was silenced in the political conceptualization of western liberal democracies. Then, I will pass into a more solid ground, that of the ontological analysis of political event-ness. The rearticulating of the meaning of the political event will take place on this ground.

The task of the first part will be the description of a totalitarian element that has been developed in our modern liberal democracies, although it is not exclusively to be found there. I will refer to old forms of totalitarianism as examples of communities which determinate their essence and their destiny appealing to historical reason or the myth, bounding their present. This bounding of present implies that all political questions and answers alike are provided proleptically. The silencing of the political represents for me the silencing of questioning (by implementing consensus and conceptualizing itself as a rational unity) and is to be also found in liberal democracy. The demand for meaning in these societies, is increased as political reality resists its meaningful designations or it surprises its already fixed political understanding. The second part will probe the designation of the ontological ground on which a political event is emerged, as constitutive for a different approach in the sense of co-existence and political events. It is an ontological description of being-with and the way we think common being as its sole truth, after the erase of societal presuppositions. Additionally, the designation of the ontological appearance of the event is

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intended to give its non-awaited, non-prescribed character. In the third part I will explain elaborately on the term of difference as the impossibility of a community to essentially identify itself and its event-ness. I will follow the Heideggerian designation of ontological difference. It can be summed up as the difference between Seiendes and Sein , ‘the difference between what there is and the being of what there is, the difference between beings [ontic level] and being [ontological level]’ (Nicholson, 1996: 357). What it concerns me the most is the societal concentration to the ontic level and the need to retrace the question of its very existence, overcoming its given meaning: ‘the question of the possibility of ontic knowledge [led back to] to the question of that which makes this ontic knowledge possible’ (Heidegger, 1962b: 16). In those case where the meaning of being is already given, the questioning of the same meaning is exiled from the political scene. An analogy of that can be found in the question of the political, whose meaning is to be found to the questioning of its essence. The event can be seen as the tension between a general meaning of being (which for Nancy represents a nothingness since is exhausted in its various names and appropriations, and its non-empirical presence), and its taking place as something still indefinable (the event for Nancy is unique, innumerable, and rare) (Nancy, 2000: 172-3, 175). Thus, the thinking of the being of a community is the thinking of its ontological difference given by the event. The political element can be manifested on the way we think/question the event and our common being.

My aim is not to come up with a complete signification of the political character of an event either the political as such. What I want to do, is to expose the limits of the meaningful political articulations on social reality and (futility of) the attempt to master its being and its meaning. I believe that the demand for such sovereignty over social reality keeps taking place by the certainty provided by the conception of complete, self-sufficient forms of subjects. The individual and its society are seen as complete essences which have to be reified. They are subjects and objects in history which evolve and progress for their realization, something which will bring them also into completeness (the concept of destiny [Bestimmung] also serves as an impetus for the demand of completeness). The Community, as it is conceptualized, is primarily a form which seeks its completeness to signify its essence. An ontological analysis of the truth of a being-with which is aware that it is enabled, each time singularly plurally, as a sense of being and being of sense through difference with signification, will highlight the political event as a manifestation of the incompleteness of the abovementioned subjects. This incompleteness corresponds in a way in which we think being; a being which remains incomplete and it gets renewed by its events. Thinking the political meaning of these events is thinking on the incompleteness of sense which is enabled by its questioning.

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1. Challenging Democracy

(Mis)using a concept

Democracy is probably the concept that is most dominant in the political scene in our time. The term is commonly presented by those who publicly use it as something positive and particularly as the lesser evil than other historical experiences of political regimes in the western world1. This assertion is present in every attempt for the self-justification of the word since the concept expresses, etymologically, in an inclusive manner, the reification of rights and freedoms of all people constituting society2. It can be said that the concept totalizes and is totalized since it stresses the totality of subjects while it functions as the stressing force of its own self-justification. The unity, derived from democracy, claims to include every part of society. This process is standing on the immediate reference to a people as a subject (consisted by autonomous agents/individuals) capable of expressing their reality, while this reality occasionally needs interventions and systemic changes for its improvement. This relation between democracy and its subject, between a meaningful concept and an actual real reference (i.e. the demos) representing the subject and the object of the concept of democracy, that ‘hypertrophy of sense or the meaning’ (Nancy, 2010: 33) is taking place. Jean-Luc Nancy in his work The Truth of Democracy, argues that the incommensurable value of demos and subsequently democracy lead us to the inference that democracy is first of all a metaphysics and only afterwards a politics (Nancy, 2010: 34). What he explicitly points out (referring to liberal western democracies) is the thinking of a hardly defined concept ‘as a form of thought, a grabbing hold of existence’ and the constant process of sovereign politics to ‘stretch the meaning or sense of a word to make politics equal to metaphysics’ (Nancy, 2010: 33-4). What interests me is the use or the stretch of the meaning of democracy, frequently, as the self-legitimized alibi for measures for the regulation of social relations. The same measures are presented as taken in the name of democracy, with the term working simultaneously as motivation for and legitimization of those measures.

Western capitalistic politics have adopted a managerial conception of democracy, emphasizing the need of self-assured regulative interventions in societies3; a form of governance tasked with the reproduction of a model of administration of society and its material resources. This, mostly economic, approach to governance, where ‘self-sufficiency continuous to dominate the representation of “politics”’ (Nancy, 2010: 48) insists that the reliability of such a model is its effectivity and productivity according to calculative reasoning. This central function of managerial democracy is usually concealed behind the

1“… democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Speech by Winston Churchil in the House of Commons (11 November 1947), published in 206–07 The Official Report, House of Commons (5th Series), 11 November 1947, vol. 444, cc.

2"government of the people, by the people, for the people” is the concise definition Abraham Lincoln

gave to democracy, see: Conant, S. (2015), The Gettysburg Address, New York: Oxford University Press.

3 Jean-Luc Nancy refers to the ex-president of French republic, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the mis-appropriation of May ’68 by him as example. The self-assurance of democracy by those who are in charge of the administration of society functions, mainly, as implement for own purposes. See Nancy (2010: 1-3)

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rhetoric of a political progress analogous to the technological one. The outcome of a techno-economical conceptualization of democracy is the terrain of what I will refer to as new totalitarianism. While alternative approaches to democracy and to the thinking of productive forces in society are usually connected with old forms of totalitarianism, the political involvement of people as their capacity to retrace the meaning of concepts and their presence within these procedures, is decreased. What essentially seems to be excluded is the questioning of this process.

Questioning a broadly used concept necessitates its retracing. Democracy from the Greek demos (the people) + kratein (to hold power, to rule) signifies the condition where political power is in people’s hands. “People” was not an abstract word representing the whole population but those free—from their individual mundane needs—men who were taking part in the polis’ life which means ‘in an essentially differential and not “totalizing” city’ (Nancy, 2010: 46), in order to achieve a higher form of life, the life of theory (bios theoretikos) (ibid). Athenian demos, as a body, was defined by its distinction from the other spheres of social life by being subjected to the multiplicity of logikoi (the men of logos), while current politics rely on the fixation of the meaning of democracy and its use as a political instrument. The principle of demos and the constitutive character of this body for the polis is lost in modern democracies and replaced by the conception of human resources. Today’s mainstream politics treat demos theoretically as something known and definable, although variable in the different historic constellation. It identifies demos as a unity of individuals and emphasizes the need for ruling them in an adequate way instead of letting demos address the question of the ruling. The fact that the term survived until our days has nothing to do with the authoritative and foundational character that it had for the polis of Athens. Demos is, now, not the mere foundation but a concept representative of the social body, a broad, although manageable subject/object ‘in the modern world, where the social and the political realms are much less distinct. That politics is nothing but a function of society, that action, speech, and thought are primarily superstructures upon social interest, […]is among the axiomatic assumptions Marx accepted uncritically from the political economists of the modern age.’ (Arendt, 1958: 33). In this world, what is dominant is the subjugation (of politics) ‘to the imperatives of exactitude and definition’ (Marchart, 2007: 87) mobilized by the ‘desire to objectify’ as ‘the positioning of a subject capable of performing intellectual operations which owe nothing to its involvement in social life.’ (Lefort, 1988: 12). Appealing to democracy as a form of governance of society, represents the demos as given (object) while examines effective forms of kratein. What is at play is the will to rule or master and not to understand the infinite nature of a political body consisted of men who infinitely transcend themselves4. Under this perspective, society is effective as long as it manages to rule itself in the most (self-) productive way.

My claim is that modern democracy exists meaningfully on the ground of its modern “values,” values which were expressing the necessities for the mere persistence of life, needs which were infra-political in its ancient version; political activity was rather ‘the freedom from the necessities of life and compulsion by others’ (Arendt, 1958: 14). The modern subject of democracy, the individual, is deprived of its civility since its political character is not founded on the distinctive character of his position and stance within polis

4Nancy recalls Pascal and his words “Man infinitely transcends man” to indicate the self-productive modern subject who find himself surpassed by the events. Blaise Pascal, cited from Nancy, “The

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but is diffused on his/herself as abstract identity. It is an autotelic form of subject, already given and realizable regarding its given potentialities. This is a subject which can articulate a definition for democracy bridging reality with the political vocabulary. Representation through elections appears to be able to resolve and address the problem of fair political involvement and accessibility to their political reality since individual wills can be expressed adequately. What designates this form of democracy is a will for mastery, a certainty about the outcomes of its function and possibilities. It’s a self-knowledge of self-sufficiency that occupies individuals and collectivities. These traits are projected as the foundations of a political life. Self-sufficiency of politics and subjects enables to present their self-assurance based on a reasoning of calculations over their finite identity. In this societal form, the figuration of a political unity is presented. This figuration is what enables societies to provisionally act in the best-laid way to achieve the goals of an already defined future.

The old totalitarianism

Before sketching the dimensions of the process of self-signification of modern western societies, it will focus on the concept of totalitarianism as the attempt to make the common being meaningful and direct through the abovementioned stretching of the meaning of words to grab hold of existence (Nancy, 2010: 33-4). In a totalitarian condition, the figuration of the community has taken place as the ‘substantialization—a re-incorporation or reincarnation […] of the social body’ (Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1997: 127). Through its completion and its generalization to all empirical phenomena, the political and especially its questioning—became unapparent (Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1997: 126). What is conceptually apparent is the governance of an imposed meaning effacing the presence of community and its direction. Communities are following a constitutive theoretical paradigm and are evolving according to it.

The case of Nazism can be illuminating. Here, the will for access to and articulation of an essential content of community is prominent as nowhere else. The pursuit of the originality of the community is escalating in what Lacoue-Labarthe calls the haunting of Gestahltung (Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1997: 151), the haunting of figuration; a haunting which circulates the specificity of an identity to be performed and protected. The appeal to community’s myth also works as the expression of ‘the demand for the appropriation of the means of identification, judged […] more decisive than those of the means of production.’ (Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, 1997: 153). Identification is not knowledge or a point of reference. It is the only and most foundational point of reference—an element which completes it as Subject (Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, 1997): 151) —for a community consisting an organic unity. As Nancy mentions community is ‘giving way to a unicity and a substantiality [...] the community that becomes a single thing (body, mind, fatherland, Leader [...])’ (Nancy, 1991: xxxix). Furthermore, the role of Gemeinschaft in Nazi ideology indicates ‘clearly what the logic of this being of togetherness can imply’ (ibid.). From a historical-sociological perspective that worked as the nullification of class distinctions as ‘a path to integrate workers into national life [...] Its democratic or populist quality was crucial to its appeal. The people’s community was also always a statement of collective strength.’ (Fritzsche, 2008: 39). Following the mythical projection of their national past, Nazis ‘refurbished the prospects of Germany’s greatness in the future. They hammered away at internal and external enemies—Jews, profiteers, Marxists, the Allies—who allegedly obstructed national regeneration.’(ibid). Identity’s construction finds its ground in a glorious past, and its

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grandeur is there to be appointed. This appointment is connected not with the identity but with the sense of completion which the identity conveys. The destiny is written, pre-given as is the origin. The achievement of destiny is the ultimate purpose of community, its direction and the possibility of reaching this destiny, is its communal impetus. Tracing the identity is something which has to reach completion. The figure has to be completed.

The other form of totalitarianism, that we met the last century, the so-called existing socialism, more clearly depicted in the period of Stalinism, constructed its identity in a different manner. It could be said that Marxism, in the first place, subordinated political thought to political economy accompanied with historical reason. The description of social reality was made in economic terms since the distinctive element of social beings was the production of its means of subsistence (Marx & Engels, 1998: 37) and furthermore ‘Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., that is, real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms.’(Marx & Engels, 1998: 7). Marxism was bringing a more materialistic view of the historical route of human societies where economic systems were becoming unsustainable and they, determinately, were collapsing under the light of new ones: ‘At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production […] these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.’ (Marx, 1970: 13). The concept of Communism signifies, here, a form of historical completion, the final exit of the contradictions of human societies or in Foucaults’ words ‘the fulfillment of an end to History—whether in the form of an indefinite deceleration or in that of a radical reversal.’ (Foucault, 1973: 261). The resolution of injustice would take place in a revolutionary way which was prescribed and predefined. In this way, communism is redefined as ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.’ (Foucault, 1973: 57). Furthermore, it was very crucial for individuals and groups, committed to the revolutionary action and its movement, to plan their next steps, strategy and tactics while staying loyal to Marxian legacy (see Lenin, 1932). The destination was the end and the final emancipation of humanity where all aspects of human life would be compatible with the general well-being: ‘In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’ (Marx & Engels, 1948: 31). The case of Stalinism revealed these premises of an appropriation of social reality, and self-organization of a class which is entitled with the historic task to bring the end5. Under this scope, individuals are to bear the production of themselves and their society, verifying and fulfilling the ‘reasonable’ movement.

A commonplace for both of these regimes is what psychanalytically could be described as narcissism. Narcissism is not exhausted in worshiping an original grandeur or providing a precise model for the self-knowledge and mastery. As it is deployed in social reality— something that can be measured in the harmful consequences of totalitarianism and the distortion of communal relations—narcissism tends to exclude the other6. Otherness is

5 The reason of history is presented by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe as the distinctive transcendental trait of Stalinism (Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, 1997: 129).

6 “For Narcissus, the good other is a dead or excluded Other”. Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, “La panique politique,” Retreating the political, p.11

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unfitting for the configured conception of the political completion not because of its appearance or manifestation but because it questions the identity of society or the societal process and its, allegedly, necessary and rational stages. It is incompatible with the figuration of the community, the route to its destiny or the orthodoxy of a political process which has to obey some basic pre-given steps. A political program is running to realize the completion of the figure or identification of community and what is disturbing for this program is without a place in it. Irruptive forces should are not acceptable since this would destabilize all claims of the program which is on mode. The totalitarian horizon is, in that perspective, built on the assumption that everything is already political—in a pre-given way; a way which gives a complete articulation of what is there in social reality and what is political in this reality. Since the withdrawing of the political from the social sphere, looks impossible, what is put forward is the exclusion of other conceptions or emergences of political being.

The new totalitarianism

Liberal democracy is usually presented as the best possible form of governance of all we have seen in modern time. The abovementioned totalitarianisms are presented on the other hand as inexplicable evils which have been overcome by humanity: they belong to a past of a history of political experiments, constructing tremendously severe or failed attempts to organize itself. The writers of the Retreating the Political would disagree with this position. For them, the moral condemnation of old totalitarian regimes served to eclipse the questions about their totalitarian elements (Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1997: 116). Although the will for accessibility to the reality and the identity of the community is philosophically substantial for a totalitarian regime, the same form of regime is not as obscure as is designated. The philosophical will for completion is concealed from many accounts of the totalitarian phenomenon while the concealment of totalitarian facts in modern democracies is taking place in the concepts that they use. These facts are leading essentially to the formation of a new totalitarianism.

With direct reference to the Human Condition of Hannah Arendt, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe borrow three traits of the complexity of a “new totalitarianism” (Lacoue-Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1997: 129), which represents the modern western democracies and their function. The animal laborans as it is described in Arendt (1958: 320-5) has prevailed as anthropological type; as the worker or producer shouldered with the task of the material reproduction of his life and the broader reproduction of the economic capital. Common life is conceived and regulated under the demand for its subsistence as life, as a collectivity of life’s needs to be covered and not as a public or a political end in itself for the theoria, the higher and distinctive activity for the well-being of a zoon politikon. In Aristotle’s Politics the gathering of these citizens, endowed with logos and with the right of presence in the public space, aims at the highest good, the highest community (Aristotle. & Jowett, 1885: 2) where they, openly, think of good life; the modern democratic conception of politics is aligned, mainly, with the subsistence of the social body. Additionally, the loss of authority as the loss of the foundations goes, in this case, hand in hand with the loss of freedom since the engagement with humankind’s immanent condition of nature subordinated to its natural necessities as natural obligations. In the case of the old totalitarianism, the foundations were moved from the sphere of transcendence to the collective identity or the historical reason. What is happening with the new totalitarianism is the retreat of transcendence

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from the political by the dissolution of the latter in every sphere of common life, where the latter is seen in economic terms as the enlargement of the household into the social (Arendt, 1958: 35-40). This loss of distinction between polis and household brought the total immanence or ‘the total immanentisation of the political in the social.’ (Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1997: 115). Also, it was the enclosure of the political in our natural globality, which was originally the meaning of physiocracy (government by nature) and its replacing by the priority of economic concerns (Nancy, 2010: 48). Freedom, in this perspective, is undermined because of the homogeneity of all aspects of life, the loss of distinction between political and economic activity and the prevalence of the latter over the first. The new totalitarianism consists of an ‘eco-socio-techno-cultural complex’ (Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1997: 129) manifesting the all-encompassing nature of liberal democratic societies. It is a domination of a conception of politics embedded and included in this complex, where everything is evaluated on the basis of its calculative effectiveness and as long as it supports it. Politics, as it is incorporated in western democracies, converts itself into a technological form of regulation or organization of the social. Following the predominant political, economic analysis, societies are working in their self-productive way in order to ensure the common well-being as it is expressed in terms of economic subsistence (in any sovereign form which is capable of expressing what economic subsistence means). What is at stake here is a process where all genuine political questions are silenced (Marchart, 2007: 66). Due to this process which is presented to be the result of an unbreakable, social consensus is systematically constructed on the basis of social subsistence. When everything is political the result is that nothing is political since the questioning about the political is silenced by its obviousness. The political, as the collective thinking and questioning of the meaning of co-existence, is retreated through its natural obviousness in all life’s spheres. The obviousness of an assumption that totalizes reality leaves space for nothing else than politics as we saw it before, as something ‘merely in charge of order and administration’ (Marchart, 2007: 67). Politics is becoming something obvious in the unfolding of technological actions and thoughts that are based on empirical calculations and the programming of society.

The functionality of these schemes and the effectiveness of administration to meet the expected results or to resolve the current problems is something that dismisses of the possibility of questioning. The self-evidential character of the process is linked with the loss of metaphysical foundations, the immanentism and the replacement of public space and political life by the economy. In an immanent world whose material resources are finite and calculable, wasting or economically inutile treatment of resources is something catastrophic and self-destructive. Modern democracies would be hostile to what Nancy calls—referring to the Greek polis—thinking of the political for ends other than the organization or administration of society (Nancy, 2010: 46). Their destiny could be reduced to the immanent limits which also identifies them. The greatest results can be reached when all forces behave as a unity serving the main task. In this scheme, politics can serve by offering an institutionalized plan of the policies and administrative measures that are needed. Zoon politikon becomes a mere zoon (living being) since politics, from the outset, is defined and is specified as the science of social and individual subsistence incapable of covering other necessities than those which an animal would have.

The expansion of demos, which was a specific body, to the total population of society, did not imply the expansion of political concerns or the spreading of political action but rather the extinction of the political element by its diffusion to various spheres of common life and

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its substitution to economy. This substitution is concealed by the ‘total and, totalizing, all-encompassing or en-globing’ (Nancy, 2010: 47) process of the conception of the political whereby there is ‘in the final analysis no difference between “everything is political” and “everything is economic”’ (ibid.). Social consensus is the outcome of and, also, the ground for the operation of dominant politics to this totalizing self-reproductive direction and the way to ensure the continuation of this process. The extinction of otherness, as I mentioned it above, goes hand in hand with totalitarian politics. Also it assigns a sense of meaningful completion of the given political accounts for the implementation of certain intervention and measures in social reality as necessary and justifiable (since they derive ‘from the self-sufficiency of a “man” considered as the producer of his own nature and, through it, of nature in its eternity’ (ibid.) while being restricted by the ‘demands’ of the same nature ). In this context an already presented reality to come through a self-productive work. What it is excluded from the process (which remains a process of calculations), is the possibility of irrupting and questioning these mechanisms. This would imply the radical doubt for the function of the complete formation of the present and future since the reality of this politics is found on the conceptualization of its completion.

The question(s) of the event

The moment of irruption of the sense of completion is what I want to highlight as the political event. A word such as revolt could substitute the term. The event is something which happens and becomes visible when a sufficiently large group of people articulate their co-presence in a different way than the given one; when they express their co-existence in a way that destabilizes, questions and gives a different sense to what it was considered to be common being. A revolt breaches the established order of things when people decide to put an end to the existing conditions which seem unbearable. It, also, expresses the loss of legitimacy of a government allegedly democratic. This loss of legitimacy has not to do with a specifically adopted program but, it could be said, it is the loss of the ground of any legitimacy. A political event is an emergence within a community which cannot be explained and calculated by the dominant politics. As will be explained thoroughly in the third chapter, the presence in common and the sharing of this common sphere is, as Nancy claims, a ‘break with all predictive calculations’ (Nancy, 2010: 16). All attempts and plans for the restriction of such events never prevent or calculate them in their emergence. The event is, subsequently, opposing to a theoretical or conceptual view of community as a fixed unity or totality. Common visions aspirations and historic paths seem not to work and not to be acceptable by all. That brings to fore the issue of the homogeneity of the social body and the impossibility of its endurance since it is proven to be an ideological construction working, at the same time, as means and end.

The meaningful content of a community, how community designates itself, also brings to the surface the question of the essence of the political event(s). Still, referring to our days in the aftermath of the fall of Iron Curtain or observing the ongoing ‘arab spring’, it can be initially said that these sort of events ‘fundamentally challenge the dominance of the theoretical models that are most used today to frame political causality’ (Volpi, 2014: 156) being also unfitted to broad historical assumption. A representation of the completion in a society contains various models of incorporating the so-called legacy of political events that took place. It aims to offer a historic account of the event-ness of the past in order to formulate a picture of the present where the current reality could rely on. But a political event seems to resist this. Talking about the legacy of the event is arguing for the closure of it and its

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integration to a completion of the present political condition. Nancy, referring to May ‘68, writes that ‘there is no legacy. There is no death. Its spirit has never stop living.’(Nancy, 2010: 4) to emphases the resistance of such events towards entering the essential realm and get identified with a certain meaning. The live-ness of the political event is not exhausted by the disparate efforts, by dominant politics, to oppress its real extents nor by the continuation of those conditions which will always provoke its emergence and of course of an incompleteness of modern democracies which will remain unable to extinct the possibility of novelties and revolts. The foundation of this possibility is the constant co-presence of reasonable beings, of those who are subjected to logos. ‘Man of logos, the one who is properly the zoon politikon’ (Nancy, 2010: 49) is the subject who has access to a political life, equal right to utter his presence into the public and gets value, strength and self-realization through that (Herodotus, 5.78.1); a form of life which is akin to the plurality of beings and questions. This common character of social life, as a constant reconstitution of plurality, is the escape from the condition of the animal laborans.

A political event cannot be assessed and analyzed by the existing analytic tools. In its historical novelty, it ‘can only be discerned by setting aside all categories’ (Nancy, 2010: 4) of its historic evaluation or examination. It seems even more impossible to find a consensus about it or to attempt to impose one since that would be the absolute retreat of the event as such. It is more an affirmative profession free of identification. Furthermore, it seems like it endures more as long as it is resisting the identification and the political agreement on its essence. Of course, no new orthodoxy is conveyed in it. As I tried to explain, totalized politics constructed their societies—and the need for a complete figuration of them—based on the finitude of their being as the immanent founding of their authority. A political event which takes place within this environment is not carrying any old or new foundations, a system of beliefs or a new strictly planned form of organization which disregards the existential conditions of a common being. Rather, primarily, it takes place as the performative questioning of implemented policies which are based in measurement and order. Accordingly, at the level of society’s self-signification, in democracies where demos remains always incomplete, an event can present ‘the withdrawal from all assumptions’ (Nancy, 2010: 32).

As the modern western societies try to conceptualize and incorporate the significance of the event—by adopting, explaining, clarifying or fully rejecting it—through the imposition of a closed meaning, a political event remains an irruptive manifestation of non-history which would assist to satisfy the complete figuration of social reality in its destiny. ‘“Politics” can no longer give that measure or the place of destination or destinerrance (Derrida). It must allow it to be into practice […] but it can never assure it.’(Nancy, 2010: 32). The event cannot assure the future society; on the contrary it can be the manifestation of its incompleteness. In order to designate that, I will develop, based on the work of Jean –Luc Nancy, an analysis of the question of what is the sense of the political event. I will focus not on the manufacturing of the meaningful content of the sense of the world, but the emphasis will be on the verb “is”, to describe the ontological ground of the event as being of prime importance for its sense.

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2. A first philosophy on the political event

Community or society?

The term which is predominant in studies about human co-existence and its particular or general state of affairs is that of society. Society, in its conceptualization, represents a space for the meaningful articulation regarding the identity and the transformations on a set of individuals and, conversely, puts itself under the demand of its signification as a complete entity which expresses social reality. These meaningful articulations, as they appeared in modernity with the emergence of sociology rejected the old metaphysical gounds by constructing and maintaining an immanent productive and self-productive essence for social reality. What has been maintained, as well, was the philosophical groundlessness or arbitrariness. Attempting the ontological description of an event of political importance, the respective ground in needed. Ontological here represents the intention to approach social reality by thinking its being and its meaning guided not by the desire for complete and closed access to this reality through significations. On the contrary, the constitutive elements that make up co-existence are to be analysed in their meaningful openness of their bare exposition and in the way which a new demand appears: a demand which ‘frees itself from signification insofar as it expressly “signifies” the limit of signification’ (Nancy, 1997: 51).

The almost unconscious substitution of the political by the social (representing a magnified private, all-encompassing realm) was clear in Thomas Aquinas, highlighted by Hannah Arendt : “Homo est naturaliter politicus, id est, socialis” (man is by nature political, that is, social). What was important in this substitution is the loss of distinction of the open exposure of the political activity and the mundane private life. Since Roman Antiquity, the social had the limited meaning of indicating an alliance between people for a specific purpose (Arendt, 1958: 22-3). A society, for Arendt, is not a distinctively human as in political condition but rather more aligned with what is considered to be ‘human nature.’ As I claimed in the previous chapter, the posterior study of society focused in the measurable elements of its field and the distinction over it, based on identified properties or common interests of different groups being part of it. Ernesto Laclau expresses this as ‘the systematic absorption of the political by the social. The political became either a superstructure, or a regional sector of the social, dominated and explained according to the objective laws of the latter.’ (Laclau, 1990: 160). On the contrary, the ancient polis, as Arendt writes, was preceded by the destruction of all organised units resting in kinship (referring to the household religion or anything that would be merely useful or necessary). The ancients considered the companionship and alliances of the human species as a limitation imposed upon us by the needs of preserving life. To put forward those needs or interests was the equivalent of the retreat of the political condition. The necessary conditions for a political life were speech [lexis] and action [praxis] in the public space (Arendt, 1958: 24). The public, as the carrier of the political, is spatially specified and not totalized. Human activity, which renders the public as such, is seen inter-subjectively and it is evaluated through the minimum recognition of its appearance.

The concept of the social evolved into the concept of society. This concept is understood by Laclau, to mean ‘simply the possibility of closure of all social meaning around a matrix which can explain all its partial processes.’7 (Laclau, 1999: 146). In the more positivistic approaches

7Laclau keeps thinking on the distinction between the society and the social, from a post-structural position, as the ‘impossibility of closing any context and among them the social context as a unified

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of modernity, as in the case of the ‘Marxist imaginary’ (Marchart, 2007: 136) it was possible to describe society as an entity or ‘social totality, since it had taken the form of an intelligible positive object.’ (ibid.) This ‘ambition of all holistic approaches […] to fix the meaning of any element of social process, outside itself’ operates as ‘an underlying principle of intelligibility of the social order,’ that is to say, ‘an immutable essence behind the superficial empirical variations of social life.’(Laclau, 1990: 90). This ‘founding totality’ (because knowledge can be founded upon it) is in contrast with the ‘infinitude of the social, that is, the fact that any structural system is limited, that it is always surrounded by an ‘‘excess of meaning’’ which it is unable to master’ (ibid.) Consequently, following Laclau’s thought, ‘‘‘society’’ as a unitary and intelligible object which grounds its own partial processes is an impossibility’ (ibid.). I will describe this excess of meaning, its appearance and its sense, referring to Jean Luc Nancy. Furthermore, on this basis, I will attempt to remove the given, meaningful societal presuppositions.

For Jean-Luc Nancy, what is known as “society” is connected with ontology merely as” the figure of an ontology yet to be put on play”, bringing the example of the social contract as an action of a finite figuration of a sociality to be established (Nancy,2000: 35). Society maintains its character as an outside to be implemented between men. At the same point, recalling other approaches which tried to see human co-existence as not exhaustible in individualistic arrangements, he notes the absence of a theory which would start from the analysis of the common being. What is, also absent is an analysis which seeks to found thinking not on the rational-individual certainty of the “I” (or a “we” representing an essential togetherness, a “founding totality”) but beginning, instead, from the “with”as the proper essence of the one whose Being is nothing other than with-one-other [l’une-avec-l’autre]’(Nancy, 2000: 34). The mastery of the “I think”—where “I” represents a complete subject—is followed by the adoption of narcissistic view of reality as we saw it in the previous chapter. The “I think”, as it was posed in Descartes (fundamentum inconcussum veritat

)

, signifies for Heidegger the absolutum fundamentum of a subject which relies on the certitude of itself ‘by guaranteeing the conformity between presentation and present’ (Richardson, 1963: 326), and consists the‘fundamentum for all possible objects in general’ (Heidegger, 2005: 202). Consequently, ‘all beings have sense […] only in terms of the subject-object relationship, and the Being-process as emergence-into-truth (non-concealment) is profoundly forgotten,’ (Richardson, 1963: 326). Objectified society (and its conception as ontology yet to be put on a play) dismisses co-existence and the common reception of what is taking place in it.

What is the actual demand of such a conception of modern society, in contrast with an ontological evaluation of common reality, is the demand for mastery through the meaningful expression of what is taking place—taking into account concepts like contract, authority, sovereignty, order, identity or the unfolding of political goals to be reified—or what has to take place. Seeing this proclamation of mastery over meaning, society can also be considered as the place of incompleteness as it is unable to ensure any completion but only to claim it by totalizing expressions. Totalization is understood here as the complete formation of society as a whole. This creates a tension between the meaningful apparatus in societal accounts and the social reality: ‘The desire for meaning marks in every way the modern subject’s access; and this “desire for meaning’ […] rather qualifies desire as such’ (Nancy, 1997: 31). This desire, still, cannot exhaust or be completely adequate to social reality and no matter how intense a programming or regulation of this reality is, the latter will resist it. Although this programming involves the world, it is primarily a demand for a

whole – what you have are marginal processes which constantly disrupt meaning and do not lead to theclosure of society around a single matrix.’(Laclau, 1999: 146.)

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new state of social reality which currently is absent. Any such demand is condemned to be ungrounded on real needs since it appears and is formulated in the abstract space of meaningful articulations over society. Society as entity, proves to be deprived of essentiality and, at the same time is characterized by the demand for the signification of its essence. A social program will make use of every possible means for its realization leading to a form of oblivion of common being, in the service of the implementation and realization of a certain meaning of this being. This will for meaning is seen in the scheme of man’s reflective immanence. This scheme considers man as the immanent being par excellence. A being which can affect its community by affecting its essence: ‘economic ties, technological operations, and political fusion (into a body or under a leader) represent or rather present, expose and realize this essence necessarily in themselves. Essence is set to work in them; through them, it becomes its own work’ (Nancy, 1991: 3). What is taking place, though, is the immanent incarnation of transcendence, where the demand for the self-reproduction of the—mostly—economic, social model governs the decisions over the order of things. This concept of “immanentism” (ibid.) anticipates its meaning and ‘it creates symbolic figures of immanence (mythic, communal, political, etc.) that are projected onto the horizon of transgressibility, then reflected or played back mimetically for the purpose of identification’ (Hutchens, 2005: 33). This immanentization of social reality throug self-justification, is more akin to politics as a mechanism, and as administrative field for the maintenance or the transformation of any order. A society which proceeds through politics, seems to be inadequate to capture the complexity and plurality of those beings who are considered to be social, by using identifications and generalizations. Politics of society relies on its self-projection and the immanent possibilities of man. But, as Arendt writes regarding political action, the latter ‘corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world’ (Arendt, 1958: 7).

My purpose is to describe the ground of co-existence without the ‘ground’—the old articulation of the essence of society keeping in mind this plurality of existence and avoiding meaningful totalizations. Such an articulation of society cannot but be complete. The continuous appearances of novelties, of non-awaited events, within it will manifest the way in which reality resists to this completeness. What is needed, in this case is not the explication of a common direction or a common understanding of the world but a form of analysis of the essence of our common existence. What I will focus on is the thinking of community as such, as bare co-existence or as a being-in-common following Jean-Luc Nancy to his description of this community. I will examine it as the word which represents co-existence in one concept which meaningfully expresses the mere common being, in better way than society. Thinking about community will bring me closer to a more bare ontological ground which forms the space of action and the space of thinking, resembling to the gathering of logikoi (of the those endowed with logos)illuminating, gradually, the origins and the taking place of a political co-existence and political events rather than the given, foresighted ends. Additionally, the political essence of a bare community, apart from not designating the organization of society or its identity, will be highlighted as “the disposition of community as such” (Nancy, 1991: 40); a ground on which the political event will be described.

Why community?

The ascription of meaning to our common reality, whether it’s related to the identity, the destiny or the self-reproduction of a process, does not offer a stable ground since it dismisses the plurality of reality and certainly the multiple thinking of humans within it. The articulation of this sort of meaning is the demand for its imposition. It is the identifying

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appropriation of being as destructive rage against it. The retreat of this appropriation of reality is essential for an ontological description of it and it follows that “only ontology, in fact can be ethical in consistent manner” (Nancy,2000: 21) in the sense that the existing reality of a community will always be the inevitable starting point for its political evaluation. What we need here is a theory of community which can work as the ontological ground to approach human co-existence but also intrinsically question the political in a fundamental way. The distinctive element of community is not merely the absence of a certain meaning or purpose of it by political abstraction. It is ground to start with “the original situation: the bare exposition of singular origins […] the necessary first philosophy” (Nancy, 2000:25). The community as bare co-existence signifies the space of exposition, the space of singular origins. I will treat the concept of community as an existing reality in which being is enabled and where ends are always openings.

From the very first pages of his work Being Singular Plural, Nancy makes clear that meaning is not something external to the world or something we can possess. Meaning is what we are: ‘Being itself is given to us as meaning. Being does not have meaning. Being itself, the phenomenon of Being is meaning, that is its own circulation and we are this circulation’ (Nancy, 2000:2). Meaning is not given as signification of our common being but as the ontological condition which enables its common thinking and evaluation by a community which coincides with it. This meaning is the meaning of its sharing and its circulation, ‘and we are this circulation’ (ibid.). The true meaning is this primary common exposition, recognition, and evaluation of our existence, the utterance of a “We” as meaning and being. What is needed here is a distinction between meaning (a term which appears in English translations of Nancy’s works) and sense. Meaning, as I referred to it at the beginning of this chapter, is “located” as a specific bestowal of “this” meaning, while sense ‘resides perhaps only in the coming of a possible signification’ (Nancy, 1997: 10). In other terms, ‘the very distinction between meaning-signification is the “presentation of meaning” in which the presence of a factual reality is established in an ideal mode, expressed in language alone’ (Hutchens, 2005: 47). The concept of sense is which can provide us with a better picture of the circulation of meaning within the community. Sense (Sens) is not equivalent to concepts like meaning, understanding and signification since it ‘can’t simply be the concept (or the sense) of something that would stay within an exterior reality, without any intrinsic relation to its concept (at least in the way in which we tend to understand the relation of a stone or a force to its concept)’ (Nancy, 2003: 5). Sense represents the possibility of the opening of significance to, something which takes place between those who share sense. Sense is intrinsically temporal in its (co-)appearance. It is an affirmation of the fact that we do not have the world or its meaning at our disposal because of sense’s openness to us and to its own signification. It does not belong to the world or the community but it stands as a middle voice or a “between” that is, ‘sense takes place on every occasion of existence alone, on every singular occasion of its response-responsibility; but this also means that sense is the lot, the share of existence, and that this share is divided between all the singularities of existence.’ (Nancy, 2003: 13). It is stretched out in or as common being, and at the same time, it constitutes community through its sharing. This sharing is what makes being sensible in the same way in which an actual or unconditional sharing can be only sensible and not pre-given. Following this, the common being can be uttered as “we are” which is the same with “we share sense”.

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Community, as the co-existence of logikoi, is constituted on this ability to say “we,” being “restricted” only by the openness and sensibility of that. The circulation of the sense, as it’s pointed out by Nancy, goes to all directions, in a way which enables human communities to say “we to themselves in all possible senses of the expression and by saying we for the totality of all being.” (Nancy, 2000: 3). This temporal circulation should be dissociated from any mastery over the world in terms of any progression or linearity or the gaining of sovereignty over it. Instead, it resembles Nietzschean eternal repetition as an ‘affirmation of the instant[...] seized in the letting go of the instant, affirming the passing of presence and itself passing with it, affirmation abandoned in its very movement.’ (Nancy, 2000: 4). The openness of the sensible access to our being, brings up the infinite singularity of meaning as sense between sensible beings. It should not be linked to the formation and the grounding of a definite meaning (this is why meaning has to be imposed in a societal context). The plurality of origins of sense is the plurality of and by sensible beings since ‘Sensing senses […] itself sensing’ (Nancy, 2003: 5) establishing the relation with the other. At the same time, the “strangeness” of otherness becomes sensible which is, here, not another thing or something coming from another subject but it refers to ‘the fact that each singularity is another access to the world’ (Nancy, 2000: 14). The sense of the community of sensible singularities is this opening of the community to itself and in itself. This opening is enabled by sense and its circulation rather than by to a destined future or a meaning of its presence. No appropriation of this way of being-in-common can take place since it is itself the sharing (of) being. Thus, the sharing of the of community as a being-with-one-another should not be understood as a being-one but, on the contrary, being one can only be understood by starting from being with-one-another.’ (Nancy, 200: 56).

The existence of being through our access to it, and the sharing of sense, is what renders being- with (Μit-sein) as more adequate for the expression and exposure of co-existence. The sharing (partage) in the community is not taking place between singular existences (Daseins), but these singularities are themselves constituted by sharing, ‘they are […] rather spaced by the sharing that makes them others’ (Nancy, 1991:25). Sharing precedes sharers and the prevalence of being-with is constitutive for them. The community does not sublate singularities in communal forms or collective meanings, but it exposes the sharing (26). Heidegger writes, “Dasein’s […] understanding of Being already implies the understanding of others” (Heidegger, 1926: 161) but this is not enough if it misses the constitutive essence of the being-with. The primacy of Mitsein and its closeness to common being, can prevent any annihilation of otherness by society since it turns ‘social’ questions into questions about being as such, hindering alienating conceptions of community. Community only bears its ontological bareness which is its ultimate exposure but also the end of human representations of it and in front of its imperative bareness. In this sense, being is not spoken, but it affirms itself as “we speak.” In its turn, the community cannot be an institution, an ensemble that speaks being but the “Being (that) is put into play as the with” (Nancy, 2000: 27).

The lack of identity characterizes the community: “Being in common means [...] no longer having, in any form, in any ideal place, such a substantial identity” (Nancy, 1991: xxxviii). On the contrary, the community is formed by the retreat of its “work” which would fulfil the identity of community (Nancy, 1991: xxxiv). It is grounded and founded on a lack of any other foundation than itself; rather on the ‘with’ than on any form of “there is”. This minimal ontological description of community is not, by definition, suspicious to any appearance of transcendence within it. What is really incompatible with community is the transcendence of

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a being supposedly immanent to community. For example, modern Western liberal politics were based on the interpretation of society as a process that always leads to the hypostasis of the common or the individual (Nancy, 2000: 59) or the maintenance of the metaphysical conception of individuals as detached subjects. This works as a foundation for the same modern managerial politics, which conceals this transcended element. To highlight the impossibility of perfect, calculable and complete immanence amongst singularities related through sense, Nancy’s poignant response is that ‘one cannot make a world with simple atoms. There has to be a climanen’ (Nancy, 1991: 3). Conversely, community needs to be explained as the ‘immanence of “transcendence”—that of finite existence as such’ (Nancy, 1991: xxxix), that is, based on the experience of the infinite (possibilities of sense) in their finitude.

Sense and value, appearing and holding their infinite status within this finitude, can come out through difference and not out of identity: ‘one sense is distinguished from the other like right from left […] and one value is essentially nonequivalent to any other’ (Nancy, 2010:23). The difference is what undoes any alleged nihilistic assumption derived from the simplicity of the conclusion about community: ‘We are exposed to the world and ourselves, and this is the sense of existence, the (only) sense of our being together, of our community […] The world is structured as sense and sense is structured as world If we are toward the world, if there is a being-toward-the-world in general, that is, if there is world, there is sense” (Devisch, 2006: para. 10) or as Nancy himself puts it: ‘The there is makes sense by itself and as such. We no longer have to do with the question “why is there something in general”, but with the answer “there is something, and that alone makes sense.”’ (Nancy, 1997:7). But sensible distinctions are not nullified. A sensible value can emerge in a finite community which does not completely transcend itself to a meaningful metaphysical notion, being aware, at the same time, that this infinite sense exists and ‘is to be found first of all in the distinction of the gesture that evaluates it, that distinguishes and creates it.’ (Nancy, 2010:22).

These distinctions of sense are the manifestation of a sensible common being which must be thought in its difference from itself, and thus in its existence. The each time singular articulation of being—of a being which is always multiple and not one—is its eventual opening which enables it to come into presence. An ontology of community brings to the fore the difference as the element which enables the community to always, already resist everything that would drive it to completion. Community itself cannot claim the full understanding of its being as this understanding is absolutely shared in an ecstatic way: If there is a sense of consciousness in community, it ‘is the interruption of self-consciousness’ (Nancy, 1991: 19). Nancy’s thinking of the community manifests the interruption of the revolving movement around social subjects, to see social being without presuppositions, revolving [tournant] on itself (Nancy, 2000: 57).

The oneness of a uniform social being is interrupted by the plurality of singular beings as its event (s). The sense of singular being is the disruption of a general being and, also, the dislocation of singularities and their disposition as allegedly solid subjects. What makes sense is our Being-with ‘with no subsumption of this meaning under any other truth than that of the with’ (Nancy, 2000: 98). No sovereignty over the truth of the event can be articulated but the singular plural spacing, as far as we infinitely understand ourselves, our being and its distinction from its taking place. What I will sketch now is an ontological description of the event as the moment of its taking place.

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An ontology of the event

The evenemential character of being is what can also be designated, through its reverse, as the thinking of the being-ness of the event, or what it means for the event to be. To describe the essence or truth of the event, we need, initially, to indicate its ontological space. The ontic truth of the event cannot be found in its conception, in its meaningful effectuation extracted from what appears in the world as something pure and simple—although it is not pure and simple at all. This process of conception as a response to the bareness of being, based on the logic of the identity of concept and thing, can describe only the advent of meaning attributed to the event and consequently can refer to the truth of the concept, missing or abstracting its ontic foundation. Nancy would argue that this logic of seeing the phenomenal appearance of the event as a manifestation of its essence, does not hold since, in this case, the concept represents the ‘phenomenon which takes hold of itself as the truth’ (Nancy, 2000: 160). This misconception of the event can be seen as the arbitrariness of inscription of meaning in reality as the most essential stage. On the other hand, the attempt to approach the event as something “pure and simple,” may abandon it to an insignificant neutrality.

If we examine the abovementioned distinction between the truth of an event and what occurs as pure and simple event, we can get closer to the conception of the latter, emphasizing the non-phenomenological substratum of the pure “which appears.” As Nancy himself puts it : ‘every presuppostition of Being must consists in its nonpresupposition’ (Nancy, 200: 56). It is a discussion about the ‘event-ness of event-ness’ or the non-phenomenal truth of what is taking place; not as a thing but as a taking place as such. The task here is dual: ‘to know the truth of what is taking place and to conceive the taking place as such’ (Nancy, 2000: 161) —where the as such is by no means mystical. The ‘as such’ represents the truth of the event before the advent of meaning and what I am attempting here is approach this bare moment. It is a question referring to the ground of (any) truth and the event as the need to conceive the truth of the taking the place of the truth, something which goes beyond truth since it is, as Nancy writes: ‘to conceive of the evenire of the true beyond its eventus’ (Nancy, 2000: 161).

The event of being is by no way an essential being (nor a particular beinig), but it is rather the taking place of being. The “there is” of the event as the moment of its appearance, the instance of the event is necessary for it to be, since is the irruption of the being as such (being as one, as a totality). As for its presence, the event represents the present insofar as it happens. As such, the event cannot be presentable in an identifiable way. The event is not just a “thing” with ontic presence but it represents the advent of a being which differs from the complete articulation of the meaning of an all-encompassing being. In this sense, the event gives ‘the question of the possibility of ontic knowledge’ by giving the existence of each, but at the same time, irrupts their essential designation and leads us back to ‘the question of that which makes this ontic knowledge possible’ (Heidegger, 1962b: 16). The unrepresentability of the present is the (ontological) difference that structures the present or, again, the difference which enables it as present. A becoming-surprise of thinking corresponds to this unexpected arrival of the present through its differentiation with total, meaningful being. The truth of this unexpected arrival is expressed by Nancy as ‘the nothing stretched to the point of rupture and the leaping-off point of the arrival where presence is presented’ (Nancy, 2000: 170). Rupture has not the sense of a break with a temporal

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