Thinking the Event of Things

Abstract

François Raffoul’s Thinking the Event offers us a panoramic history of philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as an ever increasingly thematized thinking of the event.1 It provides in-depth treatments of major figures in that history – Heidegger, Derrida, and Nancy, foremost among them, along with fresh interpretations of Leibniz, Kant, Nietzsche, Arendt, Levinas, Deleuze, and Marion – while also approaching the topic of the event thematically, each chapter addressing a different way of thinking the event or a different facet of the event – as beyond thought, as phenomenological excess, as things, as democracy, and/or as secret. The chapters thus build on each other and we think along as this history unfolds, our understanding of the event deepening all the while; the effect is magisterial and it is achieved by Raffoul’s command of a wide range of thinkers (his breadth), and his ability to incisively intervene in the discussion and find the through line (his depth). But this investigation of the event conducted by Raffoul also gives us Raffoul’s view, it is a view that he earns by close readings and textual engagements, culminating in what he will call “the ethics of the event.” Across the chapters, one learns a capsule history of the event in continental philosophy, and I can think of no better guide through this variegated, even treacherous, terrain. But one also learns something else, a way of thinking, if I may call it that, a way of repeatedly and thoughtfully responding to the need for an