The becoming of form

Abstract

This article offers insights on the investigation and development of an ontology of events in the wake of Martin Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event). It reads them with and against its later interlocutors concerning the establishment of a non-representational ontological realism. Dealing with recent scholarship, the article proposes to read the theoretical venture of a Leibnizian Structuralism made by Michel Serres in his 1968 dissertation Le Syste?me de Leibniz et ses mode?les mathe?matiques, and the surrounding texts from the Hermes pentalogy into the conceptual nexus of Heidegger’s ontology of events. This approach circumvents the difficulty of distinguishing lines of causation from lines of grounding which otherwise fosters a theoretical inconsistency in more Spinozist-oriented accounts without thereby succumbing to the conflation of temporalization as presence and representation. It sutures ‘formalism’ and ‘historicity’ to yield a calculus of the history of virtual forms.