Bruno Bosteels: What is an Event? 02 Jul 2012
After 1968 not only in France: Events of the late 1960s referred to as events. What is it that happened. In what way were these events? What is the nature of the event? What happened what were the events of 1968? Requires different disciplinary forms of thinking than disciplines available at the University, Michel de Certeau started talking this way back in 1968. The event-like nature of the event. Can we think something that is of the nature of the event. New forms needed to capture the event.
What is it that makes something that happens (politics, personal relationship) what makes it into an EVENT? Eventality/eventfulness of the event. The task of thinking consists in thinking the evental nature of an event. Foucault: asked for an evental re-writing of history. To think means to think the nature of an event.
9:10 Atomists like Lucretius: CLINAMEN slight inclination when atoms fall like raindrops and then clash and form a world. Machiavelli FORTUNA: a chance that Prince can exploit in order to impose his will. Nietzche spoke of himself as dynamite, he saw himself as an event.
11:30 These notions are now seen as precursors as an event are being re-read to give us an inkling, retrospectively, we can now read literature written before Kafka and read Kafakaesque elements, philosophers of the event, in the late 1960s started to create their own precursors.
12:40 Theoretical constellation at the end of the 1960s and where does Event intervene?
Event: brings together 2 traditions of thinking that were at loggerheads: STRUCTURALISM, what keeps a structure together? the action of the structure, taking away agency of more subject-centred theories, many structuralists started investigating nature of the structure. The truly masterful structural analysis of work of art is not one that reduces structure to a flat grid of understanding of the different laws that hold together a work of art but the one that sees the inner excess, the structure seems to escape itself, inncer excess that it cannot control. All good structuralist thinking was already a form of post-structuralist thinking. A structure could not keep itself together, ultiimately based on a form of nonsense. A dysfunctionality that was already a part of the functiioning of structure. To understand the structure is to pinpoint when the structure starts to break-down, a disruption within the logical functioning of structural machinery. These dysfunctions are gradually labelled the EVENT. Heuristically concentrate on those moments of dysfunctionality. The moments of truth through which we can understand the logic of the normal functioning
The Aberration, focus on pricipal of aberation where things get wrong, because that is the only way you can get inside and see the way things usually operate.
These moments EVENTS; are not simply structural givens, not simply aberation of machinery but requires SUB JECTIVE INTERVENTION. People are already at work on those gaps, dysfuntion only comes visible in retrospect only when subjects working on this dysfunction.
Where or how can there be a subjective intervention into our structural frames of reference and is there a way to change the very structures in whic we operate
20:00 ex and post-Althusserians: focusing on evental moments within a structure which should be a focus of structural analysis. A notion of SUBJECT AS INTERVENING in the GAP.
structural legacy combined with subjectivity and subjectivation. This is what the notion of the event allows. EVENT sits at the crossroads of Structure/subject, State/moments, System/Action
When events take place to shake up status status quo: understand the connections and changes they introduce in the current state of affairs
Event:
- element of contingency, it is not the realization of a pre-determined set of events, or the birthing of a potential already latent in history
- unpredictable
- singular: singularity, ??? A genuine event is always a certain singularity
- a radical transformative capacity, a break with status quo
Beyond this common consensus there is a wide range of differences, radically divergent. Is there ONE event or are there MANY events? Heidegger: there is only ONE event, the event of BEING itself. BEING IS THE EVENT
BADIOU: the event is not Being as Being, it exceeds or breaks with being as being. Is it Being as such as essential ontological question, or do EVENTS happen OUTSIDE philosophy: art, science, politics, love These are the events that are not philosophical, they happen behind the back of the philosopher, so what is the relation between thinking and event, philosopher and event.
Relation of event to the situation in which it occurs. Does event happen within the situation, immanent to the situation, is it already in the situation. or does it mark a radical break?? Former is Deluze: think how to actualize that which is virtually present within the situation, things as processes, multiple events that point at a general process of becoming. To attack everything that happens not from stability but from flux and becoming, and capture and actualize the virtual presences within it. Event as immanent within the situation.
Badiou: Event is a BREAK or a CUT, exceeds transcends the SITUATION.
Question of METHODOLOGY:
Deleuze: events are virtually present: questio of re-reading/teasing out, so everyting that happens can be read twice, once at level of stable identities and once at level of processes and becoming.
Badiou: Think a RUPTURE within the situation, yet not already contained virtually within it. A dialectic between the situation and the BREAK.