Overview

What happens when something happens? In Thinking the Event, senior continental philosophy scholar Francois 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.

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9780253045133

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Raffoul's new book is a major contribution toward understanding post-Kantian Continental philosophy's effort to think about the causality of being beyond the principle of sufficient reason, to consider whether human encounter with the world might not entail something unassimilable to conceptual reason, something secret, traumatic, disruptive, haunting, and yet fundamental to the existence of consciousness. -- N. Lukacher, emeritus, University of Illinois at Chicago * Choice *

Author Information

François Raffoul is Professor of Philosophy and French Studies at Louisiana State University. He is author of The Origins of Responsibility and translator (with David Pettigrew) of Dominique Janicaud's Heidegger in France.

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