For Derrida, an event truly worthy of the name must be absolutely and completely irruptive, unforeseeable, and incalculable, bordering on incomprehension and surpassing and challenging its own representation, extent, and context.
Hence, an event truly worthy of the name, Derrida says, already lies beyond the domain of the possible, the domain of the possible possibilities. The event is grounded in the impossible itself.
Derrida repeatedly attempts to problematize the events of deciding, confessing, forgiving, inventing, the gift, and hospitality, saying that if such events are ever to happen, they must pass through their own impossibilities, a radical otherness, so that they could be glimpsed as events truly worthy of their names.
The event is radically singular, and thus disrupts, resists, challenges, and exceeds all attempts at describing, theorizing, interpretation, reduction, and objectification. Yet any attempt at setting forth or narrating the event and its meaning, paths, and significance must turn to the already available discursive resources.
There is thus an uncrossable chasm and a discontinuous relation separating, whilst at the same time joining together, the event and all attempts at comprehension, from which language and thought themselves arise disrupted, altered, and varied.
In A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event, Derrida observes the difference between his problematizing-deconstructing of the event — as what surprises, evades, and disrupts language, thought, and interpretation — and how today’s information machines put together, display, and record what they also call events.
Derrida places his own problematizing-deconstructing of the event over against these so-called events and says that there exists what remains irreducible to what the media produces, covers, and records. Every death in every war, for instance, Derrida says, in its singularity, exceeds, evades, challenges, and resists the assimilative and reductive coverings and recordings of today’s information machines.
In these assimilative and reductive coverings and recordings, Derrida says, there remain non-present, unpresentable, non-coverable, and non-producible traces. Such traces must be thought, re-called, and endured every time any discussion of these events is underway.
The event, despite its radical singularity, remains non-simple, self-different, and non-pure; it is never self-contained, self-sufficient, or completely present; it is shot through with lacks, absences, and differences, according to Derrida.
Although the event is non-reproducible, irreplaceable, and radically singular, it says itself through the possibility of its re-making and repetition. The event is both radically singular and iterable. This tension constitutes the event by dividing it. That is, the possibility of repetition, of being repeated and re-made, forms the event by dividing it, by rendering it divided.
Philosophy and Death
Death is a recurrent theme in the thinking-philosophizing of Plato. There are, therefore, many ponderings on grief, mourning, sorrow, and healing in the dialogues philosophizing and thinking toward death and dying. The fear of death, Plato says, burdens humans while they are awake and haunts their dreams.
Schopenhauer on Death and Afterlife
In the thinking-philosophizing of Schopenhauer, death is central because it is linked together with the “will-to-live”. Death is the fragility pervading our existence; a fragility necessarily delivering into philosophizing
At the end of Division One of Being and Time, Heidegger says that investigating the everydayness of Dasein makes understandable and hence brings nearer to Dasein’s being, yet it does not bring Dasein wholly, completely, or fully face to face with itself; that is, it does not bring “Da-sein as a whole in view”.
Heidegger on “Being-Toward-Death”
For Heidegger, death brings closer to the question of the meaning of Being: “Death opens up the question of Being”. Heidegger says that only to the human being belongs the possibility of being brought face to face with death: “Only humanity ‘has’ the distinction of standing and facing death, because the human being is earnest about Being: death is the supreme testimony to Being”.
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre criticizes Heidegger’s conception of death in Being and Time and offers his own account of the finitude of existence, which is grounded not in the certainty of death, but rather in our choices and freedom.