Dillon - Evantalness - The Politics of Truth and the Analytic of Finitude

7/27/2019 Dillon - Evantalness - The Politics of Truth and the Analytic of Finitude

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Eventalness:

The Poli tics of Truth and The Analytics of F ini tude

Michael Dillon



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The Politics of Truth:

“…what I am doing is something that concerns philosophy, that is to say the politics of truth. So,

insofar as what is involved in this analysis of the mechanisms of power is the politics of truth, and not

sociology, history, or economics…. I do not think there is any theoretical analytical discourse which is

not permeated or underpinned in one way or another by something like an imperative discourse.”

(Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, [STP] 2007: 3)

Foucault says that what he is doing „concerns philosophy‟. Philosophy asks

the question „What is being?‟ but Foucault asks the question „How, historically, do

things happen?‟ The two questions have long been related, of course, and related in

many different ways, but since the one concerns the nature of truth outwith time, and

the other the operation of the politics of truth within time, the two questions are allied but different enterprises.1 Specifically here, in respect of the eventalness of the event,

Foucault‟s enterprise is therefore not that of philosophy proper. He says instead that

his task is the pursuit of the politics of truth.

In asking his question Foucault is able to observe that there is no „theoretical

or analytical discourse which is not permeated or underpinned in one way or another

by something like an imperative discourse.” (STP: 3) An imperative discourse, he

says, “consists in saying something like „love this, hate that, that is good, that is bad,

be for this, beware of that.‟” (STP: 3) For if philosophy asks about the nature of what

is, every account of what is, every account of the nature of the real, must

correspondingly teach us how to conduct ourselves in relation to the reality of what is.

There is no account of the real that does not correspondingly say how we should be

governed in relation to the nature of the real. In other words, you cannot speak the

truth without the injunction that since this is the truth then we, the „we‟ of that truth,

have to be governed, or govern ourselves, in the light of the truth. Every account of

the real correspondingly entails therefore an account of the governance that the reality

of the real demands. I follow him in this as well. He cannot but be correct. For that

reason, the fratricidal caesura of the political and the theologico-philosophical has

remained since the truth telling of prophets, priests and philosophers alike (Foucault,

2001). There is no healing it. The gap between the two is an expression of the wound

of existence.

1 ‘Out-with’ is an idiomatic expression commonly used in Scotland. It neatly captures the co-

belonging of the two.



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Thus the issue to which Foucault is alerting us is this: What are the conditions

of possibility governing specific historical accounts of truth and knowledge and how

are those conditions instituted and expressed through the very processes of their being

enacted historically? This applies to the modern politics and the philosophy of the

event, however, as much as it does to other truths and to other histories.

The issue thus becomes a matter of reflecting via our own practices on the

politics of truth of our time, even the politics of the truth of the event. Few do this as

well as Foucault. Not because Foucault escapes the politics of truth of our time,

specifically that of the politics and philosophy of the event, but precisely because he

reflects the aporetic dynamics engendered by the aporetic a priori forces of modern

truth-telling so remorselessly. None, I would say, do so more accurately, or with more

nuance for the micro-practices of the modern politics and philosophy of the truth of

the event, than does Foucault. For, he applies it also to himself:

“So, since there has to be an imperative, I would like the one underpinning the

theoretical analysis we are attempting to be quite simply a conditional

imperative of the kind: if you want to struggle, here are some key points, here

are some lines of force, here are some constrictions and blockages. In other

words I would like these imperatives to be no more than tactical pointers.”

(STP: 3)

If the truth-teller is therefore telling the truth, the truth is for everyone. And if what

the truth-teller says is true then it follows that the conduct of conduct, from the

individual to the collective, should be aligned, or align itself, with the truth.

Or, at least, this what I take Foucault to mean by the „imperative discourse‟

installed in every theoretical and analytical discourse concerning the truth of what is.

There can therefore be no truth without its corresponding governmental politics of

truth. Whether or not the truth-teller owns up to this, the truth of it lies in the

imperative of the discourse of truth telling itself. No truth-teller proclaims the truth as

pure abstraction without any implication for the conduct of conduct and for himself or

herself alone. This applies to Foucault as much as it does to any other truth-teller.

Whether or not you find Foucault‟s caveat about his own discourse sufficient

is a fair question, but not one that I have space to pursue here. One point it does make,

however, is that Foucault knows full well that he does not escape the aporia of the

very condition whose micro-politics and micro-practices of power/knowledge he

analyses so acutely. A second point concerns the formulation of the imperative in



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Foucault‟s own discourse. Here he expresses it in conditional terms. I prefer to

express it as a positive mode of political questioning.

As befits the operation of the empirico-transcendental doubling that

characterizes the operation of modern politics and philosophy this positive mode of

political questioning is also a dual mode of questioning. As we have just seen, it asks

what modes of government and rule derive from what accounts of the true and of the

real. But it also asks how do practices of government and rule help install the very

foundational conditions to which they appeal as their transcendental warrant?

Thus, since according to Foucault the politics of truth concerns complex

empirico-transcendental multiples, “layers of events multiplying” (Foucault in Flynn,

2005: 50), the politics of truth works both ways. Ordinarily acclaimed, or condemned,

for insisting on asking about the power effects of knowledge, in the Security,

Territory, Population lectures, for example, Foucault nonetheless always also asks the

correlate of that question: what are the knowledge effects produce by „the struggles

confrontations, and battles that take place within our society, and by the tactics of

power that are the elements of this struggle.‟ (STP: 3)

For the Foucault of the politics of truth, no doubt there is more than one

Foucault, power relations do not therefore simply arise out of the pursuit of the

politics of truth alone. The practical exigencies, epistemic dynamics and radically

contingent conjunctures arising out of the historical operation of power relations

themselves call independently for the production and application of knowledge.

Modern power relations therefore institute, regulate, and police truth as they

insatiably also wear-out truths and demand new ones. The pursuit of truth does the

same to truth albeit driven by its own dictates, and not those exclusively of

discursively constituted power relations alone, since we exist in a non-discursive

materiality as well, one according to Foucault that does not turn towards us a legible

face. Therefore the non-discursive event, according to Foucault, continually recoils on

the practices through which we seek to tame and domesticate the material outside of

discourse. Thus, however allied they may be, the rule of truth and the truth of rule

remain distinct enterprises.



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Finitude and the Event

“…to make finitude self -foundational ….Copernican dreams of power.”

(Beatrice Han, 2003: 154)

In as much as he is a philosopher, however, Thomas Flynn declares,

“Foucault is a philoso pher of the event.” (Flynn, 2005: 145). Since there are

nonetheless many philosophers and philosophies of the event, and since continental

philosophy tout court these days is a philosophy of the event, what happens if we

switch from an exegesis of Foucault the philosopher of the event to follow Foucault

the historian who pursues the politics of truth, and to follow him in this instance in

order to offer our own politics of truth of the event itself? This chapter does precisely

that. Specifically it construes the event as an empirico-transcendental double

displaying the very same oscillations that Foucault tells us characterize the figure of

Man (Foucault, The Order of Things (OT) 1989). Moreover, like Man, the event is not

only characterized as an empirico-transcendental doublet, it is characterized as an

empirico-transcendental doublet for the very same reason that Foucault characterized

Man as an empirico-transcendental doublet. The event, like Man, is a figure that

arises in response to the demand to give “concrete form to finitude” in a way that will

nonetheless also satisfy the desire, somehow, to transcend the existential, ethical and

epistemological limitations presumed fundamentally to disable and devalue finite

existence. The event is in short another figuration of the aporetic problematique that

defines the project of modernity both politically and philosophically. 2 More

precisely, and to use a Heideggerean formulation that applies here, this is an exercise

in the politics of truth of the Event of the event. Taking Foucault at his word, one of

his words, I therefore focus not only on specifying the historical condition of

possibility, that of finitude, for the emergence of the modern politics of truth of the

Event of the event, but also on specifying how some of the characteristic empirico-

transcendental properties that the Event of the event is said to have can be found in

Foucault‟s plural usage of the term „event‟.

This historical condition of possibility becomes evident politically with

Hobbes, and philosophically with Kant. Among more contemporary philosophers,

Heidegger and Derrida, in particular, interrogate its aporetic features with

consummate philosophical skill. Because of the singular way in which he questions,

2 The expression is Foucault‟s. It occurs in the chapter “Man and his Doubles” from The Order of

Things.



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however, and irrespective of the issue of whether or not he was a philosopher (faulted

by philosophers) or a historian (faulted by historians), someone in any event

concerned specifically with the politics of truth and thereby for me consummate at

thinking politically, Foucault excels archeologically and genealogically at

interrogating the material and political properties of that historical condition of

possibility. This historical condition of possibility is an understanding of temporality

as finitude, a temporality that the politics and philosophy of the event in turn institute

and elaborate, hence the empirico-transcendental doubling of time as finitude in the

form of the event.

Finitude is no mere brute acceptance of life and death, therefore, and the event

no mere brute acceptance that things take place. There is no truth of finitude and the

event as such since both finitude and the event have a history, a discontinuous history

construing them differently according to time, place and thought. Modern finitude is

an historical a priori in the specific and discursively constituted and positive sense in

which Foucault defines an historical a priori:

This a priori does not elude historicity: it does not constitute above events, and in

an unmoving heavens, an atemporal structure; it is defined as the group of rules

that characterize a discursive practice: but these rules are not imposed from the

outside on the elements that they relate together; they are caught up in the very

things that they connect; and if they are not modified with the least of them, theymodify them, and are transformed with them into certain decisive thresholds. (The

Archaeology of Knowledge (AK) 1972: 127)

Modern finitude is thus, “an a prior i not of truths that might never be said or really

given to experience: but the a priori of a history that is given, since it is that of things

actually said.” (AK: 127)

Documenting this proposition poses a wide variety of additional strategic and

analytical tasks including, for example, that of a genealogy of the diverse ways thattemporal finitude progressively became the referent point philosophically and

politically for the re-problematisation of politics and government as well as of

knowledge from the mid seventeenth century onwards. Such a genealogy requires re-

reading much of the history of early modern political thought, re-interpreting it

especially according to the proposition that its political rationalities and governing

technologies progressively took their cue from a temporal finitude progressively

divorced, methodologically as well as substantively, from the redemptive temporality



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of the Church‟s soteriological political economy of salvation (Kaufman, 1990)

summarized in Augustine‟s complex term the saeculum (Markus, 1970)

Within the Christian cosmos, men and women did not die merely because they were

biological creatures, for they were not merely biological creatures (whatever that

might mean only biology these days can say, and biology has said, continues to say,

different things). They were ens creatum, divinely created entities endowed with all

manner of additional non-biological properties: open to grace, possessed of free will,

exercising reason, living the Christ event of revelation, and secured in the promise of

salvation. Their finitude was often styled a pilgrimage. Through it they had the

opportunity to secure everlasting life. Hence, the point of human finitude in the time

of the saeculum was to be redeemed from sin, where sin was the very signification of

a finite life exposed to death. There is, literally, a world of difference, therefore,

between the Christian notion of finite secular existence as pilgrimage, and the modern

notion of finitude as a form of rationally calculative self-organizing survival; which

enterprise now calls us in the name of a different security from that of salvation, to

engage in self-formation and transformation, to continually move out of phase with

ourselves, and to become other selves more capable of surviving as whatever

precarious living entities continuously in-formation we may thus be said to be. As

Foucault observed elsewhere: “The experience of life is thus posited as the most

general law of beings…But this ontology discourses not so much what gives beings

their foundation as what bears them for an instant towards a precarious form.”

(Foucault in Flynn. 2005: 130).

Finite existence once therefore took place within a sacred time structured by

the supra-temporal political economy of salvation. To be finite was to be fallen; to be

fallen was to be finite. Death was the result of eating from the tree of knowledge. To

die was to be submitted to judgment, which judgment determined one‟s fitness to re-

enter eternity with God. The temporal properties of Augustine‟s City of Man were

therefore not properties of a finite existence conceived biologically, primarily much

less alone, but of a finite existence conceived as a radically derelicted epiphenomenon

of the eternal time of a providential God; the very fall, one might even say fall-out,

from grace itself (Markus, 1970; Brown 1988; Rist, 1996).

The Christian understanding of this its message changed (Bulhoff and ten

Kate, 2000); change is the nature of a tradition. So also did the account of the

properties of finite existence integral to that message and the theologico-political



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problematic of rule that it posed: as these were explored in political theology of the

Church and through the conflictual history of Church-State relations (O‟Donovan and

O‟Donovan, 1999 and 2004; O‟Donovan, 1996; Scott and Cavanaugh, 2007).

However presaged it may have been by the late scholastics, for example

(Brett, 2003), during the course of the political, religious, economic and epistemic

revolutions of the late 17th century, however, a fundamental rupturing took place.

Recourse was made to a finitude first distantiated then finally divorced from the

eternal. The figuration of finite life and death changed, as did their political and

economic functions, and not only for theologico-political reasons as well (Le Goff,

1980 and 2001). Less the sign of the fallen nature of God‟s creatures, finitude became

the defining feature of a facticity that radicalizes the very nature of nature as such.

The nature of nature problematised so also was the nature of truth, the nature of law

and the nature of rule. New rules of truth as well as new truths of rule were

promulgated (Daston and Stolleis, 2008). Less created, and in any event so far

removed from the source of creation that the will of the creator no longer functioned

where it functioned at all as the referent point that it was once taken to be, the figure

of Man first emerged as the self-positing, self-creating entity of this modern or even

we might say modernizing finitude.

The nature of nature generically problematised, natural law remained, for a

time, the transcendental remainder of the divinely underwritten expression of

Christian finitude (Daston and Stolleis, 2008). But it was a husk. Positively, in its

empiricities as Foucault would say, the factical nature of the life-death nexus, as it

came to be construed and positivised in the modern era, progressively rivaled and

then superseded natural law as the referential materiality to which reference was made

when seeking the answer not only to the question of political legitimacy (what is the

nature of the nature that warrants rule – answer the exigencies of modern finitude),

but also to that of the question of political efficacy (how does one rule – answer

according to the positive properties of the finite entities over which modern rule seeks

traction). The Life of the life/death nexus around which biopolitics and biopower

emerged according to Foucault – l’espece humaine/être biologique – comes to secure

both the rule of truth (life science) and truth of rule (biopolitical rationalities and

governing technologies). What I propose calling the modern Life event thus posed a

quite different kind of political and philosophical puzzle than that set by the Christ



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event of Creation, Revelation and Incarnation much less also that set by the created

nature of natural law.

The vocabularies alone – the lexical armories engaged in these different

semantic fields of formation and intervention - mark a radical transformation of the

world. Once the signature of a lack lived-out in the temporality of the saeculum, a

time in which eternal life is braided throughout secular finitude, finite existence was

on its way to becoming the Event of an infinite self-organizing plenitude: the Event of

an infinity of finite temporalities, things, places…and events.

However much it might have proceeded through secularization, correctly

understood as the rise of the secular over the eternal in a providentially created

cosmos, the advent of modern finitude was not secularization and its operations are

not properly understood as secularization. Modern finitude is something else. For just

as Nietzsche had observed that the death of God necessarily also entailed the death of

Man – the finite humanity correlate of an eternal providential God – so also had

secular finitude always been the correlate of the Christian conception of eternal life.

That was the very dualistic point of Augustine‟s term saeculum (Markus, 1970). The

death of God, the principle among other things of eternal life, therefore entailed the

death of the secular as well. Remove the one you remove the other since it is the

differentiation between them that lends each their specification.

Modern finitude is therefore something other than secularization. It is instead

the working-out of a different, if equally dualistic and aporetic, account of the nature

of time, in which the finite is correlated, in fact, with the infinite. Finitude is therefore

no longer secular finitude – the correlate of eternal life – but modern factical finitude,

whose correlate is the factically infinite. Politically, economically and culturally it

may be distinguished currently by its own cultic religiosities, I am inclined to think

that it is, but be that as it may, as an infinity of the finite, modern finitude is quite

literally, a different matter from that of secular finitude.

The eschatological horizon within which a politics of survival rather than

salvation came to be staged, modern finitude became increasingly reliant also on the

figure of Life rather than that of Man for grounding its truth of rule and its rule of

truth. As it did so, the Event of the event became more pronounced in modern politics

and philosophy as well. Foucault‟s own historical methodology bears witness to this,

simultaneously also offering a mechanism for analyzing it, that of the analytic of

finitude.



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Today, modern finitude, together with its politics and philosophy of the Event

of the event, comprises a different, horizonal and historical, account of the temporal

truth of life and death, and of the rule of rule over life and death, by positing life and

death differently from hitherto. Particularly for those along with Foucault who ask the

political question, the Event of the event of modern finitude is a staging of the truth of

rule as much as it is of the rule of truth – the problematising of how to secure politics

and government as much as how to secure knowing. Conditioning the political

rationalities and governmental technologies of the modern age, the truth of modern

finitude is nonetheless also one that modern political rationalities and governing

technologies themselves in turn install.

I believe that this applies in their different ways, and the differences matter, to

all modern politics and philosophies of the Event of the event. I learn this lesson from

Foucault even as I apply it here to Foucault. The political rationalities and governing

technologies of political modernity therefore emerge within the temporal horizon of

modern finitude, which finitude is nonetheless also continually installed by the

political rationalities and governing technologies that continually invoke this account

of the taking place of time. Hence, the empirico-transcendental doubling of modern

finitude, a doubling that finds expression in more than one figure of finitude: that of

the Event of the event itself; that of Man; and predominantly now also that of Life.

As with the event so also with modern finitude, however, there is more than

one finitude. In her acute study of Foucault, and of the indebtedness of the Foucault of

The Order of Things, in particular, to Heidegger, Beatrice Han differentiates empirical

finitude from transcendental (Kantian) finitude (Han, 2002 and 2003). I will add a

third: that of the abyssal finitude of Heidegger‟s „enowning‟ event of Ereignis

(Heidegger, 1999; Raffoul and Pettigrew, 2002; Raffoul and Nelson, 2008; and

Stambaugh, 1992). There are of course more, principal among them, for example,

those of Deleuze and Badiou. And there are also critics, notably Quentin Meillassoux

(2009). For the moment, however, since my purpose is analytic rather than

taxonomic, let these three suffice. In my argument the properties of the event that

Foucault details are construed as specifying some the properties of modern finitude as

such, as these have been explored by modern empirical, transcendental and abyssal

accounts of finitude, since modern finitude is taken to be an account of time that is

essentially evental.



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In pursuing this account, I am sympathetic also to the view advanced by

Michael Schwartz as well as Beatrice Han, that The Order of Things, in particular,

derives in certain ways from Foucault‟s reading of Heidegger , the modern

philosopher of finitude as event (Han, 2003; Schwartz, 2003). What follows from this

is that Foucault himself was perfectly aware that he was operating analytically within

the politics and philosophy of finitude, was aware also of its aporetic character, and

was struggling, as all moderns are fated to do, with addressing the aporetic difficulties

to both politics and philosophy (rule and truth) posed by the temporal horizon that

historically conditions the modern.

In that sense what we learn from Foucault, and from few as clearly as

Foucault, is that Foucault is as ensnared in the aporia of evental time as much as Kant

and, arguably also, Heidegger. Derrida maybe different but we have no space to pose

and pursue that difficulty here either. But what we also learn from Foucault are details

of the ways in which that aporia is structured and how it operates politically and

governmentally, since Foucault himself reflects them so well in his own oeuvre.

I should add that I am less interested also in whether or not thinkers escape the

aporia of the event. Outside a confession of faith, or Derrida‟s affirmatory „yes‟ – one

also wonders how effectively that „yes‟ meets the empirical and historical demands of

modern finitude - I do not think that they can, and I am not interested in applying the

philosophical standard of having to escape it to them. I wish instead to foreground

Foucault‟s own line of questioning in relation to the politics and philosophy of the

event, that of the historical politics of truth of the Event of the event.

Deriving in the first instance, therefore, from Foucault, I pursue my line of

questioning in relation also to Foucault and the event. It is a line of questioning that I

pursue in relation to philosophy in general, irrespective of the account of truth it has

to offer. It asks of all accounts of truth and of the real, what mode of governance

follows from that account of truth? For there is no account of truth that does not, one

way or another, imply or endorse a correlative mode of government and rule which is

why I ask it of the politics of truth of the Event of the event as well.

I open the problematic of the aporia of modern finitude historically

conditioning modern politics and philosophy, then, by noting how political theorists

and philosophers alike construe finitude as the temporal horizon that conditions the

possibility of modern politics and philosophy as such. I also note that it is an horizon

within which the event also serves as an increasingly definitive principle of formation,



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ontically as well as ontologically to use Heidegger‟s language, empirically as well as

transcendentally to use that of Foucault‟s, which I privilege because of its acute

political sensibility to the mutually disclosive co-implication of the rule of truth and

the truth of rule. I pursue the problematic by following what Foucault teaches us

about the polysemic properties of the event, which I take to be an account of the very

empirico-transcendental eventalness said to characterize modern finitude itself.

Finitude and the Empirico-transcendental Double of the Event

“ What is an event? This is a problem of philosophical dimensions, the pons asinorum of historical

epistemology.’

Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language

(In Flynn, 2005: 48)

In some ways an historicized and politicizing version of Heidegger‟s ontico-

ontological difference, and for these reasons prized, Foucault‟s account of the

empirico-transcendental doubling of Man as the ontological substrate for the Human

Sciences of Man that seek to give concrete form to finitude, nonetheless reliant also

for its installation on the very sciences it is claimed to warrant, itself also renders the

modern episteme deeply aporetic. The a priori that warrants it – that underwrites the

very grids of intelligibility inscribed in and by its everyday relations of

power/knowledge – has no traction, intelligibility or purchase outside the weft and

warp of the practices that invoke it. To forget this is to sink into what Foucault called

the anthropological sleep.

And so, applying a summary account in The Order of Things of an earlier and

more extensive critique of Kant‟s critical epistemology of finitude, delivered in his

Introduction to Kant’s Anthropol ogy, (2008), Foucault teaches there that while the

modern episteme institutes itself by invoking certain transcendental conditions of

possibility, these very conditions of possibility turn out to be historical not

transcendental a priori. They are, as he says of Life, Labor and Language, in The

Order of Things, „quasi-transcendentals‟. Instituted historically via the very Human

Sciences that claim to be enabled by them, so it is that the very figure of Man that

furnishes them with a unified ground is a figure they must continuously institute via

their very interrogation of it, if they are to sustain themselves as the sciences of that

figure (Man). This empirico-transcendental doubling of Man is the institution of an



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ontological substrate that arises only in and as the condition of possibility that these

very sciences must install presuppositionally in order to operationalise themselves

positively. It is a Sisyphean task : “…ceaselessly woven like a gigantic shuttle,” to

tease Deleuze (1994: 38). For, as John Mullarkey has observed, Deleuze can also be

accused of fooling himself “into thinking that empiricism goes beyond transcendence

when in fact it is simply another form of it.” (2006: 143). Something of the same I

maintain can then be observed of the modern politics and philosophy of the event –

empirical, transcendental and abyssal.

This is not to say that there is no outside to what Foucault calls the discursive

practices of power/knowledge, quite the contrary. Since Kant, the outside has simply

been declared inaccessible to modern knowing directly. Quite explicitly admitted by

Foucault, among many others accused mistakenly of dismissing that which swirls in

and around discourse coming often devastatingly to discourse as opposed to

exclusively arising within discourse alone, the proper meaning of Derrida‟s notorious

expression, “there is no outside text,”, the „outside‟ is always already at work

disruptively throughout discourse. Never written-out, the outside remains, and

Derrida would say it is the remainder, but remains as inaccessible to the direct light of

reason.

The outside thereby becomes a density and impenetrability disruptively

haunting as well as fuelling the modern. One might say that it is precisely because it

has not been able to secure the secure contract with the outside that it continually

seeks, which outside it also finds always already operating on its inside, that the

modern r emains „modern‟. Its very dynamics and desires a response to an

impenetrability posed by itself, rendered the more impenetrable also to itself by the

ways in which modern dispositifs of power/knowledge command finite existence to

be fungible and transparent to knowing and ruling; to ruling through knowing. This is

no mere philosophical paradox. It is endlessly repeated also throughout the violent

governmental technologies of modern policing, surveillance, and security, for

example especially, as well

Modern finitude is thus a complex political and philosophical figure of time,

differentiating and co-implicating the finite with the infinite in an infinity of finite

things (Kaplan and Kaplan, 2003). It is as complex and dualistic as St Augustine‟s

onto-theological figuration of time as the saeculum, which differentiates as it co-

implicates secular and eternal time (Markus, 1970; Kaufman, 1990; O‟Donovan and



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O‟Donovan, 1999).3 The event mattered to St. Augustine and the Christian tradition,

however, equally as much as it did for Heidegger, Althusser, Derrida or Foucault,

(Badiou too). It was of course a different event - that of the Christ event. And

Christians were enjoined to live up to that event equally as much as Deleuze also

enjoined us to live up to the event as he had figured it in his account of the philosophy

(and politics) of the event: "Philosophy's sole aim is to become worthy of the event."

On the one hand we can therefore say that modern finitude and the Christian

saeculum pose the problematic of rule within the truth of their different assertions

about the nature of time as such. Correlatively however, it is perfectly clear that the

very facticity of rule materially also institutes the time politically to which it appeals,

onto-theologically in the Christian tradition of created nature, or in a philosophical

tradition increasingly preoccupied with the evental problematics of a self-creating

nature. Indeed the rise of political modernity out of the confessional conflicts that

witnessed the dissolution of the medieval theologico-political imaginary emphasized

the importance of substituting the task of political self-creation to escape the violence

of disputes fuelled, it was said, by the irreconcilable differences that had arisen

between competing dogmas and doctrines concerning divine creation and salvation

(Hunter, 2001; 2002; and 2007).4

Finitude‟s political implications for the staging of modern problematisation of

government and rule are therefore as profound as – and despite shared difficulties

profoundly different also from – those posed and explored by the onto-theological

politics of the Christian tradition; Trinity versus Monarchy or Kingship (Geréby,

2008; Kantorowicz, 1997; Kaufman, 1990; O‟Donovan, 1996; O‟Donovan and

O‟Donovan, 1999 and 2004; Scott and Cavanaugh, 2007), and the subsequent

„disciplining of the divine‟ reflected in the declension of Christian responses to the

problematisation of government in and by the finitude of the modern age (de Vries

and Sullivan, 2006; Fletcher, 2009; Taylor, 2007). Equally, also, modern finitude is

not a property or an expression of the event. The essence of modern finitude is

eventalness, and this in two classic and correlated ways of the empirico-

transcendental double.

The first of these is that of the event understood as the taking place of things

as such. 'Event', as Krzysztof Ziarek put it, "not [merely] as a temporal punctuality or

3 Infinity and eternity are not the same. 4 For a powerful dissenting voice see William Cavanugh, 2009.



15

an instance of presence but, instead, as a dynamic open-ended field of forces, whose

historicity prevents experience from closing into representational constructs, psychic

spaces, or lived instances." (Ziarek, 2002: 13) It is the event in the sense therefore

also of Heidegger‟s Ereignis, for example, or deconstructively riffing on Heidegger‟s

“ Die Zeit ist nicht; es gibt die Zeit.‟ Derrida‟s „gift‟. In the Order of Things Foucault

neatly also captures the ontological point when referring to: “That rent, devoid of

chronology and history, from which time issued.” (OT: 332)

In the second instance the event also refers to the manifold modes of taking

place, the punctual empiricity of the taking place of factical events, whose very

facticity is of course a labor of differentiation and enumeration dependent upon

historical and complex epistemic and taxonomic dividing practices, as well as the

growth of the modern fact, within the Natural, Human and Social Sciences (Hacking,

1982; Porter, 1995; Poovey, 1998; and, Desrosières, 1998).5

As Richard Polt also observed, in his telling study of Heidegger‟s Emergency

of Being (2006), and as continental philosophers more generally attest – Miguel

Beistegui is a good example (2004) - the essence of eventalness is now also

understood to be a morphogenetic emergency of continuously emergent time issuing

an existential challenge thus far met on the one hand by an empiricism which fails for

want of the transcendental warrant to which it continuously appeals (Kant), and on the

other by a transcendentalism that fails without the grace of faith, and for want of

grounding itself convincingly in the lived corporeality of contemporary historical

being (Heidegger). In his analysis of Deleuze, Keith Ansell-Pearson refers to these

preoccupations in terms of originary technicity and „bio-techno-genesis‟. (Ansell-

Pearson1977: 181-182.)

One way or another the empirico-transcendental doubling of the space of the

Event of the event in response to the aporia posed by modern finitude also turns it into

a heterogeneous battle-space, pluralistically conceived and enacted philosophically as

well as politically. Witness philosophically, and for example, polemos in Heidegger

(Fried, 2000), struggle in Foucault (1977), revolution in Badiou (2000, 2005), dis-

agreement in Rancière (Dillon, 2002, 2005), and war machine in Deleuze and Guattari

(1987; Guha, 2010; Reid, 2003). Witness, politically and commercially, today, the

centrality of the event in military strategic discourse, security and war where,

5 I use capital letters here to emphasize that these are institutions.



16

fulfilling Foucault‟s observation that modern politics is the extension of war by other

means (SMD, 2003 and STP, 2007), government and rule consist in what the military

call „a concept of operations‟ (Dillon and Neal, 2008; Dillon and Reid, 2009; Guha,

2010; Osinga, 2007). Foucault captures this modern account of politics as the

extension of war by other means brilliantly well in an interview to geographers:

“There is an administration of knowledge, a politics of knowledge, relations of

power which pass via knowledge and which, if one tries to transcribe them, lead

one to consider forms of domination designated by such notions as field, region

and territory. And the politico-strategic term is an indication of how the military

and the administration actually come to inscribe themselves both on a material soil

and within forms of discourse.” (Foucault, quoted in Flynn, 2005: 115)

Likewise, also, witness the centrality of the event in the concept of operations of

global capital (LiPuma and Benjamin, 2004 and 2005; Mackenzie, 2007; Muniesa,

2007, Cooper, 2008). Seeking to respond to the Event of the event of finitude via the

strategic and logistical enframing of it as a continuous security project – what

Heidegger calls technology – need not, however, be the only response to or figuration

of the finitude of existence.

If there is, then, an empirico-transcendental doubling of Man there is certainly

also an empirico-transcendental-doubling of the Event of the event as well, and

Foucault‟s analytic of finitude applies equally as much to modern politics and

philosophy of the Event of the event of modern finitude as it does to the empirico-

transcendental doublet of Man. Man and the Event of the event of modern finitude,

one might also hazard Dasein, are expressions, equally if differently, of the

problematic posed by modern finitude to a politics and philosophy that seeks its

temporal grounding in the finitudinal Event of the event: empirically (Realism),

transcendentally (Kantianism) and abyssaly (Heidegger). What also follows from this

is that the empirico-transcendental doubling of modern finitude receives different

figurations: Man, Event and, I have already indicated, Life.



17

The Politics of Truth of the Event of the event

“An event consequently is not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a

relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those

who had once used it, a feeble domination that poisons itself as it grows lax. The forces operating in

history…always appear through the singular randomness of events.”

(Foucault quoted in Flynn, 2005: 148)

From Foucault‟s work in general, and from The Order of Things in particular,

I therefore derive and apply several lessons in relation to the modern politics and

philosophy of the Event of the event.

The first of these is that the modern ordering of things occurs in the context of

a form of historical time described as finitude. Second, I also learn that, once pivoting

around finitude in the form of the figure of Man, but now claiming to give concrete

form to finitude by grounding it in the figure of Life, the supposed facticity of the life-

death nexus, the time of finitude has become increasingly preoccupied with the

evental processes of life-creation or morphogenesis. Third, that this biopoliticisation

of modern finitude, especially, poses a distinct problem to both philosophy and

politics - truth and rule - and that the rule of truth and the truth of rule are

irredeemably implicated in one another finitudinally, not least in their

biopoliticisation; the contemporary grounding of the problematising that modern

finitude poses via the figure of Life rather than that of Man. Fourth, that the figuring

of modern finitude in terms of Life has been deeply implicated in the emergence of

the modern politics and philosophy of the Event of the event since early modern times

but for reasons yet to be explored, because the essential eventalness of biopoliticsespecially is curiously overlooked by Foucault. Fifth, with the shift from Man to Life,

and in ways that are deeply indebted to Heidegger as much say as Canguilhem, comes

a pervasive emphasis on the priority of relationality over property. As Clare

Colebrook observes in exegesis of Deleuze, but in expression also of the empirico-

transcendental doublet, this commits us to, “perceive life…[as]…connection and

relation …the outcome of an event…of relations not determined in advanced by

intrinsic properties…life is both that which requires some form of order and

system…and which opens the system….” (Colebrook, 2005: 5). Sixth, that the time of



18

modern finitude, politically as much as philosophically, is a complex and dynamic

aporia, one that is lived-out in many different ways by and through the modern age

rather than simply resolved by it.

Traditionally, it is Hobbes who is taken to open the modern response of

political thinking to the problematic of government and rule posed by finitude. He

grounds the securing of sovereign rule „finitudinally‟ in the infinity of the passions

and the universal fear of violent death at the hands of other men.6 In Hobbes, also, the

problematic of government posed by early modern accounts of finitude does not

escape the problematic of knowing that simultaneously also characterizes modern

finitude: a finitude always already haunted by a specter comprised, then, of two faces,

that of ruling as well as that of knowing. Indeed, Hobbes poses the problematic of rule

in novel epistemic as well as anthropological terms, albeit his anthropology is more

indebted to the scholastics than his principled hostility to them admits (Kahn, 2004;

Condren et al, 2006; Brett, 2003).

But Foucault also teaches that modern politics has offered many different and

co-existing political rationalities and governing technologies in answer to the

problematisation of the truth of rule and the rule of truth posed by the advent of

modern finitude. He alerted us in addition to just how plural and heterogeneous these

answers and their allied dispositifs of sovereign, disciplinary, anatamo and bio power

have been, and how reliant they are on their correlative politics of truth.

Philosophically, of course, the ethical and epistemic problematic of finitude

was posed classically for moderns by Kant: “in a bereaved world in which God is no

guarantor of eternal truths anymore and can only be construed as a postulate, how can

a finite being step beyond the boundaries of its empirical limitations and know

anything with a legitimate claim to universality.” (Han, 2003: 127). Kant‟s genius,

Foucault tells us, lies in grounding a solution to that problem by reversing the

formerly negative meanings of finitude by making finitude foundational for

transcendence. Instead of subverting secure knowledge of the world, and in a way that

chimes with Hobbes installing finitudinal fear of violent death at the hands of other

men as the condition of possibility for securing rule in the world, finitude becomes the

6 There is no contradiction between the infinity of the passions and the finitude of existence. The

correlate of the finite, the infinite figures within it in many ways: empirically for example in theinfinity of finite things. The finite and the infinite are a couple as eternal time and secular time

were a couplet, albeit a different couplet, in Augustine’s saeculum.



19

condition of possibility for securing knowledge of the world. The two are always in

need of one another, however, not least in respect of the politics of anticipation and

reception also of the Event (the often unacknowledged messianic rule correlative of

many contemporary philosophies of the Event: Bradley and Fletcher, 2009 and 2010;

Dillon, 2010), as well as of the politics of the accidental, catastrophic and

terroristically inspired event, in which contemporary politics of emergency (Honig,

2009), as well as security and war are now so deeply steeped.

Governmentally, therefore, modern finitude poses the problem of the conduct

of conduct both individual and collective in a different way. How do we know how to

govern without reference to a divinely underwritten natural order of things? Is there

some alternative natural order to which appeal can be made? What is the nature of the

nature of this alternative nature? (Hannah Arendt long ago warning of the totalitarian

danger of committing oneself to a rule in nature when instituting and exercising

political rule: Arendt: 1958) How is it to be specified, and what form of rule does it

warrant or mandate? Once recourse is made to the Event of the event of modern

finitude to supply such a „natural‟ reference, rather than the formerly common natural

law remainder of divine creation, how and why is the life-death nexus of modern

finitude increasingly construed eventally, specifically in the proliferating forms of

biopolitics and biopower, to give concrete political form to the truth of that finitude?

Correlatively, however, what truth does government in the name of modern

finitude in turn demand of time? In short, to the question what modes of political

subjectification, rule and governance does the modern truth of finitude require of us,

must always therefore be added the question what finitudinal truths do the exigencies

of modern political subjectification, government and rule correlatively also require of

time? For modern finitude is a temporality whose very temporalising is foundational

to modern processes of political and economic subjectification. And this now, also, in

a time, finitudinally, when the figure of finitude has become Life rather than Man, and

the law of the Event rather than the event of Law, the rule required equally by the

politics as much as the philosophy of the Event of the event of modern finitude.

Somewhere here also lies the additional puzzle then posed by the figure of

Life. Or at least a shift in the puzzle of the modern, because Life and Man are

different figures and the figure of Life seems somehow also central to the rise of the

Event of the event as the empirico-transcendental organon of modern politics and

philosophy alike.



20

The Aporia of the Event of Modern Finitude

“T he death of Man is always constitutively at work in the Man-Form.’

(Deleuze, 1988)

A priori are historical works at work. A priori also stage aporias. That also

seems part of the work that they do. It might however be possible to edge crab-wise

towards the space of thinking mapped by the aporia of modern finitude via the every

remaindering of the empirico-transcendental doubling of the Event of the event of

modern finitude itself.Some „transcendental‟ accounts of the truth of the Event of the event of

modern finitude say, for example, that there are limits to the totalizing imperatives of

rule precisely because the impenetrable outside is always already unpredictably in

play on the inside. Some empirical accounts of the event say in return to the truth of

the Event of the event of modern finitude, however, that there are limits to the

totalizing imperatives of truth, because the truth has not only to be made flesh. In

standing only so much truth, the flesh itself ultimately cries out also against the

manifold cruelties that the totalizing of truth inflicts upon it. The impenetrability

encountered by the modern politics and philosophy of the Event of the event is

therefore not only abstract – a function if not a necessary fiction of its thought

processes - it is ultimately also corporeal. Where corporeality signifies no transparent

material ground but a sensibility and affectivity instead, one whose materiality

remains nonetheless as mutable as it is plenitudinally opaque.

However that might be, a priori not only institute forces in play historically

for Foucault, they serve as generative principles of formation helping to institute

fields of formation and intervention themselves also swept by surfaces of friction,

historical and epistemic ruptures and dispersals that constitute forms of governance as

well as knowing. This is the play of the politics of truth that Foucault sees proceeding

through the figure of the event. Since historical a priori are also never stable, they are

after all historical, therefore witness for example the different figurations of modern

finitude posed by Man, the Event and Life, and since it is the very a priori that pose

the modern aporia, the modern aporia itself is not stable. Nor is it an hermetically



21

sealed system of systems. On the contrary its governmental and truth systems alike

are finite, fallible and porous. To call the modern an aporia is therefore to point

towards a diverse, heterogeneous and radically unstable, complexly problematic and

problematising, project concerned simultaneously with the operation of the truth of

rule as much as the rule of truth, rather than to a mere impasse much less an

accomplishment. Although impasse it still may be in certain ways, how the impasse is

encountered may change. The charges it levies and the demands that it make may be

construed differently. In the midst of it, our living it out conducted differently.

This was I think the challenge that came to intrigue the Nietzschean in

Foucault. What does living in the time of the Event of the event of modern finitude

require of us? What opportunities does it offer? What responsibilities does it pose?

What freedom is entailed? What loves and desires? How are all these to be enacted?

From whence might we seek guidance, inspiration, or models of how to organize the

conduct of conduct of ourselves and of ourselves with others, others like us and not

like us? What charges does the Event of the event of modern finitude levy? In what

currencies are those charges levied? How might life be lived-out in the Event of the

event of modern finitude, rising to its challenges, responding to its demands, meeting

its responsibilities, and paying its price, in the jouissance also of the very thrill of

existence? How, in short, once the task is posed, is the time of the Event of the event

of modern finitude to be lived politically and philosophically - under what truths of

rule as well as what rules of truth – affirmatively outwith faith and without denying

the obscure facticity and governing force of modern finitude?

Eventalness

“The two fundamental notions of history as it is practiced today are no longer time and the past but

change and event”

(Foucault in Flynn: 70)

To mark the operation of the event in Foucault is therefore to do more than

mark yet another version of the event in the politics and philosophy of continental

thought. It must certainly do more than simply testify to the rule of the truth of the

Event, or, indeed, today especially, the truth of the rule of the event. Inescapably,

following Foucault himself, it must also mark the historicity of the Event of the eventof modern finitude itself. Here, then, in the Foucauldean figuration of the event,



22

the event does more than mark historical ruptures that contingently bring forth

the new via, most notably, the enunciative event (archeology) the epistemic

event (genealogy) and the event as the intersection or point of application for the

operation of discursively constituted power/knowledge relations(problematisations constitutive of generative fields of formation, intervention

and transformation, swept by surfaces of friction).

In relation to history, for example, the event disrupts the writing of history as

the ascent of Man. In relation to language, the event disrupts the account of language

as the reading of signs already inscribed in nature, or the transparent transmission of

meaning by a communicative subject presumed to exist prior to the discursive rules of

formation that constitute the communicative subject as subject. In relation to

knowledge, the event serves to argue that knowledge is not innocent, nor is it a unity.

Characterized by epistemic breaks, Foucault describes such breaks themselves as

events: witness in particular for example how Foucault characterizes Kant‟s essay

„What is Enlightenment?‟ (Foucault, 1997) In relation to power, the event in Foucault

is not only a reversal of but also a point of application for power relations.

Here in Foucault the event nonetheless also occurs as more than mere

historical punctualities; however multiple, however dynamically multiplying,

however layered, and however contingent and conjunctural. If materiality is non-

discursively opaque as well as discursively material, if the opening of time as

history is a staging of struggle, of the relay of forces and counter forces, this

essential backdrop to the Foucauldean analytic of finitude relies upon the

evental character of finitude as such – the Event.

There is, then, the event as historical punctuality. Foucault is of course

most explicit, most himself analytically provocative, in the very many ways in which

he employs the figure of the event as disruptive punctuality responsible for the

expression of the singular, the new and the repeatable in series and in difference. He

does that, for example in exploring the systems of differentiation and individuation

that result in the enunciative or „statement-event‟ of discursive formations

(archaeology and discourse). He does it also in exploration of the ruptures that

characterise epistemic events in the ordering of knowledge (genealogy and

power/knowledge). He does it in alerting us to the fact that problems come in the

form of problematisations, and that problematisations form part of the way that



23

power/knowledge relations constitute generative fields of formation and intervention

positively constituting the mobile territories of rule, economy and sociality as well as

sexuality that institute the modern world. In all of this as well there is profound sense

of the mutability as well as the motility of these fields, regions and terrains, and of

their strategical, precisely not dialectical, organisation or construal as administrative

and logistical more than political much less democratic political challenges.

But there is also the Event as that, “rent, devoid of chronology and history,

from which time issued,” (OT: 332) "not as a temporal punctuality or an instance of

presence but, instead, as a dynamic open-ended field of forces, whose historicity

prevents experience from closing into representational constructs, psychic spaces, or

lived instances." (Ziarek, 2002: 13). I therefore start to close this chapter not so much

by enumerating the many punctual uses of the event in Foucault, something Flynn

does comprehensively, but by indicating how that very usage of the event repeats the

empirico-transcendental doubling. For the Event of the event is also there in Foucault,

in his recognition of the outside of discourse, in his recognition of the mute

materiality upon which power/knowledge relations inscribe themselves, in his

recognition that his histories are also involved in a more general history as he calls it

of words and things, and in his recognition ultimately of the giveness of an existence

that does not turn towards us a legible face but in whose very lack of legibility lies

opportunity, response-ability, desire, self-making (of course Foucault is a modern)

and the thought of another sort of politics and another sort of self-rule.

Conclusion: A Philosophical Reflection

Time and the event therefore always co-occur. But, as Merleau-Ponty

showed in his Phenomenology of Perception (1962), philosophy can give neither a

realist nor an idealist solution to this problem of time. The same applies also to

politics since politics and philosophy not only arise in time; each is indebted

equally also to the very opening of time itself. Neither has so far been successful

at locating the solution to the problem of time either in consciousness or in

things themselves (Dastur, 1996).

If on the one hand we consider time to be no more than a dimension of

reality, we can no longer explain the relationship between what comes first and

what follows. The succession of events can only be established by consciousness,



24

a consciousness that requires, in order to have a general view of the succession

of events, not itself to be completely immersed in time. But what if, on the other

hand, we consider time to be a mere construction of consciousness? Temporality

itself becomes incomprehensible, insofar as it is the essence of time to beincompletely present to consciousness, to remain incompletely constituted, as

Husserl would say (Dastur, 1996). For time, precisely, is not identical to being, it

is a process which is always in becoming. It is always of the order of the process,

the passage and that which comes. Therefore realism, (which immerses the

subject in time to the point of destroying all possibility of time consciousness)

and idealism (which places consciousness in a position of over-viewing a time

which no longer proceeds) are equally unable to clarify what they pretend to

explain, that is, the relation of consciousness to time. For in both instances what

remains out of range for a philosophy of inquiry and a politics which wants to

see in time either a reality or an idea is precisely its transitional character, its

non-being or non-essence, which is not, but proceeds.

Neither philosophy nor politics can therefore succeed in accounting for

the passage of time when they take the form of a simple realism or idealism. In

both cases they are led, inescapably, to think of the connection of the different

parts of time as already realized, either in the subject or in the object. But this

‘time-synthesis’, far from being given, must on the contrary be considered the

most difficult philosophical and political problem. If philosophy must then be

able to account for the discontinuities of time, and for the fact that these are, for

us, events, politics must also be able to take account of it. Each would have

somehow to accommodate this definitive discontinuity of time, the very

structural eventalness of time itself the means of submitting us to contingency,

chance and unpredictability of the world in the world.

What might untie this approach is the phenomenological insight that

there is nothing behind phenomena, behind what shows itself to us; which is

essentially what is meant by modern finitude. Not simply the insurmountable

horizon of death for human beings but this other brute fact witnessed by death

that however much the world shows itself to us, and however artful we become

in fact at recording the materialization of that showing in facticity, it does not



25

show us what may or may not lie behind but only the continuous unpredictable

coming to us of the world.

Thus if the task of phenomenological philosophy is to direct itself to that

be-coming of the event of time, it is perfectly evident also that the task of modernpolitics sees itself as having to command the coming of time by mastering the

morphogenetic power of time. Hence the political obsession not only with the

‘natural’ or ‘manufactured’ event but increasingly also with the chaotically

excited experimental event-machines of our military, security, biomedical and

techno-scientific networks.

What then we might ask is an event ‘in fact’? At first it seems as if we can

only define it as what was not expected, what arrives unexpectedly and comes to

us by surprise, what descends upon us, the accident in the literal meaning of the

Latin word accido from which the word accident derives. The event in the strong

sense of the word is therefore always a surprise, something which takes

possession of us in an unforeseen manner, without warning, and which brings us

towards an unanticipated future. The eventum, which arises in the becoming,

constitutes something that is irredeemably excessive in comparison to the usual

representation of time as flow. It appears as something that puts the flow of time

out of joint and changes its direction (Dastur, 1996).

The event’s powerful association with the modern understanding of

political freedom, especially, is most strong here. For, since Machiavelli, for

whom there is no law that makes the law, modern freedom has been defined in

terms of the ability to act into time to change the course of time; quite literally to

be able to steer a course through the events of time to triumph over the

eventalness of time itself; always allowing for the blessings of Fortuna (Dillon,

2008)

So the event appears as that which intimately threatens the synchrony of

transcendental life or existence, in other words the mutual implication of the

different parts of time: retention and protention for Husserl; throwness and

project for Heidegger. This exteriority of the event introduces a split between

past and future and so allows the appearance of different parts of time as dis-

located. The event pro-duces, in the literal meaning of the word, the difference of

past and future and exhibits this difference through its sudden happening, a split.



26

Understood thus, time as the time of the event where “the event overflows all

works of actualisation” (Dastur, 1996) is, as Derrida also says, that which stops

everything happening at once. The event thus constitutes the dehiscence of time,

its coming out of itself in different directions, which Heidegger calls ‘ekstasis’ , thefact that it never coincides with itself, and which Levinas calls dia-chrony. For the

Event as such is literally up-setting, which is for example why every politics –

which in modern times thus far has always been a politics of the set-up – seeks to

master the Event, indeed to become itself the eventalness for example of

permanent revolution.

The Event of the event does not integrate itself at a specific moment in the

flow of time. It drastically changes the whole style of existence. It does not so

much happen in a world as on the margins of a world opening up new worlds

through its very happening. In short the Event of the event appears in the

philosophy of the event as that which constitutes the critical moment of

temporality – a critical moment that however paradoxically nonetheless allows

the very advent and continuity of time itself. It is kairological.

This non-coincidence with oneself which allows the possibility of being

open to the Event and the events of time, of being transformed or even destroyed

by them, is also that which makes of the subject a temporal being, an ex-istent

being, a being which is able constantly to get out of itself since it is never in fact

one with itself. Openness to the accident in the philosophy of the Event of the

event is therefore constitutive of the finitudinal account of human existence.

Such an opening gives human being a destiny, for the philosophy of the Event of

the event , and makes one’s life an adventure not the outworking of a programme.

Such an opening is the opening of finite existence as such as it has come to be

understood by the project of modernity.

Hence the centrality of modern finitude, and these its evental properties,

to modern politics as well. For all this, without tracking the complex genealogy of

the emergence of this understanding of time, acknowledging its indebtedness to

the scholastics while noting its decisive rupture from their world as well,

constitutes the condition of possibility for the modern politics and philosophy of

the Event of the event. Constitutes I would also say its aporia. For modern

politics is continually driven to give concrete form to this finitude. Rooted in a



27

progressive understanding of the very eventalness of time as such, modern

politics conceives and practices the government of Life, especially, through these

the very evental properties of Life. Its very problematic of rule posed by the very

opening of this temporally indebted destiny and its adventure of freedom,modern politics too-readily seeks to resolve that problem by translating freedom

into self-securing self-regulatory utility-driven programmes of increasingly

biopoliticised rule. Confining thereby the after-effect of the Event of the event

into no more and no less than the continual extraction of bioeconomic surplus

from the Event of the event Cooper, 2008). Thus when the Event of the event of

modern finitude adopts Life as its primary figuration, the way in which finitude is

understood from the vantage point of its continuous dissolution, dissolution

characterized however by the infinite remainder of the life-death nexus biologically

and economically described, and there seems little difference between these two

accounts of the life-death nexus, the figuration of the Event of the event, betrays the

possibilities and the hope that the modern project continues nonetheless to invest in it

politically.



28

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Dillon - Evantalness - The Politics of Truth and the Analytic of Finitude