Thinking the Event

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.

• Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Event Outside of Thought2. The Event without Ground3. Event and Phenomenology4. Things as Events5. Historical Happening and the Motion of Life6. The Event of Being7. Event, World, Democracy8. The Secret of the EventConclusion: The Ethics of the EventBibliography

"Timely, provocative, carefully reasoned and argued, and astonishing in its scope. It is a hugely ambitious book that sets out to show how the notion of event in contemporary continental philosophy has utterly transformed not only our thinking of the "event" but also our thinking of "thinking," that is to say, philosophy, ontology, ethics, and theories of human subjectivity."—Elizabeth Rottenberg, author of Inheriting the Future: Legacies of Kant, Freud, and Flaubert"This is a major contribution to philosophical scholarship on a topic that has become increasingly important in recent decades. It caps the existing scholarship on events – both drawing on it extensively while criticizing it effectively – by offering a book that is at once cognizant of all the most important descriptions and theories of the very idea of the event, while offering its own unique take on it."—Edward S. Casey, author of The World on Edge"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