In choosing the formulation of the title I would like to convey both a distance taken with regard to the category of the event (which continues to draw attention in contemporary French philosophical discourse), as well as the recognition of its essential, strategic function. On the one hand, I would like to outline a critique of what I shall venture to call ‘eventalism’ ( just as people spoke of existentialism, historicism, and structuralism), showing in particular that its possibility and even its realizations in singular systems are dictated by the dialectical relationship that eventalism maintains with its opposites. This also constitutes a limit to the capacity of the thought of the event to make itself an ‘event,’ in other words a break, something completely new, a change in mindset. Although the word choice obviously entails some conventionality while also imposing connotations that are not completely within our control, I am again taking up the expression of present or contemporary reality (actualité) in an attempt to designate the supplement to eventness (événementialité) which would uproot the event from its function as a simple variant in the history of the metaphysics of time. But, on the other hand, I would like to confirm and explore more fully the idea that an authentic reflection on the relationship of philosophy to contemporary reality can only be rigorously developed if it begins by reflecting on the event and eventness, and indeed perhaps limits itself to an attempt to constitute the category completely and state its problems.

In what is of necessity a very incomplete investigation, I will examine the question in two sections. First, I shall review several traits suggesting that twentieth-century philosophy made a kind of ‘evential turn’ (tournant événementiel), as a result of which philosophy confirmed the crucial equivalence between the problem of being and that of time—between questions of ontology and historicity—and placed at the heart of historicity a problematics of the transcendental event, instead of a problematics of becoming, transformation, or process. Inevitably, this investigation will rely on an evocation of questions raised by the confrontation of Hegelian legacies—the teleology of ‘absolute method’ or of ‘subjectless’ process which constitutes the self-realizing form of the Idea—and those of Heidegger—the facticity of the event/advent (Ereignis), inseparable from the modality of ‘taking place,’ interpreted as a gift without giver (es gibt).