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A few years ago, I was asked to review a book by the French philosopher Claude Romano, entitled L"Événement et le temps.¹ The title intrigued me, especially the concept of the "event". It is a concept we are all familiar with in a sense, even in philosophy, since it is so central to much of contemporary thought. It plays, for instance, a central role in Whitehead's process philosophy, but it is also a key concept for postmodern philosophers like Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard. The meaning of the concept, however, is not always the same (to say the least) and Romano makes it even more complicated. For him, l"événement seems so extremely exceptional, while for Whitehead it is constitutive for all that is, and in that sense not at all exceptional. Romano's way of dealing with the event, however, fits quite well within a phenomenological perspective. As the phenomenologist tries to describe all forms of phainesthai, all the ways in which things manifest themselves to consciousness, so there are also these "exceptional events' we sometimes experience, like falling in love, or even like the Holocaust (which for Lyotard is a kind of archetype of an event). Such events indeed are extraordinary — they take us by surprise, they overtake us, outside of any context. It is as if the world explodes and time is suspended, Romano says. They come from "nowhere", and all of a sudden they are here, almost an existential version of Butler's Erewhon (to which Deleuze loves so much to refer), turning everything Around.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230280731_4

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