Theory & Event

Traveling on a desert highway, we occasionally come upon a crossroads, where a sign indicates our location relative to towns north, south, east, and west. The sign gives us a sense of placement, even though we can only see empty horizon. The terrible image of the World Trade Center in flames has, or ought to have, a similar sort of indicative function for us today — pointing toward what cannot be seen or represented, but only lived through: the actuality of a historical event. To understand this idea, we need to draw a distinction between the events of September 11, and the complex, historical event that we are drawn into on account of these events. The former can be represented, but the latter, as something that we are presently passing through, is something with which we can only engage. This broad, environing event comprises the “historical exteriority” of the terrorist attacks. To give thought to this exteriority is to assemble and engage a diverse series of struggles, centered in the Middle East, revolving about the access to, and control of, oil. We in the West can no longer deny our involvement in this history of struggles. For in the wake of September 11, this historical exteriority has become our own. We experience our installation in this new realm of exteriority in the form of an altered, temporal disposition. If the events of September 11 have changed us, it is because they have opened us to an other time — a time of conflict, transformation, and decision.

September 11 marks a crisis in world history. With the attacks on New York and Washington, terror has become a truly global phenomenon, bringing with it a new kind of warfare with incalculable stakes. In the developed world, at least, it seems as if, all of a sudden, the world is divided against itself. When the American President says: “In the war against terrorism, you are either for or against us,” this rigid dichotomy only reflects the rift that has opened beneath our feet. We feel we must respond to the events of September 11 with decisive action, lest we are swallowed by this abyss. But at the same time, we seem to lack any definite sense of what it is that we are responding to. We tell ourselves that we are responding to the attacks of September 11. If the crisis that we presently face is an effect of these attacks, is it not obvious that the perpetrators of the attacks are its cause? But the logic of cause and effect is misplaced here. For the crisis that we face does not merely concern the tragedy of the towers, nor even the sprawling, diffuse, plethora of tragedies that has since engulfed Afghanistan. These are only symptoms of the crisis, not the crisis itself. The crisis itself is an entirely different order of event.

Ordinarily, when we think of an event, we think of something that takes place within the flow of history. To have an understanding of “events” in these terms is to follow “current affairs” — the kind of everyday occurrences that are recorded by journalists, and documented in the daily news. It is certainly possible to think of the attacks on New York and Washington in these terms. But does this do justice to the event itself? Not at all. For the most part, this viewpoint elides the event itself. For here the event is represented as an objective circumstance — something which takes place “out there in the world,” requiring us only to be present on the scene to capture the moment with our cameras, sum it up in a sound bite. As Heidegger notes, whenever something becomes “the object of representing, it first incurs in a certain manner a loss of Being.”[1] When we reduce the event marked by the date September 11 to the specific events that transpired on this date, we shut ourselves off from the being of the event, even while it takes possession of our lives and futures.

We represent objects, but we can only undergo events. The event as such is not something that can...