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Event and Time
Contemporary philosophy, from Kant through Bergson and Husserl to Heidegger, has assumed that time must be conceived as a fundamental determination of the Time is not first in things but arises from actions, attitudes, or comportments through which a subject temporalizes mtime, expecting or remembering, anticipating the future or making a decision.
Event and Time traces the genesis of this thesis through detailed, rigorous analyses of the philosophy of time in Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, ultimately showing that, in the development of metaphysics, the understanding of the temporal phenomenon as an inner-temporal phenomenon has made possible time’s subjectivization.
The book goes on to argue that time is in fact not thinkable according to metaphysical subjectivity. Instead, the guiding thread for the analysis of time must shift to the eventual hermeneutics of the human being, first developed in Event and World , and now deepened and completed in Event and Time . Romano’s diptych makes a compelling, rigorous, and original philosophical contribution to the thinking of the event.
Event and Time traces the genesis of this thesis through detailed, rigorous analyses of the philosophy of time in Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, ultimately showing that, in the development of metaphysics, the understanding of the temporal phenomenon as an inner-temporal phenomenon has made possible time’s subjectivization.
The book goes on to argue that time is in fact not thinkable according to metaphysical subjectivity. Instead, the guiding thread for the analysis of time must shift to the eventual hermeneutics of the human being, first developed in Event and World , and now deepened and completed in Event and Time . Romano’s diptych makes a compelling, rigorous, and original philosophical contribution to the thinking of the event.
- GenresPhilosophy
296 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1999
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June 29, 2018
In this book, Claude Romano carries on the "evential hermeneutics" he initiated in an earlier book
Event and Time
, so as to analyze the phenomena of time and temporality. Considering its argumentative orientation in general, the book is a close dialogue with, and critique of, Martin Heidegger's ideas on temporality in his existential analytic of Dasein.
Instead of expressing his disagreement directly, however, Romano takes a detour through reading Plato's Parmenides , Aristotle's Physics , and St. Augustine's Confessions , for these philosophers exemplifies what Romano calls "the metaphysics of time". By this he means the long-lasting and pervasive tradition of conceiving time as an "inner-temporal" phenomenon, of studying time with reference to concepts like "before" and "after", like "first", "then" and "finally". Thus conceived, time appears to be a neutral succession of moments, each passing from the future through the present into the past. Though Romano tries to distance this characterization of traditional accounts of time from Heidegger's characterization of "the vulgar concept of time" as "a succession of 'nows'", the difference is not determinative. The formulation of "inner-temporality" is inspiring though, as it can more easily be applied to traditional philosophies of time.
According to Romano, the metaphysics of time suffers from two problems. First, as it can only account for a temporal phenomenon by referring back to another, purportedly "more original" temporal phenomenon, any explanation is threatened by an infinite regress. Second, the metaphysics of time prioritizes actuality over possibility, and thus cannot address the radical novelty of events (as opposed to facts). Possibilities that are not yet are interpreted as ready-made actualities in effect, except that they are "tensed" in a future incapable of eliciting genuine surprise.
Romano goes on to single out a predominant tradition in the metaphysics of time, that of "subjectivizing" time, basing it on projections of a subject that persists despite every event it undergoes, thus functioning as a substratum of all experiences. This approach is prompted by the difficulty of conceiving a moment's presence to itself, since the notion of an isolated moment seems rootless and unable to resist the aforementioned infinite regress. The subjectivization of time, however, transposes the foundational presence-to-itself into the subject. Because subjectivity is ever accompanying experiences, the subject, conceived as a substance, seems capable of grounding the fleeting moments in its own presence-to-itself. When the subject remembers or expects something, the content is tensed while the subject is always present, witnessing its passage from the future through the present into the past.
For Romano, philosophers from Augustine to Edmund Husserl and "even" to Heidegger fall into the tradition of subjectivizing time. Things are less obvious with Heidegger, and Romano argues that, though Heidegger resists the traditional concept of the subject, his Dasein is nothing more than a subject that is Being-in-the-World. Though this step has profound consequences, it by no means changes the idea that the subject (in this case Dasein) is a basis of temporality that is present-to-itself.
Though the subjectivization of time seems to avoid the infinite regress, stopping it with the subject itself, it nevertheless has to presume the inner-temporality of the subject, so that it can "first" project this and "then" that. Moreover, the radical novelty of events remains unexplainable.
Here we can already sense that there are two moments in Romano's critique of the metaphysics of time (and especially of the subjectivization of time), one intrinsic (inner-temporality and the infinite regress) and one extrinsic (the radical novelty of the event). It later becomes clear that Romano pays more attention to, and indeed invests more in, the latter. Thus begins his positive account of "evential" time.
Romano's theoretical construction is based on a distinction between an event and a fact, one of the themes in Event and World. To locate the difference between the two, Romano limits his discussion to meaning-making (that is, suspending questions about what "in fact" is), and expands the concept of explanatory framework so that it becomes ontological rather than merely epistemological. Another name for the framework is "world". A fact "is", because a framework of meaning preexists it, within which the fact makes sense by relating to the framework through causal or motivational links. It fits into the framework, complements its detail, but does not shake the framework. Hence a collection of facts can adumbrate the world-framework in the manner of an inner-worldly succession.
The event, by contrast, shakes the framework to the extent that the meaning of all that has been is radically transformed. Because of this, the event cannot be properly anticipated when it has not yet taken place. As Romano says, the event brings about its own possibility, and it is only after its advent that such a possibility can be retroactively recognized. Before its advent, however, it was not possible at all. Nor was it impossible, to be sure - for it was simply incommensurable with the world-framework adopted before its advent.
Needless to say, if one wants to preserve the radical novelty of the event, one has to prioritize evential time over factual time. The latter is inner-temporal, perfectly accountable as a succession. The former, however, is not inner-temporal, since the event makes ("temporalizes") time rather than fits itself into any preexistent framework of time.
Accordingly, the "three dimensionals" of time are defined with respect to the advent of the event: the future is not a deliverance of ready-made actualities, but the openness to novel, non-anticipatable possibilities. The "always already" does not address a past that has once been present, but expresses the fact that the event radically exceeds one's projections, so that it cannot be completely incorporated, but always appears to have always already been there, as an "other", before its advent. The present is not a facade or an infinitesimal point through which the future passes into the past, but what "singularizes" the event and the one undergoing it (the "advenant") as such. These three dimensionals are not successive as in the metaphysics of time; rather, they are "contemporaneous", in that each of them has to be at work in order for the rest to be. They are inseparable, expressing different aspects of the same phenomenon of time.
Romano goes on from time (the mode of advent of events) to temporality (the way time temporalizes itself through the ex-per-ience of the counterpart of the event, the advenant). This yields a more concrete analysis, in which Romano discovers three "vistas" of temporality: availability, the having-taken-place (responsibility), and transformation. Romano deliberately avoids the term "horizon", because he understands it to be a closed totality, while "vista" allows for indefinite development. With these concepts, Romano explains the phenomena of an immemorial past, radical surprise, and the relation between selfhood and responsibility.
Following Paul Ricœur, Romano distinguishes between the "idem-" and the "ipse-" senses of self-identity and characterizes the latter as selfhood without a substratum. In this way he believes that he has surpassed Heidegger's model of authentic selfhood, which still depends on the projection of Dasein in a moment of vision [Augenblick], thus championing Dasein's presence to itself. The following discussion on traumatism, as being not able to free oneself from certain recurring remembrances and to go on, is in the same line.
For Romano, time precedes temporality, for the advent of the event is out of the control of the advenant and hence irreducible to projections of the latter. This is more evident when he turns to the "finitude of temporality": according to his interpretation, the event of birth is peculiar, not because it shakes a preexistent framework of the world (which every event does), but precisely because it is an event by which alone any other event becomes possible; it is the possibility of all possibilities. Because birth is strictly excluded from projections of the advenant, it signifies that the advenant is not the origin of her own possibilities. In other words, in an event, and especially in the event of birth, there is an irreducible import from what exceeds the advenant herself, from others as well as from configurations of the world discovered as already-there. This excess is a notion inherited from Emmanuel Levinas' discourse on the "there is" [il y a]: the negativity that actively constitute whatever is graspable.
It is thus birth that avails the advenant for death and other events; the Heideggerian Dasein, on the other hand, is never born. Romano here attributes to Heidegger the idea that Dasein has to enjoy a totality [Ganzsein] so as to be Being-towards-Death, a totality problematizes by the radical openness of life and its dependence on something exceeding Dasein that Romano's analysis of birth reveals. For Romano, the adventure of the advenant is still finite, not in the sense that it is a totality confined within a boundary, but precisely because it is borderless, because it cannot be exhausted by projections of a subject that is present-to-itself.
Considered as a whole, Romano's book aims ultimately at an explication of the temporality of the advenant's ex-per-ience. This means that the phenomenon of time cannot be satisfactorily interpreted without introducing the advenant, of subjectivity in a sense. This Romano readily acknowledges: for him, any meaning-making works through the advenant, though he emphasizes, more than once, that an entrance to meaning does not equal a foundation of meaning.
This, however, is precisely an idea that Heidegger (and Husserl to an extent) holds as well. When Romano tries to distance himself from Heidegger, he hastily renders Heidegger a foundationalist, ignoring, deliberately or unawares, the fact that, for Heidegger, Dasein is the site of ontology, not its basis. Heidegger's analysis of time in Being and Time is insufficient, precisely because the book deals with the existential analytic of Dasein, a prolegomena to fundamental ontology, i.e. an investigation into the meaning of Being in general.
Reading Heidegger in a foundationalist way (following a couple of Heidegger commentators), Romano sets up a straw man so that he could develop a "new" account that, in fact, is deeply in line with Heidegger, especially concerning the relation between actuality and possibility, the idea of a "null basis", and the interpretation of finitude. One may say that if Dasein were not misleadingly understood as an entity (among others) but as a structure by which the world and the self emerges simultaneously, then it is close enough to Romano's advenant: a "subject" with open borders that does not claim diachronic persistence as a substratum.
All these confusions notwithstanding, Romano's analysis still has two merits. First, it shows decisively that a foundationalist reading of the Heideggerian Dasein is untenable - a finding that is far from obvious from current scholarship on Heidegger. Second, the conceptual apparatus Romano adopts in his articulation of the moments of time and temporality brings the Heideggerian analysis to a more profound level. Not only does he reveal the fundamental ontological status of radical possibility in Heidegger's conception of an original temporality [ursprüngliche Zeitlichkeit]; he also supports it with an evential hermeneutics, in which the notion of the explanatory framework is effective, forceful and thought-provoking. Ideally, it seems promising that Romano is completing Heidegger's thinking of time by starting, not with Dasein, but with Being in general.
This, of course, does not annihilate several problems in Romano's account. First, the exact status of the excessive "there is" is obscure - a same problem as in Levinas. A totality has to be assumed in order for there to be any excess, or else the excess is nothing more than a sign of the openness of horizon, an idea already existent in Husserl. In either case, there is the risk of reifying the excess, of rendering it something like the Lacanian Real, for otherwise its constitutive force is hardly comprehensible. But, in that way, the excess is precisely actual, no longer radically open as a possibility.
Second - and this follows directly - Romano does not leave us any clue about why he, as one advenant, infinitely exceeded by the "there is", should be able to grasp and characterize the "there is" in a non-privative and non-formal way. True, the "there is" exceeds projections of the advenant - this Romano is entitles to know by examining projections of himself as an advenant. But how does he know or make sure that the "there is" actively constitute our projections, provided that he, as every other advenant, is denied direct access to the excessive "there is"? Though I do believe that there is a way out of this difficulty, Romano does not show, or even hint at, such a way. It seems as through the problem were simply non-existent for him.
Third, the distinction between the event and the fact seems to be based on a difference in kind rather than a difference in extent. An occurrence is either a fact, if it fits into the world-framework the advenant finds herself in at the moment, and thus gets interpreted as realizing an anticipated possibility, or an event, if it doesn't. Moreover, at several points Romano claims that the event has to be shown through a fact (211), which means that the event and the fact are concepts at different levels. On the other hand, however, Romano does not provide a practicable criterion about which moments in our life qualify as events. Though he enlists a few, he remains silent about the rest. It is thus doubtful whether the picture Romano draws about factical existence is a faithful one.
Fourth, Romano confuses two senses of "fact": a fact can either mean 1) what is not yet made sense of, like what Jean-Paul Sartre calls a "brute" fact; or it can mean 2) what makes perfect sense in the current framework of meaning. Romano defines the fact as 2), but implies 1) when he needs to show the unity of all events in a unitary world. The problem is that, while 2) is derivative from, and subordinate to, the notion of the event as possibilizing any possibility, 1) is not. Indeed, 1) logically precedes the notion of the event, if Romano expects it to serve as a virtual basis of the unity of the world. Then the ambivalence between 1) and 2) creates a vicious circle in explanation. This, by the way, is the problem of all realism, proclaimed or smuggled.
Nevertheless, it remains to be seen what conceptual consequences Romano's book can have on philosophy of time. For me, the section on "time" (not on "temporality" - that is, not yet involving thematically the advenant) is more promising, as it sketches out what an interpretation of time without appealing to a subject looks like. There, the ontological relation between being-itself, being-not-itself, becoming-itself and becoming-not-itself is at play, capable of accounting for the genesis of inner-temporality, or what Heidegger calls chronological time. The further introduction of the Levinasian "there is" only obscures the problematics opened up by Romano's critique of inner-temporality. By falling back to what he is comfortable with, Romano misses the genuinely radical. His ultimate orientation of questions shows that he remains in a conceptual framework that is essentially Cartesian. His "event" of thinking, if any, is yet to come.
Instead of expressing his disagreement directly, however, Romano takes a detour through reading Plato's Parmenides , Aristotle's Physics , and St. Augustine's Confessions , for these philosophers exemplifies what Romano calls "the metaphysics of time". By this he means the long-lasting and pervasive tradition of conceiving time as an "inner-temporal" phenomenon, of studying time with reference to concepts like "before" and "after", like "first", "then" and "finally". Thus conceived, time appears to be a neutral succession of moments, each passing from the future through the present into the past. Though Romano tries to distance this characterization of traditional accounts of time from Heidegger's characterization of "the vulgar concept of time" as "a succession of 'nows'", the difference is not determinative. The formulation of "inner-temporality" is inspiring though, as it can more easily be applied to traditional philosophies of time.
According to Romano, the metaphysics of time suffers from two problems. First, as it can only account for a temporal phenomenon by referring back to another, purportedly "more original" temporal phenomenon, any explanation is threatened by an infinite regress. Second, the metaphysics of time prioritizes actuality over possibility, and thus cannot address the radical novelty of events (as opposed to facts). Possibilities that are not yet are interpreted as ready-made actualities in effect, except that they are "tensed" in a future incapable of eliciting genuine surprise.
Romano goes on to single out a predominant tradition in the metaphysics of time, that of "subjectivizing" time, basing it on projections of a subject that persists despite every event it undergoes, thus functioning as a substratum of all experiences. This approach is prompted by the difficulty of conceiving a moment's presence to itself, since the notion of an isolated moment seems rootless and unable to resist the aforementioned infinite regress. The subjectivization of time, however, transposes the foundational presence-to-itself into the subject. Because subjectivity is ever accompanying experiences, the subject, conceived as a substance, seems capable of grounding the fleeting moments in its own presence-to-itself. When the subject remembers or expects something, the content is tensed while the subject is always present, witnessing its passage from the future through the present into the past.
For Romano, philosophers from Augustine to Edmund Husserl and "even" to Heidegger fall into the tradition of subjectivizing time. Things are less obvious with Heidegger, and Romano argues that, though Heidegger resists the traditional concept of the subject, his Dasein is nothing more than a subject that is Being-in-the-World. Though this step has profound consequences, it by no means changes the idea that the subject (in this case Dasein) is a basis of temporality that is present-to-itself.
Though the subjectivization of time seems to avoid the infinite regress, stopping it with the subject itself, it nevertheless has to presume the inner-temporality of the subject, so that it can "first" project this and "then" that. Moreover, the radical novelty of events remains unexplainable.
Here we can already sense that there are two moments in Romano's critique of the metaphysics of time (and especially of the subjectivization of time), one intrinsic (inner-temporality and the infinite regress) and one extrinsic (the radical novelty of the event). It later becomes clear that Romano pays more attention to, and indeed invests more in, the latter. Thus begins his positive account of "evential" time.
Romano's theoretical construction is based on a distinction between an event and a fact, one of the themes in Event and World. To locate the difference between the two, Romano limits his discussion to meaning-making (that is, suspending questions about what "in fact" is), and expands the concept of explanatory framework so that it becomes ontological rather than merely epistemological. Another name for the framework is "world". A fact "is", because a framework of meaning preexists it, within which the fact makes sense by relating to the framework through causal or motivational links. It fits into the framework, complements its detail, but does not shake the framework. Hence a collection of facts can adumbrate the world-framework in the manner of an inner-worldly succession.
The event, by contrast, shakes the framework to the extent that the meaning of all that has been is radically transformed. Because of this, the event cannot be properly anticipated when it has not yet taken place. As Romano says, the event brings about its own possibility, and it is only after its advent that such a possibility can be retroactively recognized. Before its advent, however, it was not possible at all. Nor was it impossible, to be sure - for it was simply incommensurable with the world-framework adopted before its advent.
Needless to say, if one wants to preserve the radical novelty of the event, one has to prioritize evential time over factual time. The latter is inner-temporal, perfectly accountable as a succession. The former, however, is not inner-temporal, since the event makes ("temporalizes") time rather than fits itself into any preexistent framework of time.
Accordingly, the "three dimensionals" of time are defined with respect to the advent of the event: the future is not a deliverance of ready-made actualities, but the openness to novel, non-anticipatable possibilities. The "always already" does not address a past that has once been present, but expresses the fact that the event radically exceeds one's projections, so that it cannot be completely incorporated, but always appears to have always already been there, as an "other", before its advent. The present is not a facade or an infinitesimal point through which the future passes into the past, but what "singularizes" the event and the one undergoing it (the "advenant") as such. These three dimensionals are not successive as in the metaphysics of time; rather, they are "contemporaneous", in that each of them has to be at work in order for the rest to be. They are inseparable, expressing different aspects of the same phenomenon of time.
Romano goes on from time (the mode of advent of events) to temporality (the way time temporalizes itself through the ex-per-ience of the counterpart of the event, the advenant). This yields a more concrete analysis, in which Romano discovers three "vistas" of temporality: availability, the having-taken-place (responsibility), and transformation. Romano deliberately avoids the term "horizon", because he understands it to be a closed totality, while "vista" allows for indefinite development. With these concepts, Romano explains the phenomena of an immemorial past, radical surprise, and the relation between selfhood and responsibility.
Following Paul Ricœur, Romano distinguishes between the "idem-" and the "ipse-" senses of self-identity and characterizes the latter as selfhood without a substratum. In this way he believes that he has surpassed Heidegger's model of authentic selfhood, which still depends on the projection of Dasein in a moment of vision [Augenblick], thus championing Dasein's presence to itself. The following discussion on traumatism, as being not able to free oneself from certain recurring remembrances and to go on, is in the same line.
For Romano, time precedes temporality, for the advent of the event is out of the control of the advenant and hence irreducible to projections of the latter. This is more evident when he turns to the "finitude of temporality": according to his interpretation, the event of birth is peculiar, not because it shakes a preexistent framework of the world (which every event does), but precisely because it is an event by which alone any other event becomes possible; it is the possibility of all possibilities. Because birth is strictly excluded from projections of the advenant, it signifies that the advenant is not the origin of her own possibilities. In other words, in an event, and especially in the event of birth, there is an irreducible import from what exceeds the advenant herself, from others as well as from configurations of the world discovered as already-there. This excess is a notion inherited from Emmanuel Levinas' discourse on the "there is" [il y a]: the negativity that actively constitute whatever is graspable.
It is thus birth that avails the advenant for death and other events; the Heideggerian Dasein, on the other hand, is never born. Romano here attributes to Heidegger the idea that Dasein has to enjoy a totality [Ganzsein] so as to be Being-towards-Death, a totality problematizes by the radical openness of life and its dependence on something exceeding Dasein that Romano's analysis of birth reveals. For Romano, the adventure of the advenant is still finite, not in the sense that it is a totality confined within a boundary, but precisely because it is borderless, because it cannot be exhausted by projections of a subject that is present-to-itself.
Considered as a whole, Romano's book aims ultimately at an explication of the temporality of the advenant's ex-per-ience. This means that the phenomenon of time cannot be satisfactorily interpreted without introducing the advenant, of subjectivity in a sense. This Romano readily acknowledges: for him, any meaning-making works through the advenant, though he emphasizes, more than once, that an entrance to meaning does not equal a foundation of meaning.
This, however, is precisely an idea that Heidegger (and Husserl to an extent) holds as well. When Romano tries to distance himself from Heidegger, he hastily renders Heidegger a foundationalist, ignoring, deliberately or unawares, the fact that, for Heidegger, Dasein is the site of ontology, not its basis. Heidegger's analysis of time in Being and Time is insufficient, precisely because the book deals with the existential analytic of Dasein, a prolegomena to fundamental ontology, i.e. an investigation into the meaning of Being in general.
Reading Heidegger in a foundationalist way (following a couple of Heidegger commentators), Romano sets up a straw man so that he could develop a "new" account that, in fact, is deeply in line with Heidegger, especially concerning the relation between actuality and possibility, the idea of a "null basis", and the interpretation of finitude. One may say that if Dasein were not misleadingly understood as an entity (among others) but as a structure by which the world and the self emerges simultaneously, then it is close enough to Romano's advenant: a "subject" with open borders that does not claim diachronic persistence as a substratum.
All these confusions notwithstanding, Romano's analysis still has two merits. First, it shows decisively that a foundationalist reading of the Heideggerian Dasein is untenable - a finding that is far from obvious from current scholarship on Heidegger. Second, the conceptual apparatus Romano adopts in his articulation of the moments of time and temporality brings the Heideggerian analysis to a more profound level. Not only does he reveal the fundamental ontological status of radical possibility in Heidegger's conception of an original temporality [ursprüngliche Zeitlichkeit]; he also supports it with an evential hermeneutics, in which the notion of the explanatory framework is effective, forceful and thought-provoking. Ideally, it seems promising that Romano is completing Heidegger's thinking of time by starting, not with Dasein, but with Being in general.
This, of course, does not annihilate several problems in Romano's account. First, the exact status of the excessive "there is" is obscure - a same problem as in Levinas. A totality has to be assumed in order for there to be any excess, or else the excess is nothing more than a sign of the openness of horizon, an idea already existent in Husserl. In either case, there is the risk of reifying the excess, of rendering it something like the Lacanian Real, for otherwise its constitutive force is hardly comprehensible. But, in that way, the excess is precisely actual, no longer radically open as a possibility.
Second - and this follows directly - Romano does not leave us any clue about why he, as one advenant, infinitely exceeded by the "there is", should be able to grasp and characterize the "there is" in a non-privative and non-formal way. True, the "there is" exceeds projections of the advenant - this Romano is entitles to know by examining projections of himself as an advenant. But how does he know or make sure that the "there is" actively constitute our projections, provided that he, as every other advenant, is denied direct access to the excessive "there is"? Though I do believe that there is a way out of this difficulty, Romano does not show, or even hint at, such a way. It seems as through the problem were simply non-existent for him.
Third, the distinction between the event and the fact seems to be based on a difference in kind rather than a difference in extent. An occurrence is either a fact, if it fits into the world-framework the advenant finds herself in at the moment, and thus gets interpreted as realizing an anticipated possibility, or an event, if it doesn't. Moreover, at several points Romano claims that the event has to be shown through a fact (211), which means that the event and the fact are concepts at different levels. On the other hand, however, Romano does not provide a practicable criterion about which moments in our life qualify as events. Though he enlists a few, he remains silent about the rest. It is thus doubtful whether the picture Romano draws about factical existence is a faithful one.
Fourth, Romano confuses two senses of "fact": a fact can either mean 1) what is not yet made sense of, like what Jean-Paul Sartre calls a "brute" fact; or it can mean 2) what makes perfect sense in the current framework of meaning. Romano defines the fact as 2), but implies 1) when he needs to show the unity of all events in a unitary world. The problem is that, while 2) is derivative from, and subordinate to, the notion of the event as possibilizing any possibility, 1) is not. Indeed, 1) logically precedes the notion of the event, if Romano expects it to serve as a virtual basis of the unity of the world. Then the ambivalence between 1) and 2) creates a vicious circle in explanation. This, by the way, is the problem of all realism, proclaimed or smuggled.
Nevertheless, it remains to be seen what conceptual consequences Romano's book can have on philosophy of time. For me, the section on "time" (not on "temporality" - that is, not yet involving thematically the advenant) is more promising, as it sketches out what an interpretation of time without appealing to a subject looks like. There, the ontological relation between being-itself, being-not-itself, becoming-itself and becoming-not-itself is at play, capable of accounting for the genesis of inner-temporality, or what Heidegger calls chronological time. The further introduction of the Levinasian "there is" only obscures the problematics opened up by Romano's critique of inner-temporality. By falling back to what he is comfortable with, Romano misses the genuinely radical. His ultimate orientation of questions shows that he remains in a conceptual framework that is essentially Cartesian. His "event" of thinking, if any, is yet to come.
December 12, 2015
A highly original work of post-Heideggerian phenomenology, "Event and Time" succeeds in its task of formulating a phenomenology of time and temporality, subjectivity and singularity, of events and world, by virtue of their reconceptualion beyond and before the horizons of a constitutive, transcendental subjectivity. While Clause Romano's prose is at times dense and even abstuse, it is hardly so in the same manner as Heidegger's sometimes obscurantist jargon: it favors a conceptual clarity that simpler, more direct prose would make impossible.
October 19, 2023
A little bit disappointing to read 160 pages of fairly obscure and unrelenting French phenomenology for Romano to just end up saying that his idea of an event or 'the event' is the incarnation of Christ. Nonetheless, I get why he is working through issues of post-Husserlian questions of temporality, but I just am somewhat tired of all this talk on 'the event' in French phenomenology and do not take it as coincidentally that Romano (and, for that matter, Badiou) resort to Christian theological paradigms as being emblematic of the event, universality, etc..
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