Derrida’s Thinking of the Event

Derrida’s thinking of the event engages a certain inappropriability of the event, always resistant to anticipation and even to comprehension. For Derrida, an event is always inappropriable, displaying an aporetic structure and happening in what he calls an experience of the impossible. The event remains inappropriable as it frustrates any attempt to stabilize or crystallize it into some present being, some established identity. Happening outside of thought and subjectivity, an event can only happen as a surprise. The event is thus the coming of an alterity, of an arrivant. From a reflection on the aporetic structure of the event, I will focus on an ethics of the event, understood as an unconditional hospitality to its unpredicable arrival. I will unfold in the following pages Derrida’s thinking of the event as “im-possible,” pursue his characterization of the event as a “letting” (as opposed to doing or making and leading to a deconstruction of power in his thinking of the event), and then retrieve the ethical scope of such thinking, approached as hospitality to the event, a letting the event happen.