Romano's 'There Is': Event & Finitude Review

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C. Romano, There is. The Event and the Finitude of Appearing (Fordham
University Press, 2016, 271 pp.)
Pierre-Jean Renaudie (University of Porto)
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
After having translated the diptych in which Claude Romano, one of the
leading figures in contemporary phenomenology, sets the frame of his ‘evenential
hermeneutics’, Fordham University Press publishes the translation of a third volume,
carrying Romano’s project one step further. These three volumes form a
complementary set of studies, so that There Is: The Event and the Finitude of Appearing,
originally published in French in 2003, is to be understood as an outcome of Event
and World and Event and Time (published in French in 1998 and 1999, and translated
into English in 2009 and 2014). There Is sets the grounds for the major work published
a few years later by the author, At the heart of Reason (Gallimard, 2010 for the French
version, translated by M. B. Smith, Northwestern University Press, 2015), where he
develops an in-depth confrontation between phenomenology and its analytic
criticisms, and argues for the legitimacy of a renewal of phenomenology that
addresses some of the main challenges of contemporary thought. With the
translation of these four books, the English-speaking public is now able to access the
core of Romano’s philosophical thought and to grasp what is at stake in his
intellectual itinerary.
Why an ‘evenential hermeneutics’? What is its purpose and its tasks?
Romano’s philosophical project as exposed in Time and Event and World and Event
analyses the impact of fundamental events on one’s existence that contribute in
configuring the meaning of the world within which their decisions, their actions,
their understanding of themselves, and more generally their life, takes place. This
project is phenomenological, insofar as, it aims at analysing the conditions of
appearing of such events, and draws on the main figures of the phenomenological
tradition (Husserl and Heidegger first and foremost, but also their French inheritors:
Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Ricœur, Maldiney, and Levinas) in order to unveil the
temporal structures and bring out the existential meaning that the “coming about” of
the event involves. An ‘event’, Romano claims, “upsets the hierarchy of the agent’s
objectives, the configuration of his possibilities, the way in which he understands
them, and himself in light of them, that is, his world as such” (15). This aspect of the
event justifies that its phenomenological description requires a hermeneutics, insofar
as this very notion of the event always involves the possibility of understanding the
meaning of one’s existence. Events always carry the tragic weight of a crisis through
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which “the possibility of understanding himself is opened to man” (4). In opposition
to mere facts, which are fundamentally subject to a causal inquiry and somehow
reducible to the causes they follow from, events belong to the domain of meaning,
“that is, to a domain in which the understanding of a situation by an agent comes
into play” (12-13). Events do not only happen; their “coming about” is essentially
characterized by their significant impact on the human lives that they affect and
transform; they necessarily carry a certain meaning that is to be revealed in light of
the possibilities of existence they contribute in reconfiguring.
A fundamental feature of this reconfiguration is, according to Romano, its
“impersonal” character (60). While the events always befall someone, they
nevertheless appear as anonymous insofar as they affect one’s existence from the
outside, dismissing one’s ability to anticipate and control the actualization of the
event: events happen to us, so to say, without us; they reconfigure our possibilities
and determine our place within the world beyond our reach. The radical change that
the occurrence of the event provokes is primarily a “transformation of the world”
(XVI). Being impersonal, this “reconfiguration of the world” urges us to reconsider
the role that one is able to play with respect to the constitution and determination of
the meaning of their own existence. This is the reason why the evential hermeneutics
is bound to criticize and eventually reject any form of transcendental philosophy that
substitutes, explicitly or not, an analysis of the a priori conditions of the experience of
the world to a proper description of the irreducible novelty of the event. The evential
hermeneutics is then expected to provide a phenomenological description of the
“absolute change” that arises from the event’s critical upheaval. It is this “’passage’
from nothing to something”, this “occurrence out of the blue” (XVII) irreducible to
any kind of causal mechanism that Romano proposes to call “there is”.
The overall purpose of the evential hermeneutics put forward in this third
book is to open a pathway for a new and revisited phenomenology that resists the
transcendental temptation to which Heidegger and his French inheritors yielded
according to Romano no less than Husserl. Accounting for the impersonal character
of the events that play a fundamental role in the determination of one’s possibilities
of existence, keeps us away from any philosophical method that aims at tracing the
process of appearing back to its constituting sources in a “subject”, or in a Dasein
whose transcendence is expected to provide the conditions of possibility of the
appearing of the world. Heidegger, according to this reading, “transforms
Husserlian transcendentalism from within without breaking away from it entirely”
(XII). Romano’s non-transcendental phenomenology of the event is meant to take on
the project that Heidegger was aiming at but failed to carry through with; this
phenomenology puts forward an “evential conception of existence” (59), which does
not need to ground the appearing of the world and the constitution of its meaning in
anything but in the actual “coming about” of the events that disclose the world to us
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and give our existence its singular meaning. The goal of such a phenomenology of
the event is “to understand how it transforms that situation, that experience, that
history; how it appears irreducible to all prior understanding and is itself the opener
and initiator of its own meaning” (XVII-XVIII).
Instead of focusing on the event’s impact on the structures of existence as
such as in the previous two books, There is makes a new step and attempts to
describe “the very appearing of the event”, its occurring or its coming about,
provided that the transformation performed by this “coming about” has nothing in
common with the changes undergone by things that remain through time. This step
further is absolutely critical and decisive, not only for Romano’s evential
hermeneutics, but also for phenomenology: “the question of the there-is is the very
question of the appearing as it is posed to any phenomenology” (XVII). One of the
most remarkable achievements of this book is to propose a series of
phenomenologically-based studies faithful to the spirit of the tradition in its
approach to existence, while deeply revising and pointing out its shortcomings.
Romano’s book addresses three fundamental challenges that contemporary
phenomenology must face: a/ it proposes a constructive criticism of
transcendentalism, b/ it argues that phenomenology is able to specify the meaning of
the logos of phenomena without having to meet the exclusive requirements that
contemporary logic imposes on it, and c/ it revitalizes the question of the
delimitation of metaphysics that came to be left aside by the main representatives of
contemporary hermeneutics in the 20th Century (Gadamer, Ricœur, Taylor etc.).
These three sets of issues intertwine throughout the three parts of the book
and command its structure. The three chapters of the first section, “Event and
Metaphysics”, attempt to delimit the metaphysical horizon of the evential
hermeneutics through a critical but meticulous reading of Aristotle’s conception of
tukhè (a necessary chance that matches Romano’s notion of the event), an critique of
Heidegger’s oblivion of the event, and an analysis of Bergson’s investigations on the
temporality of possibility. The second section, entitled “Beyond Subject and Object?”
attempts to revise from within the phenomenological analysis of three main
concepts, freedom, flesh and perception, that each played a fundamental role within
the development of the phenomenological tradition. In three chapters dedicated to
the Sartrean concept of freedom, to Husserl’s analysis of the flesh and its critical
uptake by Merleau-Ponty, and to J. J. Gibson’s ecological phenomenology
respectively, Romano tries to demonstrate the phenomenological necessity of
overcoming the transcendental modes of reasoning about the world and to open new
pathways towards a non-transcendental and nevertheless phenomenological
description of its disclosure. Finally, the last part of the book consists in two chapters
that scrutinize the phenomenological meaning of the concepts that constitute the
basis of the evential hermeneutics (existence, nothingness, event), arguing for their
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irreducibility to the logical function that logical analysis ascribes to these concepts.
Romano discusses Carnap’s project to eliminate metaphysics through a logical
paraphrasing and rejection of the existential concept of nothingness emphasized by
Heidegger. Examining the roots of this project in Frege and Russell, Romano points
out the shortcomings of their logical analysis of the notion of existence, and argues
that it entails an irreducible metaphysical claim, which presupposes all the way
through the “perfect univocity of existence” (202). Against such a generalization of
the logical concept of existence, Romano contends that the phenomenological
distinction between the different regional ontologies allows us to conceive a radically
alternate and irreducible mode of existing that involves a non-logical but
nevertheless rigorous concept of nothingness, crucial to his own philosophical
undertaking. The second text of this third part, and very last chapter of the book,
explores the implications of this phenomenological concept of nothingness and
claims that the apparent logical contradictions inherently attached to the notion of
the event put forward by evential hermeneutics finds a phenomenological legitimacy
in the context of its “occurring”, provided that we take into consideration its specific
“modality of appearing”: “the event is nothing other than its pure appearing qua
appearing out of the nothing, in the forefront of the nothing, in suspense in the
nothing” (223). One might regret the absence of the seventh chapter from the French
version of the book in the translation, which provides more detailed insights on the
specific temporality of the event. However, its absence does not affect the
intelligibility of the book, nor weakens its structure.
Although the eight studies gathered in There is span a very wide spectrum of
topics and address some of the most difficult problems inherited from the
phenomenological tradition, Romano does an admirable job in making these crucial
points explicit and intelligible to the reader. There is is a particularly easy and
pleasant read, regardless of the difficulties inherent to the topics discussed. The book
could possibly be reproached for the relative absence of references to the most recent
studies on the philosophical issues it addresses. However, this lack of references is
justified by the style of the writing as it contributes greatly in making it more fluid
and accessible to the reader, and allows Romano to open a personal and original
pathway with respects to fundamental questions in philosophy. This remarkable
attempt to renew the understanding of major issues like the relation between
existence and temporality, the contentious relationship between phenomenology and
logic, and the intrinsic connection between metaphysics and hermeneutics,
legitimates the author’s choice to focus on the major historical figures and on the
most significant contributions on these matters. Romano’s rigorous analyses
developed throughout the book draw out a particularly clear, insightful and
interesting reading of the main philosophers belonging to the phenomenological
tradition.
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For reasons of space, I will not be able to present in detail these analyses nor
do justice to their subtlety; I shall need to limit myself in the last paragraphs of this
review, to raising a few questions that aim at interrogating the philosophical stakes
of the evential hermeneutics sketched in There Is. A particularly interesting and
fascinating aspect of Romano’s project is its complex and ambiguous relation to
Heidegger’s ontology. In his last tribute to Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida described his
relation to Husserl as a kind of paradoxical unfaithful fidelity – “infidèle fidélité”. This
analysis perfectly fits Romano’s ambiguous relation to the author of Being and Time
and could be applied to his critical but respectful reading of Heidegger, whose
influence on his work is constant and unquestionable. The ‘evential hermeneutics’ is
to be understood as a response to the Heideggerian project of an ‘existential
analytics’, identifying and attempting to address its major deficiency: the lack of an
existential analysis of the event studying the conditions under which something can
happen to Dasein that transforms it in a significant and meaningful way. According
to Romano, Heidegger dismisses too quickly the existential significance of the event
and its impact on the “ek-sistence” of Dasein. “The event, as soon as it comes up in
Sein und Zeit, is traced back to an inauthentic modality of Dasein, that is to an
ontological dissimulation of its existence” (17-18). There is does a very convincing job
in demonstrating that this “surreptitious reduction of events to mere innerworldly
facts” that can receive only the ontological meaning of Vorhandenheit (50) misses a
fundamental dimension of existence and is responsible for Heidegger’s unsatisfying
analysis of the “ecstatic” temporality of Dasein. The very question that Being and Time
unearths and emphasizes, the question about the “who?” that characterizes the Sein
of Dasein, requires an in-depth analysis of the occurrence of the events that determine
the very possibilities of Dasein and contribute in reconfiguring its world, making
each time that Dasein the particular Dasein it is and has to be. “It is the event,
understood more radically in its relation to possibility, that, by its very upsurge,
reconfigures all my possibilities before any project of mine and is world-forming for
the “entity” that I am” (51). Dasein, in other words, if we need to take into
consideration its evential structure and understand it as an “advenant” – a being
affected in its understanding of itself by the events that occur to it – cannot be
authentic in the sense that Heidegger gives to this word, insofar as its own
possibilities are not completely under its control or in its power: “the advenant is
exposed to possibilities of which he is not the measure” (225). This is why the
fundamental “evential” – that Romano opposes to the “existentiales” listed and
analysed in Heidegger’s Being and Time – lays the ground of the advenant’s existence
is its “passibility” (59, 225). Dasein’s freedom is not enough to allow him to project
and configure a world of possibilities only based on its resolute project toward death.
“Here, ‘possibilities’ are no longer what is open by the free projection of a finite
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potentiality-for-Being, but what comes to me without coming from me in the ordeal
undergone through the event” (52-53).
Logically, the analysis of the hermeneutical status of birth becomes the
leading thread of this phenomenology of the event. The demonstration of the
antecedence and priority over the free projection of Dasein’s possibilities focuses
primarily on the existential role of birth, insofar as birth is to be described as an event
that necessarily marks one’s existence and impacts its meaning although it can by no
means be fully taken over: “one is born into oneself without ever being able to take
one’s own birth upon oneself” (47). Being immemorial, birth cannot be but
inauthentic according to Being and Time’s concepts, as it opens existence to a past that
cannot be subject to appropriation nor be projected as one’s possibilities. Birth
becomes the event “par excellence” (64) revealing the limits of one’s ability to take
responsibility for the whole of their existence and undermining the privilege of
Selfhood. “Selfhood, as an ontological structure, can no longer be considered
originary” (Ibid.). It is needless to add that this analysis entails a complete
dismantling and revision of Heidegger’s existential analytics. If, as Romano claims,
birth is not a mere fact about one’s life and does not belong to the innerworldly
domain of the states of affairs having the ontological characteristic of Vorhandenheit,
then we need to acknowledge that the question of Being goes well beyond Dasein’s
own potentiality-for-Being and surpasses its power of appropriation: Being is
entrusted to Dasein before all ownership of its existence or authenticity as a gift “that
it can neither appropriate nor understand but that irrupts into its most intimate
existence” (48).
This remarkable analysis of birth raises a conceptual difficulty and a more
general concern regarding the overall project that it supports. The conception of the
event that Romano’s analyses put forward characterizes it as fundamentally nonworldly and “unexperienceable” (60). The exceptional character of events does not fit
the standards of the empirical concept of experience, which reduces it to a mere
“experience-of-facts” according to Romano’s distinction between events and facts.
Insofar as events contribute in reconfiguring one’s world and deeply alter their
understanding of themselves, they impose their own temporality on one’s existence
and cannot be said to come about in a world that pre-exists their occurrence.
However convincing this argument may be when applied to very specific and
extraordinary moments that disrupt the flow of one’s existence and upset the
meaning of their world at a very deep level, it seems quite counter-intuitive to apply
this analysis to the particular case of birth – and more generally to the common
events that necessarily belong to the history of everyone’s life – as birth does. On the
contrary it seems that precisely because of its “unexperienceability”, birth hardly
plays any role in the determination of one’s possibilities of existence and cannot
affect the meaning of one’s life. A birth is certainly – or at least can be – an event in
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the strongest sense of the word: disruptive, life-changing, and likely to affect the
meaning of one’s existence. But for whom? Less so for the child who cannot
experience it and whose birth belongs to the domain of the facts that provide a
strictly extrinsic determination of her identity than for her parents. “Born on the 19 th
of November 1979”: Romano would concur that such a mere fact about the identity
of Pierre-Jean Renaudie cannot provide me with any meaning that could help me
understand who I am and what is the extent of my possibilities of existence. But can
my birth be anything more than a mere fact, as long as it is not part of my
experience? Yet, this fact mentioned on my identity card may very well refer to a
proper event, but to an event that marked and transformed my parents’ lives rather
than mine. If birth is an event, it is an event for the others who experienced it in a
significant and disruptive fashion, rather than for oneself. How could the event
possess the “dimension of referentiality and of address” according to which “it is
always an event for someone” (15) if this event is not to be experienced in a concrete
and straightforward way, likely to effectively impact upon one’s life and affect the
meaning of their existence? In order to possess such a strong power over one’s life,
the event needs to occur primarily as an empirical and worldly fact that can be
recognized by everyone before it takes a particular and exclusive significance with
respect to one’s existence.
The conceptual problem that I am trying to raise does not only concern the
difficulty of maintaining a clear-cut distinction between events and facts when it
comes to birth, it also interrogates the meaning of a phenomenology of the
“unexperienceable”. Since its beginning, phenomenology always emphasized the
necessity of widening the empirical concept of experience in order to avoid the
metaphysical presuppositions attached to it. But the very idea of opening the
phenomenological description to the realm of the unexperienceable seems to bring
the phenomenological concept of experience to its extreme limit and challenges our
ability to make sense of its boundaries. If one would easily grant that some
contingent facts can bear some consequences on the conditions of the existence of a
person who did not positively experience them, it seems much more difficult to see
how unexperienceable events can involve a profound transformation of the selfhood
of the one to whom it happens, as Romano claims (15). As interesting and fruitful as
this revision of Heidegger’s existential analytic is, Romano’s evential hermeneutics
seems to put phenomenology in an uncomfortable situation, as it urges it to focus
primarily on events that are not to be experienced in the most common sense of the
word and that are by no means fit for the description of the everyday vicissitudes
that characterize one’s life. According to this approach, events are by definition rare
and exceptional: their uniqueness and singularity is the condition of their ability to
provoke a reconfiguration of one’s existential possibilities. If so, then how can the
analysis of exceptional moments in one’s life be generalized in order to provide the
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hermeneutic paradigm for the interpretation of existence? The evential hermeneutics
makes the analysis of an exceptional and unexperienceable event the guiding norm
for the interpretation of existence. Even if we grant that Romano’s strong and
original analyses of the notion of event are perfectly legitimated with respect to the
specific and restricted field of phenomena that his definition of the event
encompasses, the local relevance of these analyses may not justify the kind of
generalisation upon which evential hermeneutics is grounded.
Finally, one might wonder if this emphasis on the unexperienceability of the
event, grounded on the rejection of the empirical concept of experience, weakens
Romano’s attempt to get rid of transcendentalism. By refusing that events be
characterized as empirical facts or Weltereignisse, evential hermeneutics withdraws
these events from the world that they precede and are expected to give rise to. If
There is focuses on the appearing of the event as such, it is only insofar as this
appearing has nothing to do with the common sense in which something can be said
to happen. It seems then difficult not to understand evential hermeneutics as making
the event a condition of possibility of the appearing of the world. Romano argues
against this objection in several passages of the book, claiming that “the event is not
first possible and then actual”, and that its emergence “is not subordinate to prior
conditions of possibility in the subject” (59). However, his attempt to stress the nonworldly and unexperienceable dimension of the appearing of the event gives rise to a
tension that expresses the difficulty of breaking away from the transcendental
tendency inherent to phenomenology, even after the dismantling of the Ego.
The difficult challenge that Romano’s book faces consists in maintaining the
legitimacy of the phenomenological approach – even after its hermeneutical
mutation – while aiming to revise it in depth from within. Consequently, his evential
hermeneutics seems sometimes trapped in a conceptual framework that might not be
able to support the radical transformations entailed by such a rethinking of the event.
Romano’s analyses provide very strong and convincing evidence that this revised
conception of the event deserves to find a place in the existential analytics that
Heidegger was aiming at and should have been fully acknowledged by the author of
Being and Time. But it is not entirely clear whether his efforts to revise the major
concepts inherited from the phenomenological tradition (such as the concepts of
existence, experience, world, possibilities, nothingness, appearing, etc.) maintains
ultimately the evential hermeneutics under the insuperable horizon of Heidegger’s
existential analytics, or leads it to break through the boundaries of phenomenological
thought in order to think outside of its framework. Here we arrive at the essential
ambiguity of the relation that ties Romano’s philosophical project to Sein und Zeit:
that the accomplishment of this remarkable evential hermeneutics might be either
too Heideggerian; or not Heideggerian enough. Thus, being at the same time too
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successful in its transformation of Heidegger’s conceptual apparatus, and too
respectful when overcoming its shortcomings.
Far from undermining the intrinsic qualities of these fascinating and
insightful analyses developed in There is, the questions that were just raised are
intended to highlight the depth and interest of the philosophical views that the book
exposes. They should by no means diminish the value of a philosophical project that
accepts to face the fundamental challenges that need to be addressed by
contemporary phenomenology, and which builds an original and extremely
stimulating pathway in order to redefine the stakes and outcomes of the
phenomenological heritage.
Pierre-Jean Renaudie – University of Porto - 2016