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Writing the Event: The Impossible
Possibility for Historiography
Michelle Ballif
Published online: 06 Jun 2014.
To cite this article: Michelle Ballif (2014) Writing the Event: The Impossible Possibility for
Historiography, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 44:3, 243-255, DOI: 10.1080/02773945.2014.911561
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Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Vol. 44, No. 3, pp. 243–255
Writing the Event: The Impossible
Possibility for Historiography
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Michelle Ballif
This essay argues that traditional historical methods elide the radical singularity of the event by
subjecting the event to meaning by way of categorical norms that cannot—by definition—include
the radical singularity of “what happened.” Such historiographical methods render every event
significant only insofar as it becomes evidentiary to and subservient to a satisfying narrative with a
proper beginning, middle, and end—all of which follow, chronologically, in a linear, logic of time.
Relying on Jacques Derrida’s theorization of the event, specifically in “A Certain Impossible
Possibility of Saying the Event,” this essay will address the impossible possibility of writing the event
by way of a hospitable historiography—beyond the representational demand, appropriative
impulse, and temporal mandate of traditional historical methods.
Sande Cohen has criticized Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx as advancing a “historiography without history” (172). Intended as a death blow, the criticism rather
inspires a historiography that dispenses with traditional historical thinking, which
Cohen himself describes as “the successivity of events, no matter how ambiguous, gathered together as proper names (French Revolution), which at once serve
as periodization and event-markers” (173). This essay argues that such “normative historical thinking” elides the radical singularity of the event by subjecting the
event to meaning by way of categories of knowledge that cannot—by definition—
include the radical singularity of “what happened.” Such “normative historical
thinking,” thus, renders every event significant only insofar as it becomes evidentiary to and subservient to a satisfying narrative with a proper beginning, middle,
and end—all of which follow, chronologically, in a logic of time. So, how might
the event—inappropriable as such—be written to counter this representational
demand, appropriative impulse, and temporal mandate?
I brush a broad stroke here, but I begin with the presumption that “normative historical thinking” composes histories produced under a guiding paradigm,
argument, and hypothesis, and that the task for a historian of normative historical
Michelle Ballif is Associate Professor of English at The University of Georgia, 254 Park Hall, Athens, GA 30602,
USA. E-mail: [email protected]
ISSN 0277-3945 (print)/ISSN 1930-322X (online) © 2014 The Rhetoric Society of America
DOI: 10.1080/02773945.2014.911561
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Ballif
thought is the work of finding the evidence, the “facts” of the case to support
that paradigm, that argument, that hypothesis, to produce knowledge about the
“past.”1 My further presumption is that such histories do violence to “what was”—
or to what once was or to what never once was—by coopting past events as merely
evidentiary to whatever the guiding paradigm, argument, or hypothesis is that
prompted the history. I am yet further arguing that “normative historical thinking”
renders whatever happens, has happened, will have happened to a predetermined
(linear) chronology of what happened (the past), what is happening (the present),
and what will happen (the future): hence traditional historiographies impose temporal constraints on the happening—on the event. Despite this imposition, this
appropriation, the event—as inappropriable event—“disrupt[s] the ordinary course
of history” because it is “absolutely singular” and hence cannot be paradigmatic,
cannot be exemplary of a pattern, a sequence upon which traditional historical narratives depend (Derrida, “A Certain Impossible” 446). That is, the event resists the
impulses of “normative historical thinking” and, thereby, provocatively invites the
historiographer to likewise challenge normalizing histories by writing the event as
event.
In what follows, I will attempt to negotiate the simultaneous possibility of theorizing the event, of writing its history, whilst acknowledging the impossibility of doing
so. The stakes of doing both are high—are life itself, I might suggest—although
it appears as a mind game: what is the possibility of impossibility or what is the
impossibility of possibility vis à vis historiography? I hope to merely pose the question. The answers are beyond me, impossibly possible, but the question itself poses
to historiography a uniquely ethical task: how to historicize the impossible? Yet,
how to render the impossible historically possible? These are “serious” questions.
Indeed, as Derrida argues, these are the ethical questions. For the ethical question
is precisely that quandary in which one finds oneself—unable to know, unable to
discern, unable to decide, and yet a decision must, nevertheless be made, in that
aporetic space. Likewise, I am arguing, a uniquely ethical historiography is precisely
one that is written without knowledge as such. One does not know, and one certainly can not claim any “good conscience” about what one has written (Derrida,
Aporias 19).
The Impossible Possibility of Defining the Event and/as the Untimely
To even “identify” the event as some thing; to answer the question “what is the
event?” is already to submit it to the very violence that we are trying to redeem
it from. As any card-carrying post-structuralist knows, to ask the question “what
is” (“what is X?”) is the primordial act of epistemological violence, as it submits
all to a state of being, a state of presumed self-presence. So, I tip toe around the
1 This presumption is, of course, one that many revisionary historians share, motivated by Friedrich
Nietzsche’s characterization of nineteenth-century historians in “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History
for Life” (see John Poulakos’s extrapolation of this essay in his “Nietzsche and Histories of Rhetoric”).
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Writing the Event
245
question, not to answer it, not to submit to its ontological demand, but to at least
foreground what I mean by “the event” and historiography’s responsibility toward
it. Many have theorized the event, but for the purposes of this essay, I will rely on
Derrida’s theorization of such.2 With the previous caveat on the record, we tread
carefully, as we hesitate to name the “isness” of the event. Our step forward is not to
make any ontological claims about the event, but merely to foreground its various
appearances.
To begin, an event “must be exceptional,” as Derrida articulates in his essay “A
Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event.”3 To be “exceptional” means that
the event is always an “exception” and always “an exception to the rule,” and hence
not reducible to norms or rules. Derrida explains: “Once there are rules, norms, and
hence criteria to evaluate this or that, what happens and what doesn’t happen, there
is no event” (457). As exceptional, it is thus radically singular, without exception.
Further, an event has “the exterior form of a rupture” (Derrida, “Structure, Sign,
and Play” 278), and is, hence, “always traumatic,” demonstrating its “vertical”
nature, by which Derrida means that the rupture, the trauma, befalls one, as if from
above, without a “horizon of expectation” (emphasis added; “A Certain Impossible”
451). Horizontally, one can “fore-see” and “fore-say” the event, rendering it, of
course, a non-event. For a “predicted event is not an event” (451). So the event
is always a surprise and always traumatic, “even when it is a happy event” in that
its “singularity interrupts an order and rips apart, like every decision worthy of the
name, the normal fabric of temporality or history” (Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon”
136).
There is a kernel of the impossible at its core; for if it were possible, “[i]t merely
develops and unfolds a possibility, a potentiality that is already present” (“A Certain
Impossible” 450). And if this potentiality is already present, then this would presume that the event could be foreseen, hence nullifying the exceptional and the
traumatic, situating the event on a horizon of potentiality. So, the event is impossible; yet, “if there is [an event],” Derrida further claims, it “consists in doing the
impossible” (449; emphasis added). In his discussion of such, he names forgiveness
and the gift as two examples of acts of the impossible, for, in the case of forgiveness, if one only forgives what it is possible to forgive, the forgivable, then one is
not forgiving. Forgiving, Derrida argues, must forgive the unforgivable, must do
the impossible (449). But, he stresses, “this impossibility is not simply negative. This
means that the impossible must be done” (449).
As another example of doing the impossible, Derrida offers up the notion of
invention: if one invents what is possible to invent, then one is merely “follow[ing]
a potentiality” and thus the invention “brings nothing new”; it “disrupts nothing;
2 In contrast, see, for example, Alain Badiou’s Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil and Being and
Event.
3 My essay relies on, obviously, and echoes, a close reading of this essay. See also: Simon Morgan Wortham
(119–126) and Kyle Kinaschuk, whose essay I found belatedly and bemusedly noted the similarity in our essay
titles.
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it’s not an absolute surprise” (450). In short, “The event’s eventfulness depends on
this experience of the impossible. What comes to pass, as an event, can only come to
pass if it’s impossible. If it’s possible, if it’s foreseeable, then it doesn’t come to pass”
(450–451). That is, the event’s impossibility is what renders it possible.
The event—as exceptional, as impossible, as a trauma that disrupts and invents—
is related, “essentially” so, to hospitality—to receiving the arrivant, a radically other,
a future that cannot be foreseen (see also Marder 4). Although the event is “absolutely singular,” it is always already repeatable (an apparent paradox to which we
will return), in that it will reappear—from the future, from a future that is not on
a horizon of expectation, but from a future that will arrive vertically, and that one
must ethically receive. As such, the event has everything to do with hospitality: one
does not say, Derrida notes, in a spirit of hospitality, I will receive you this once, but
never again; one must be prepared to host the event now—and again and again and
again ad infinitum (453).
The event happens, arrives, all the time (if I might use “time” provisionally at
this point), but it is not simply reducible to phenomenology: it is not simply a
function of what I experience as such. It just happens. There really is not a grammar to it: there is neither subject of the event nor predicate. Indeed, one knows
not “who” or “what” is happening. One cannot self-assuredly acknowledge that an
event has arrived. For the event is beyond categorical systems of knowledge and certainly beyond programmatical systems of agency. To press the point: Events event all
the time. Happenings happen all the time. But, as I previously argued, the writing of
history coopts happenings, events, and subjects them to sequences of progression or
regression, making them evidentiary to greater paradigms (of “time”) and thus fulfills a chronological notion of temporality. Traditional historiographical methods,
thus, do their work precisely by neutralizing the event by subjecting it to a variety of
meaning-making purposes: narrative, ideological, but more to our point, temporal
along a horizontal axis. And so, to repose our impossible question: how to write a
hospitable history, how to write the event, how to receive that which befalls us in a
vertical fashion? Although I do not presume to forward a method, per se, I propose
a handful of considerations that the historiographer may attend to.
To begin, the historiographer who writes the event acknowledges the always
already untimely nature of the event. He/She relinquishes the traditional notion
that the historiographer is writing “history,” as “the successivity of events” (Cohen
173), as the task of ordering all past events into tidy categories or rendering them
exemplary instances of a greater narrative. That is, beyond simply eschewing “grand
narratives,” the historiographer who writes the event abandons the very notion that
“history” is a temporal, chronological narrative and, thereby, surrenders the presumption of the “past,” as such. Precisely because such historical narration occurs
after the fact, after the event, one is not historicizing what indeed “happened,” but
rather one is historicizing the so-called “present” (which, “itself,” only materializes
apres coup), in a temporal logic of belatedness (i.e., Freud’s Nachträglichkeit). Hence
“history” is always already “out of joint,” out of time, untimely, anachronistic.
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This acknowledgment amounts, according to David Wood, to inviting a “reorientation to time,” as “understanding time as Event,” which would “[restore] to the
Moment the possibility of inaugurating a radical renewal. . . . Radical renewal does
not mean beginning linear time again. It is a relaunching of time itself as intensity,
possibility, as open” (22). Merely serializing events would, Wood continues, “miss
the point” (23). Entirely. To radically relaunch time, on the contrary, would be “to
ponder, to invite, to welcome something of a different order” (23). To begin writing
histories that write the event would be to acknowledge that time is always already
“out of joint,” as Derrida is fond of citing. Yet, such a historiography is not “mere”
anachronism. According to Derrida, “I have to be in tune with what is going on [in
an historical moment], even if being of one’s time means, here, being attuned to
something that in itself is anachronistic” (A Taste for the Secret 82). An untimely
historiography or a historiography of the untimely “is a matter of attuning to something that is out of joint and out of tune. One has to attune, but it is also a question
of doing otherwise, and of inviting others to do something” otherwise (82).4
The invitation to do otherwise is, therefore, the invitation to write histories that
begin with this presumption of their always already untimely nature, and further
to think about history as not a function of linear temporality. This is the aporetic
quest: how to rethink history, how to write history, beyond traditional notions of
linear temporality? How to write the event?
But first a return to our discussion of the untimely nature of temporalization. As
previously cited: “‘The time is out of joint,’ says Hamlet.” And Derrida explains:
“Literally, ‘to be out of joint’ is said of a shoulder or a knee that has gone out of
its socket, that is dislocated, ‘disjointed.’ Thus, time ‘out of joint’ is time outside
itself, beside itself, unhinged; it is not gathered together in its place, in its present”
(A Taste for the Secret 6). Time is untimely precisely in that it is not present to itself;
it is “beside” or “outside” itself; temporal constructions of the “present,” “past,” and
“future” are always already untimely and “disjointed.” The event, then is irreducible
to a temporalized event or to temporalization. Although the event has a sense of
the singular “now” about it, one would be mistaken if one reduced this “now” to
a conception of a present moment self present to itself. Derrida writes: “There is
‘now” without present; there is singularity of the here and now, even though presence, and self-presence, is dislocated” (13) or “out of joint.” Hence, the event is
not reducible to a “present” now, to the present. Nor is the event reducible to the
“past.” So-called “historical events” are inventions of the non-present present. Nor
is the event reducible to the “future,” especially to one teleologically prescribed or
foretold.
The event does, however, have a unique relationship to a future to come.5 But,
again, to a future that can be awaited only insofar as it remains open. Keeping the
future open is to welcome the event as event. The so-called event of the coming of
the messiah would be, in Derrida’s estimation, precisely a non-event because such
4 See
5 For
Thomas Rickert on his theorization of “attunement,” which reverberates the various implications.
some more on the future to come and the future anterior, see Michelle Ballif; Victor J. Vitanza.
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an event is predicated on a predicted future that is certain, guaranteed: the messiah
will come. There is no wager here; the coming of this “future” has been foretold.
And hence, according to Derrida, this “future” is foreclosed, and thus precisely not
a future. To await a future to come, the event to come, the future and the coming must
remain open—that is, unpredictable, unforeseeable, unknowable. And Derrida’s
preference for the event over the non-event is due to the “ethical dimension” of
the event, of the open future to come:
because the future is the opening in which the other happens [arrive], and it is
the value of the other or of alterity that, ultimately, would be the justification.
Ultimately, this is my way of interpreting the messianic. The other may come, or
he may not. I don’t want to programme him, but rather to leave a place for him
to come if he comes. It is the ethic of hospitality. (A Taste for the Secret 83)
The Impossible Possibility of Writing History and/as Hospitality
To pose the question “how to rethink history, to write history, beyond [traditional
notions of] temporality” is not a mere rejection of historicity, despite what Cohen
may have suggested. In “Typewriter Ribbon,” Derrida explains:
We must also keep in view a certain concept of history, of the historicity of history,
so as to trace its intersection with this logic of the textual event as material inscription. When it is a matter of this structure of the text, the concept of historicity will
no longer by regulated by the scheme of progression or of regression, thus by a
scheme of teleological process, but rather by that of the event, or occurrence, thus
by the singularity of the “one time only.” This value of occurrence links historicity not to time, as is usually thought, nor to the temporal process but, according
to de Man, to power, to the language of power and to language as power. Hence
the necessity of taking into account performativitity, which defines precisely the
power of language and power as language, the excess of the language of power or
of the power of language over constative or cognitive language. (118).
He continues, in his treatment of de Man on this subject:
De Man speaks of thinking history as event and not as process, progress, or regression. . . . “History is therefore not a temporal notion, it has nothing do do with
temporality, but it is the emergence of a language of power out of a language of
cognition” (133). This hyperbolic provocation, in the style of de Man, certainly
does not negate all temporality of history. It merely recalls that time, temporal
unfolding is not the essential predicate of the concept of history; time is not
enough to make history. (118)
These comments introduce the distinction between constative and performative
instantiations of language. As is well rehearsed, constative uses of language presume
to state instances of fact about a referent; whereas, “the performative does not have
its referent (but here that word is certainly no longer appropriate, and this precisely
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is the interest of the discovery) outside of itself or, in any event, before and in front
of itself.” Derrida continues: “It does not describe something that exists outside of
language and prior to it. It produces or transforms a situation, it effects”; it events,
as it were (“Signature, Event, Context” 13).
A historiography to come—writing the event—then, is a performative and not a
constative act (although, ultimately, as we shall see, the performative becomes symptomatic. But we’ll get there event-ually). A constative utterance “consists in saying
what is, describing or noting what is” (Derrida, “A Certain Impossible” 446); most
histories would be recognized as a narrativation or serialization of constative utterances. One is historicizing events so as to present them as a simple saying of what is
(or what was). A performative utterance, on the contrary, doesn’t just say an event—
it produces it in and through the utterance (446). Examples that Derrida uses, in
this essay, as well as elsewhere, include the utterance “I do” in the wedding ceremony. As an instance of the “promise,” more generally, this utterance seals the deal,
as it were. It not only signifies the union of the couple, it establishes it (446). Other
examples include the confession, forgiveness, the gift, and the secret. The point of
the distinction here: “Saying the event is saying what is, saying things as they present
themselves, historical events as they take place [and] this is a question of information”
(emphasis added; 446). And
this saying of the event as a statement of knowledge or information, a sort
of cognitive saying of description, this saying of the event is always somewhat
problematical because the structure of saying is such that it always comes after
the event. Secondly, because as saying and hence as structure of language, it is
bound to a measure of generality, iterability, and repeatability, it always misses
the singulary of the event. (446)
Hence, historiographies composed as constative utterances will always miss the
“singularity of the event” and will always be temporally invented, after the fact.
To rethink historiography as a performative gesture, according to Derrida, challenges the philosophy of history “to find its limit” (A Taste for the Secret 65). And that
limit is the performative. “[T]he philosophy of history,” he writes, “says what there
was, what there is, and what there will be, it makes no room for performance. And so
as soon as there is something performative—as soon as something happens through
discourse and in discourse—the philosophy of history is in trouble” (A Taste for
the Secret 65). However, Derrida pushes even a historiography of the performative
to its limits. He acknowledges how media technologies indeed do perform history
and enact events, daily: they “make” the news; they make eventful events such as
9/11 through their mediation. However, such performances are still, he maintains,
a function of “information, of knowledge as information” (446), and the event is
always “beyond the confines of knowledge” (448).
But one apparent paradoxical quality of the event must be attended to: the event
“is,” with all the caveats underscored, only insofar as it is radically singular and
simultaneously iterable, repeatable. How is such a thing possible? Impossibly so. But
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this impossibility is the condition of its possibility. As Derrida argues, it is ultimately “impossible to think the singular without thinking about it as repeatable”
(Szafreaniec 61). Just as a performative utterance is presumably a saying of the event
that is radically singular, it presumes its performative force and efficacy precisely by
being a recitation, a repetition, of a previously established norm of authority to
effect the event. One cannot pronounce “I pronounce you man and wife” without
some previously cited authority. Hence, the power of making the pronouncement
relies on previous citations of such and, indeed, on the future occasions of making such pronouncements. So even the performative eventalness of the event—in its
radical singularity—relies on a repetition, on an iterable quality. On a substitution
that is merely a “replacement of the irreplaceable” (“A Certain Impossible” 452).
But—as he so poignantly describes in his memoires for Paul de Man, he must speak
to the singular event of the loss of de Man, but for the enunciation to have any meaning, it must share in the iterability quality that is that of writing—or speaking. For
anyone to understand a word or a phrase, one must share in an iterable economy of
such. But the substitution is
not simply the replacement of a replaceable uniqueness [this is impossible]: substitution replaces the irreplaceable. The fact that, right away, from the very outset
of saying or the first appearance of the event, there is iterability and return in
absolute uniqueness and utter singularity, means that the arrival of the arrivant—
or the coming of the inaugural event—can only be greeted as a return, a coming
back, a spectral revenance. (452)
The problematic of writing the event—of witnessing it or of testifying of it—asks us
to step into the very aporia we have thus experienced.6
The idea of testimony requires exemplarity, and that means absolute singularity:
a testimony takes place once on the subject of what takes place once, the testimony is unique, irreplaceable—it is the logic of the instant. But this uniqueness
must immediately be opposed to its contrary—I have to be replaceable in the very
place where I am irreplaceable. When I say “I’m telling you the truth about what
I saw there,” it means: (1) anyone whosoever in my place would have seen the
same thing, that’s why what I say is true; (2) I’m ready to repeat universally and
infinitely this statement that is unique, but that becomes ideal—and so all of a
sudden the unique becomes universal, universable. (A Taste for the Secret 73)
But let’s return to Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play,” where he notes that the
event’s “exterior form should be that of a rupture and a redoubling” (351). To say
that it is a redoubling is to say that it is no simple doubling—no simple doppelganger. A redoubling, a reiteration, is an act of creation, of birth, albeit monstrous.
Rupture and redoublement, in Derrida’s French tongue, names an act of repetition
6 I thank Sarah Frank for her thoughtful e-mail to me on the topic of witnessing, the event, and vertical
temporality; her provocative questions and lines of inquiry will no doubt arrive in future work. She has set the
table for its return.
Writing the Event
251
that invents. A new word. New, a repetitive action (an iterable moment) that invents.
The event is radically singular but, of course, it has to be repeatable. Derrida writes:
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In order for my “written communication” to retain its function as writing, i.e.,
its readabilty, it must remain readable despite the absolute disappearance of
any receiver, determined in general. My communication must be repeatable—
iterable—in the absolute absence of the receiver or of any empirically determinable collectivity of receivers. (“Signature, Event, Context” 7)
However, all the functions of receiver—as well as sender and more fundamentally
signification, itself—are subject to a logic of destinerrance (Derrida, “For the Love of
Lacan”): there has to be the possibility that any audience may receive my utterance
(my history) but simultaneously, there has to be the impossibility of the self same—
this is what the trace, différance, and metonymic displacement ensures.
Hence, this logic of desinterrance, likewise, destabilizes the position of the author,
the signator, of any history. One cannot guarantee that the letter has a point of destination, nor can one guarantee that the letter has a point of origin. Derrida addresses
this conundrum further in “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event.”
To write the event, its impossible possibility, is to consider it in the “impersonal
nature of the infinitive” (456): To write the event. This requires us to push the limits of philosophy or of historiography beyond even the limit of the performative.
Derrida presses the saying of the event beyond a site of “enunciation,” and we would
press the writing of the event beyond the instantiation of a signator or author.7 We
are thus challenged to think of historiography as symptomatology. Derrida writes:
“the impersonal nature of the infinitive [the evocation of “To Say” echoed in his
title] got me thinking in particular that when there is no one present, no subject
of enunciation to say the event in [either the constative or performative modes],
then the saying is no longer constative, theoretical, descriptive, or performative: it
is symptomatic. . . . The event defeats both the constative and the performative”
(456).
He continues:
Beyond all forms of verification, beyond discourses of truth or knowledge, the
symptom is a signification of the event over which nobody has control, that no
consciousness, that no conscious subject can appropriate or control, neither in
the form of a theoretical or judicative statement, nor in the form of a performative production. There is symptom in what’s happening here, for instance
[at his lecture]: each of us in interpreting, foreseeing, anticipating, and feeling
overwhelmed and surprised by what can be called events. Beyond the meaning that each of of us can read into these events, if not enunciate, there is the
symptom. (457)
7 Byron
Hawk, likewise, critiques histories that rely on “the ethos of the performer” (108).
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The symptom, or what might be otherwise addressed as the “remainder effects”—
the trace, différance—the surplus of meaning that destabilizes any meaning, any
signification.
Hence to refigure historiography as symptomatology is not to—once again—play
the hermeneutic game of de-termining the message, the encrypted message of the
symptom. Derrida is at great pains to depathologize the symptom, “to dissociate
[it] from its clinical or psychoanalytical code” (457) in order to foreground the
symptom in regards to is vertical nature: “A symptom is something that falls. It’s
what befalls us” (457). Again, we are stressing the vertical—as opposed to horizontal temporality. Traditional horizontal forms of temporality underscore a horizon
of expectation: the future can be fore-told. The symptom cannot be fore-cast. The
vertical appearance of the symptom, on the contrary, is beyond expectation—and
beyond meaning, beyond secret meaning. Derrida invokes Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of the symptom as evocative of such, and perhaps we could hover near the
latter Lacan on this score. There is symptomatology without meaning but with pleasure. Loads of pleasure. The symptom is a shared secret. But as a secret that is not
one—just as a gift is not one.
Further Notes on the Impossible Possibility of Writing the Event as
Hospitality
Following our discussion of the always already untimely nature of the event and
its impossible possibility as performance-cum-symptomatology, we step forward
to address other considerations that the historiographer who writes the event
might attend to. Such as the exceptional nature of the event. Histories writing
the event, then, would not be looking for paradigmatic cases of this instantiation or that instantiation of rhetoric, but would—on the contrary—be looking for
the exception—for that evental moment of rhetoric that does not fit any model
of rhetoric, that does not seem to follow any prescription of genre (deliberative,
judicial, epideictic), that was not called forth, predictably, by any exigency, occasion, or situation—that certainly was not anticipated. Indeed, a moment of rhetoric
that appeared out of nowhere—as a surprise, vertically falling. (Michel Foucault’s
attention to disruptures, discontinuities, might prove fruitful as an analogue to
historicizing the event.)
Specifically, as Derrida emphasizes, the event is traumatic—it causes ruptures and
disruptions. How might one write a history that attends to moments of rupture—
without, and this is the key—pointing to how these moments of rupture instantiated
a new series of moments or ushered in a new rhetorical moment? The rupture must
remain evental—and hence, not a harbinger of some new world order. Similarly, the
event must not be historicized as some unfolding of an already present potentiality.
As related to invention, it must be so radically new as to have, again, appeared out
of no where. But this presents, invites, precisely the possibility of our discipline’s
invention—into a future that we cannot predict.
Writing the Event
253
In sum, then, how does one write the event—or compose a history that attends
to the event?
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How can this be done? Well, I ask the question but I have no answers. Not only
I have no answer, but I hold that there must not be an answer in the form of
a general norm, a rule or a prior criterion. By definition, there can be no prior
answer or method or technique. Each time it is necessary to invent the singular law
of what remains and must remain a unique event, held in this aporia or double
bind. (Derrida, “Countersignature”; emphasis added)
If one assumes alongside Derrida that the event is only appropriable but never
approached through constative language—that is, the event is not a function
of knowledge or information, then one further acknowledges that to write the
event requires something other than traditional historiographical techniques that
presume to communicate knowledge about past facts according to standard historiographical methods. This is why I have taken great pains to avoid discussing a
writing of the event.8 To write of the event is to belatedly appropriate the event for
a historiographical purpose, to constatively “report” it, or to “perform” it as a simulacra, to reduce it to instances of “what happened,” to what can be recounted as
information. But how to write the event? How to do precisely the impossible?
The historiographer who writes the event proceeds without any normalizing
method or technique. Indeed, as Derrida has written, one must engage with the
notion of “destiner au hasard”—where the destination and the mode of destination is given up to chance (see Diakoulakis 92–93 n27), where destinerrance is the
wager of the day.9 Historiography is the writing of history, and writing, according to Derrida, is “inaugural, in the fresh sense of the word, that it is dangerous
and anguishing. It does not know where it is going” (“Force and Signification”
11; see also Diakoulakis). “Errance” is the “destination” of any written missive;
one cannot control its contexts, its audience, its address, its author, its arrival.
Writing—just writing—is a throw of the die, and “will always have been of chance”
(Diakoulakis 52). As a (mis)representative anecdote, Derrida relates that after a
symposium that both he and Jean Hippolyte were participating in, the latter noted
to the former: “That said, I really don’t see where you’re going.” And Derrida
responds: “I think I answered him more or less like this: ‘If I saw clearly and beforehand, where I was going, I really think I would not take even one more step to get
there’” (qtd. in Diakoulakis 52).
8I
invite the reader to look at Barbara Biesecker’s “Prospects of Rhetoric for the Twenty-First Century:
Speculations on Evental Rhetoric,” in which she presses the point: “what we are dealing with here is not the
saying of the Event, not the inscription of the Event into language or into speech, but saying as the Event”
(19). Here she is contrasting the performative with the Lacanian notion of “full speech,” and she uses the
same as a theoretical frame to foreground how a speech by Barack Obama instantiates an evental rhetoric.
This reader eagerly awaits the arrival of Biesecker’s book-length manuscript in progress that addresses the
event, particularly in terms of its uncanny nature (29).
9 Of especial note, I point to the historiographical methods of Byron Hawk and Jane Sutton. The former
calls for complex methods that work against linear, predictable models of history; the latter specifically invites
us to look at the aleatory—in all of her work, but for a sampling, see Sutton and Marilee Mifsud.
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254
Ballif
One knows not where one is going, where each step of each written word will
take one, but one writes, one takes the step beyond, in an attitude, one might say,
of gratitude, friendship, and ultimate hospitality. That is, writing is basically, originarily even, just a response: a “yes.” A “yes, I am listening.” A double yes, indeed.
“Yes, yes.” It is a welcoming gesture, even if nothing is said (“A Certain Impossible”
442–443). But it is specifically a welcoming gesture to the other—to the radically
other—in its most hospitable form. As we have already acknowledged, if there is an
event, it is characterized by an arrival that can not, by definition, be anticipated. But
one awaits it, attends to it with the further caveat that one is “not [the] proprietor of
the place open to hospitality. Whoever gives hospitality ought to know that he is not
even proprietor of what he would appear to give” (A Taste for the Secret 85). In short:
historiographers writing the event can take no comfort, no moral gratification from
the hospitable gesture proffered.
In terms of historiographical gestures, I am drawn to Derrida’s description of his
own writing:
there is a demand in my writing for this excess [what we have previously called
the “remainders of signification”] . . . the demand that a sort of opening, play,
indetermination be left, signifying hospitality for what is to come [l’avenir]: “One
does not know what it means yet, one will have to start again, to return, to go
on.” . . . [E]ach text enacts a kind of opening . . . of the place left vacant for who
is to come [pour qui va venir], for the arrivant—maybe Elijah, maybe anyone at
all. There has to be the possibility of someone’s still arriving; there has to be an
arrivant—who may be called the Messiah, but that’s another question. And there,
where there is place for the arrivant, the text is not intelligible, the discourse bears
a zone of emptiness. (A Taste for the Secret 31)
The text sets the table but leaves an empty place setting, for what will have arrived,
but what has not yet arrived, and for what could most certainly not be recognized
as having arrived. And, further still, the condition of absolute hospitality is not just
about receiving the guest we are prepared to greet—but precisely the arrivant that is
beyond the capacity of what we are able to receive (Derrida, “A Certain Impossibility”
451). What historiography, what events are beyond our current capacity to receive?
This is the impossible possible question for writing the event.
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