Indifference and Event: Heidegger, Badiou and the Crisis of Historical Time
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Is there a link between Badiou's “événement” and Heidegger's “Ereignis”, or between event conceived as “a-venir” and event conceived as “er-äugen”? This paper provides a positive response to this question. The paper unfolds the claim that both thinkers conceive of event as a “rupture with indifference” and discusses temporal implications of such a conception. Badiou and Heidegger agree that modernity is characterized by a general indifference: The equal validity of all beings as representations renders all difference indifferent. For Heidegger, then, event is a dislocation—a loss of indifference that clears Being’s concealedness and restores difference, which he attributes to the poet's poetry or the thinker's thinking, in which “each and every thing […] completely loses its indifference and familiarity.” While Badiou shares the motif of dislocation, he stresses that dislocation does not consist of restoring “difference,” but rather of a true indifference—a complete withdrawal from the differentiation between difference and indifference. The conception of event as a break with indifference emerges in response to the crisis of historical time—that is, the primacy of the “historiographical” [historisch] and its constructivists impacts stiffening the indifference of any happening. This leads both Heidegger and Badiou to emphasize the “historical” [geschichtlich], which withdraws from any constructability. Regarding this crisis, the French historian François Hartog presents us with a challenge today. He claims a new stage in the “crisis of historical time,” which he coins with the term “presentism.” According to Hartog, the overemphasis on the uniqueness of “historical” time has caused such a primacy of the present that it extends in both directions of past and future projections. Consequently, the production of historical time is suspended altogether. What remains is a mere present characterized by “the tyranny of the instant and the treadmill of an unending now.” In light of this diagnosis, a crucial question arises: How would Heidegger’s and Badiou’s conceptions of event relate to “presentism”: as an antidote or its silent but sublime instrument? |
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