What’s an event.
It’s a difficult question not because we
lack definitions but because there are too
many definitions.
In my book I focus on event in the sense of
something extraordinary takes place.
But with all this wide span of what we call
an event I think an elementary structure can
be described in formal terms.
Within a certain field of phenomena where
things go on the normal flow of things, from
time to time something happens which as it
were retroactively changes the rules of what
is possible in the sense that something happens.
It is generated by that situation.
Of course it’s causally produced by that
situation but in a way it changes interactively
the whole situation.
It’s a miracle in the sense of the event
would have been an effect which is stronger
than its own costs.
For example, now come a couple of examples
that I hope you will all like.
In literature why is Kafka, Franz Kafka, the
one that we all know and love an event?
Of course he has predecessors.
We can say that Kafka implicitly or explicitly
relied on a whole series of other artists
like Edgar Allan Poe, Dostoevsky, William
Blake and so on.
But it’s not as simple as that because when
you try to isolate in those earlier orders
what makes them predecessors of Kafka, you
can see that that dimension, Kafka, before
Kafka, is perceptive and only once Kafka is
already here.
Or as Borges the Argentinian writer, as he
put it in a wonderful concise way, truly all
authors, writers have predecessors.
A truly great writer in a way creates his
own past, his own predecessors so that yes,
there are people who influenced him but you
can see this influence only once he is here.
And now let me jump to a totally different
domain.
Love.
Love in the good old fashioned sense which
is today more and more rare.
Love is an encounter.
This is why in English and also in some other
languages, not all like French, you use the
term fall.
We fall in love.
This is the event that I mentioned.
In what sense?
Let’s say you lead a happy life.
You are lucky.
You have a job.
You meet regularly with friends.
You are not in love, you just make one night
stands maybe here and there.
You meet every evening with friends.
You drink.
You go to blah, blah.
Then all of a sudden in a totally contingent
way let’s say you stumble on the street,
somebody helps you to stand up.
It’s a young girl or boy blah, blah.
And, of course, it’s the love of your life.
A totally contingent encounter but the result
can be that your whole life changes.
Nothing is the same as they say.
You even spontaneously perceive your entire
past life as leading towards this unique moment,
you know, the illusion of love is oh my God,
I was waiting all my life for you.
This – something like this would have been
the love event.
And I think it’s getting more and more rare
today.
Many intelligent cultural critics notice how
we are almost returning to preromantic, premodern
times when marriage or love connections were
a matter of relatives, counselors and so on.
Your uncle, your aunt, they selected whom
you will marry and so on.
Today it’s similar only instead of all those
old wise uncles and so on its dating agencies
marriage agencies and so on and so on.
What they offer us is precisely love without
the fall, without falling in love, without
this totally unpredictable dramatic encounter.
And that’s what I find very sad.
I think that today we are simply more and
more afraid of this event or encounters.
You encounter something which is totally contingent
but the result of it if you accept it as an
event is that your entire life changes.
It’s a different story.
This is why I think that this avoiding falling
in love is the same phenomenon as a standard
joke that I use in all my, almost all my books,
you know.
How we want today to think without the bet
aspect of it, without the price we have to
pay for it.
We want – I don’t know, we want sugar
without calories so we have sweeteners.
We want beer without alcohol.
We want – and so on and so on.
And I claim it’s the same thing in sexuality.
We want brief safe sex sexual encounters without
the fall, without this fatal attachment.
And I think this is the most sad thing here
that even what is slowly emerging is maybe
deeper dominant ideology today.
What I ironically refer to as Western Buddhism.
Life is just a play of appearances.
Don’t take it too seriously.
Maintain a proper distance.
Don’t get too attached to worldly objects.
It fits perfectly this superficial consumerist
attitude.
So again events are rare.
An event is a dramatic encounter which to
put it in more learned philosophical terms
retroactively creates its own causes.
