THE ETHOS OF THE EVENT: FROM POLITICAL ERUPTIONS TO CLIMATE CHANGE by Kellan Anfinson A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland March, 2015 © Kellan Anfinson All Rights Reserved Abstract This project explores “the event” and its roles in political life, with a focus on articulating an ethos that better attunes us to an eventful world. Prominent among the unexpected events that punctuate political affairs, climate change drives and is driven by an acceleration of pace in several domains of contemporary life. The difficulty in engaging this event is revealed by the denials and deferrals we have faced in forging a political response to it. Thus the question that motivates this study: If an event is diffuse, complex, and elusive, what kind of ethos is needed to recognize, engage, and respond to it? We are in need of an ethos that attends to the kind of sensibility to be developed generally in a world punctuated by events and the existential-spiritual responses most appropriate when we actually encounter one. To forge such an understanding, I examine comparatively Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Foucault. Each of these thinkers has worked through enigmatic, intense, and turbulent events such as the birth of Christ, the death of God, the rise of a fascist leader, and the collapse of a familiar mode of knowing. Climate change belongs to such an order of events. I argue for an experimental and supple ethos that moves beyond anthropocentrism through attunement to both micro- and macro-expressions of climate change. This study challenges political responses that use climate destabilization to seize power, as it deploys a history of previous eruptions to help us engage this one. Critically, climate responsiveness requires a spiritual resolve to dwell in uncertainty and discomfort, while being attached affirmatively to a world that contains tragic elements. ii Acknowledgements Thanks being due on a wider scale than custom and memory permit, I will limit myself to the strongest influences. I would like to thank William E. Connolly for the wise mentorship that gave me the intellectual space and time to work freely, and that imposed the necessary demands to make things cohere into a project the shape of which he often saw before I did. Jane Bennett’s intellectual generosity seems to be without bounds. She also bakes excellent bread. PJ Brendese, Andrea Krauss, and Naveeda Khan graciously read and gave invaluable comments on this project for the defense. Emma McGlennen, Derek Denman, Chitra Venkataramani, Troy Tower, and Tripp Rebrovick read a draft and contributed essential refinements for the final version. My colleagues across departments at Johns Hopkins have been a constant source of intellectual engagement, support, and conviviality. My intellectual guides at Macalester College—Frank Adler, Kiarina Kordela, and David Blaney—set me on this course in the first place. The Max Kade Center for Modern Thought at Johns Hopkins provided funding to conduct research for chapter three. It often seems that I am simply a node through which various influences have been able to interact. In this sense it also seems appropriate to thank chance. iii Table of Contents Introduction What is Happening? 2 Chapter One Passionate Transformations: Believing in the Event 14 Chapter Two Uncontrolled Experiments: Feeling an Eventful World 56 Chapter Three Risk or Security? Decisiveness and the Event 100 Chapter Four Foucault's Techniques of the Event 137 Chapter Five An Ethos for the Climate Event 189 iv One morning, We woke up in an alley. To the smell of urine, alcohol, Trash and gasoline, With a dim sense of a notion We'd held something in our hands, That was bigger than us or God, And we can never touch again. And we say that the world isn't dying. And we pray that the world isn't dying. And just maybe the world isn't dying. I've been looking at the symptoms for a while, Maybe she's heavy with child. -Jason Webley, Last Song “I think we will fail, but I don’t know we will fail.” – Kevin Anderson, climate scientist 1 Introduction What is Happening? As a man divinely abstracted and self-absorbed into whose ears the bell has just drummed the twelve strokes of noon will suddenly awake with a start and ask himself what hour has actually struck, we sometimes rub our ears after the event and ask ourselves, astonished and at a loss, “What have we really experienced”—or rather, “Who are we, really?” And we recount the twelve tremulous strokes of our experience, our life, our being, but unfortunately count wrong.1 In these opening lines to the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche uses the event to question the terms of our existence. Unlike many theories of the event, Nietzsche emphasizes how we might miss it, left only to assemble a few pieces of ourselves in its aftermath. Indeed, the original German text does not reference the event directly; it allows it to slip by the inattentive reader unheeded, with the word “afterward” as the sign of its occurrence. The reverberations of an event can help us think about our relation to it and how our existence is constituted. But such investigations are inadequate. Rather than merely trying to retroactively unearth connections between existence and the event, events also need to be proactively probed, shaped, and forged. Thus the question that motivates this study: If the event is diffuse, ineffable, or elusive, what kind of ethos is necessary to recognize, engage, and respond to the event? But since, as Nietzsche points out, this is a historical question, it concerns the contemporary situation. Just as Nietzsche uses the event to sound out the subject after God, this study examines climate destabilization to sound out the subject in the Anthropocene. The event is an important concept for modernity and interest in it has grown in recent decades.2 Part of its appeal seems to lie in its ability to stand in as a transcendental 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), 147. 2 The event has even spread to popular analyses. See for example Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine (New York: Picador, 2007) and Nicolas Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan (New York: Random House, 2010). For a more academic and theoretically provocative consideration of the latter in terms of the event, see Elie Ayache's 2 element in a philosophical system. In this way it can carry out a unifying function, often negatively, that God no longer can. But this take tends to freeze the event, making it unwieldy for both thought and politics. Indeed, the problem is that many thinkers of the event grant it a degree of independence, necessity, and even (anti-)metaphysical fortitude, which it may not have. A short survey of some important thinkers of the event will show this. Michael Marder effectively summarizes some primary insights and connections between Heidegger's and Derrida's theories of the event. Heidegger's event of appropriation “does not grasp something definitively present but performatively creates the second beginning of philosophy in the 'inceptual' leap that, instead of landing on an already formed terrain, finds a new grounding in itself.”3 Appropriation of the event is thus a philosophical movement which un-grounds experience only to conceptually reground it and, in so doing, draws out what is constitutive but unexamined in experience. In contrast to this, Derrida's event is expropriative, approaching Heidegger's notion from the other side. For Derrida, the act of appropriation that makes experience one's own is so singular as to be impossible, abyssally so. “Ereignis in abyss...seduces with 'the allure of the inappropriable event...' that indefinitely defers the situation, in which one would find oneself in absolute proximity to oneself, the situation every metaphysics of presence counts upon.”4 Though Heidegger tries to ground experience in an evental leap of appropriation, Derrida expropriates that movement, arguing that experience is itself inappropriable. A person never manages to fully secure their subjectivity because of the “sheer uniqueness and utter generality”5 of it. The elements that constitute experience are both unique in themselves (and thus potentially so The Blank Swan (Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2010). 3 Michael Marder Groundless Existence: The Political Ontology of Carl Schmitt (New York: Continuum, 2010), 62. 4 Ibid., 62. 5 Ibid., 62. 3 for each individual) but also generalizable to everyone's experience. For we all experience events. The event of securing the subject thus becomes an impossible yet alluring task, whose very instability is more appropriate to the shape of experience. Heidegger and Derrida both develop concepts of the event that bring out some of the texture of experience, but their notions remain limited. For them, the event emerges only through rigorous thought, which controls and limits the interruptive force of the event. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that experience is structured solely on a spectrum between appropriation and expropriation. In his essay “Writing the Event,” Roland Barthes analyzes May '68 in France to outline “the traces which constitute the event”6 with particular attention to the way that an event destabilizes existing systems and the potential transformations that it enables. Drawing on Derrida, he makes the distinction between speech that tries to lay claim to the event and has some revolutionary potential, and writing, which is “the dizzying break with the old symbolic system, the mutation of a whole range of language.”7 If an event is to produce novelty, it cannot be approached through a process of “decoding” which would speak to its true nature.