Event and Time

Contemporary philosophy, from Kant, through Bergson and Husserl, to Heidegger, has assumed that time must be conceived as a fundamental determination of the subject. Time, the thinking goes, is not first in things, but arises more originally from actions, attitudes, or comportments through which a subject or a Dasein temporalizes time, expecting or remembering, anticipating the future or making a decision. Event and Time discusses and analyzes this thesis, tracing its genesis through detailed, rigorous analyses of the philosophy of time in Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, ultimately showing that, in the development of metaphysics, the understanding of the temporal phenomenon as an inner-temporal phenomenon has made possible time's subjectivization, and imposed its conceptual framework onto metaphysics itself. In light of this analysis, Event and Time argues that time is in fact not thinkable according to metaphysical subjectivity. Instead, the guiding thread for the analysis of time must shift to the evential hermeneutics of the human being, as first developed in Event and World, and now deepened and completed in Event and Time. There currently is, and has been for some time, great interest in the event as a privileged locus for the investigation of a number of central philosophical issues - studies of the event in the thought of Alain Badiou or of Gilles Deleuze, are examples, and events are of interest among philosophers of a more analytic bent, as well (Donald Davidson). Claude Romano's diptych offers a thorough-going phenomenology of the event that has the ability to bring greater clarity and to advance work in this field: he offers both a tour-de-force investigation of the issue from the point of view of the history of philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger), and, through his presentation of an evential hermeneutics, makes a compelling, rigorous, and original philosophical contribution to the thinking of the event.