Plastic Events, Spectral Events

Abstract

Both Catherine Malabou and Jacques Derrida attempted to rethink the notion of event by accounting for a certain poetic essence of literature. Notably, they tried to approach the eventness of the event by highlighting a phantasmatic dimension inseparable from what we call “the real.” They both refuse the conventional opposition between “phantasm” and “real event.” They redefine the role of the phantasm and of literature in relation to reality, and attribute to the phantasm a privileged access to what we call an “event.” But they do so with very different implications as to the status and definition of reality. This chapter discusses these two conceptions of the articulation between “phantasm” and “the real”—the first predicated on Malabou’s readings of Heidegger and Kafka, and the second following Derrida’s readings of Blanchot and Cixous. While Malabou’s “ontological phantasm” presents an ontological account of the event described as Being’s plasticity and indexed on a “new materialism,” Derrida strives to think a phantasm-event that precedes and exceeds the capture of ontological discourse, thus liberating literature and the event’s otherness from the authority of the philosophical decision on the truth of Being.