Abstracts

Nikolaus Schneider (Bio)

Translation as becoming

The talk will provide a problematization of James Bahoh’s recent attempt to yield conceptual coherence to Heidegger’s notion of event in his Heidegger’s Ontology of Events. In particular, it will be argued that the author does not offer a necessary ground for his distinction between lines of ground and lines of causation/ temporalization, that is central to his argument. Against what I claim to be a merely methodological notion of truth in the event’s logic of determinacy, assuming time-space to be the pivotal register of the event will provide an opportunity to further relate the event to its own becoming. It is decisive that the argument oscillates between the pitfall of dialectics, to which any thought of the event may fall prey, and one of relationality. Given the theorization of the event as a coherence of differential values and following a logic of difference, the talk will propose to conceptualize becoming according to the different possibilities that were attempted historically to unlock the deadlock of history and structure in the aftermath of French structuralism. Adhering to the latter, three options and three different conceptualizations of becoming come into play: the Neo-Spinozist notion of an immanent cause, the Neo-Cartesian theorization of a cause of the void and lastly, a translational paradigm that has been put forward by Michel Serres. Given the latter’s relative forgottenness in the philosophical imaginary of Structuralism the talk will propose to extend the account of becoming in Heidegger’s Ontology of Events by way of Serres’ Leibnizian Structuralism.