“Thus there is no event except in the plural, the event is always at least two. In other words, the event is less the absolute occurrence of a birth on the background of negativity (nothingness or doxa) than a becoming in which the before and the after spring forth at the same time, on either side of a caesura that thought cannot reduce (the before is not nothing, which is to say not before me or before thought, but me-before-otherwise [moi-avant-autrement] or what thought was – ‘I is an Other’). In addition, the event, always plural and preceded by other events, does not, as in phenomenological thought, have the character of an advent.”
François Zourabichvili, Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p. 40.
François Zourabichvili, commenting on Deleuze’s thought, draws attention to the doubleness of the event. An event simultaneously produces the new (otherwise) and the pre-evental “before” (“me-before-otherwise”generated as pre-event by the event itself).
The “otherwise” and the “before” arrive simultaneously, and the “before” belongs intrinsically to the “otherwise” insofar as it is generated in tandem with and constituted with reference to the “otherwise”; the two are generated with the same movement.
The event that produces this splitting between the before and the otherwise, is an irreducible “caesura.” Caesura is a fundamental phenomenon, it cannot be further granulized by thought. It is the border that illuminates the before as before and the otherwise as otherwise.
“Otherwise” has the sense of a counterfactual. It has the sense of a potentiality, or perhaps virtuality, becoming concrete, having made a Whiteheadean “decision” and in that decision coming to understand the before as before. The new, then, is integrated with a pre-established status quo, and a feeling or habit of identity can endure from event to event.
As such, the phenomenological understanding of the event (with “character of an advent”) might be too close to an “absolute occurrence on the background of negativity (nothingness or doxa).” The phenomenological conception of the event prioritizes rupture and discontinuity, while the Deleuzian perspective emphasizes becoming, that is, a change taking place in and belonging to a continuous series.
Jacob N. Given 