In today's language, an "event" is what happens, what happens when it happens. The term did not have this meaning in classical language. Furetière defines it as "Issuë, succés bon ou mauvais de quelque chose¹". This meaning is preserved in the English adverb eventually, which is translated as finally, i.e. at the end of the event. The event thus began by designating that which occurs after, i.e. the subject was always situated upstream of the event. It was this position of the subject that changed radically between the 17th^e and the 18th^ecentury. Witness the article Evénement in l'Encyclopédie, and in particular its first grammar entry, signed byDiderot:

* Event, s. m. (Gram.) term by which we designate, or the production, or the end, or some remarkable & determinate circumstance in the duration of all contingent things. But perhaps this term is one of the radicals of the language; & serving to define the other terms, can it not define itself?

From the outset, Diderot designates three possible relationships of the event to what happens. The production of the event (the event in the modern sense of the term), what will happen in the end (the event in the classical sense defined by Furetière) and, at greater length, the circumstance of the event, taken from the constellation, the cluster of micro-events which, in duration, make the event: "some remarkable & determined circumstance in the duration of all contingent things". I choose this circumstance: through this choice, the event becomes a principle of organization, of intelligibility of accidents; it presents itself henceforth as an empty form capable of taking in heterogeneous contents manifesting themselves in time, and giving them meaning through the coalescence they form. In a way, this is already the Kantian definition of the concept.

The event is not in itself the real, but the form of intelligibility in which the real is welcomed. This is why Diderot gives it the status of "radical". Its self-evidence vanishes as soon as a definition attempts to formulate it: production, end or duration, cause, consequence or circumstance, the event disseminates and evades self-evidence as soon as it reflects.

Because it is radical, the event gives us knowledge but does not know itself in itself. Diderot thus in a way maintains the classic definition of the event, which linked it to Providence: the theological unknowability of God's decrees is replaced by a grammatical unknowability. What is certain, however, is that the event, becoming primary, has ceased to be the outcome of something: it has ceased to be instituted in order to become instituting.

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Something essential thus happens in the foundation of the modern notion of event, between the end of the seventeenth and the middle of the eighteenth century: something like an inversion of perspective in the representation of what an event is. It's not so much that, in the course of time, in the line of the sequence of things, we stop the cursor further forward or further back to designate the moment in the narrative, the peripatetic event, the circumstance, the episode that will be privileged as the event, as that which in history, in the process, makes an event: there's a wave of the event that envelops this whole. What changes is the direction in which we look at things: downstream, for the prognosis of a catastrophe; then upstream, for the diagnosis of the causes that produced it.

There is thus, in the apprehension of the event, an inversion of the direction in which things are taken. The counter-current will progressively disqualify the linear succession of time. This problem of the disqualification of time by the event crystallizes first in the theater.

And theater is thought of from Aristotle onwards. There is no concept strictly speaking of event in Aristotle, but rather a polarity between praxis and pathos. La praxis pushes history towards a future, while the pathos reflects, echoes a past.

Classical French dramaturgy, claiming to scrupulously apply Aristotelian principles, will completely overturn this system of praxis/pathos polarization by introducing the event as both the setting and the end of tragedy. This is how Abbé d'Aubignac writes:

"let the Poet choose well the day in which he wishes to enclose all the intrigues of his Piece, & this choice must usually be taken from the most beautiful Evenement of the whole story, I mean the one which must make the catastrophe, & where all the others end like lines at their center [...]. Apres ce choix ainsi fait, le plus bel artifice est d'ouvrir le Theatre le plus près que il est possible de la catastrophe, afin d'employer moins de temps au negoce de la Scéne, & d'avoir plus de liberté d'étendre les passions & les autres discours qui peuvent plaire." (La Pratique du théâtre [Paris, A. de Sommaville, 1657, livre II, chap. 7, "De l'Etenduë de l'Action Theatrale", p. 159.)

It is the choice of event that determines the composition of the tragedy. The whole question of the perspective from which the event is viewed is brought down to this choice, which replaces the praxis/pathos polarity. A primacy of the visible now orders the composition: the event is the day chosen for the scene (and not a past mystery to be unveiled), and the plots will converge on this event like "lines at their center". What d'Aubignac is describing here is the convergence of the lines of discourse, "the assembly and concurrence of incidents": lines, assembly, the compositional model is visual. Moreover, it will essentially consist in a second choice, that of the opening of the theater, i.e., the arrangement of the entrance to the stage, in relation to the catastrophe, which becomes the event par excellence, the center, the point of convergence and culmination of the plots.

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Contrary to what the Greek etymology might suggest, catastrophe is not an Aristotelian notion. What is sometimes translated by catastrophe in Poetics, sometimes by "pathetic event", ispathos, the feeling of facts, the effect triggered by the production of an action and then the communication of the facts. The catastrophe takes on decisive importance in classical dramaturgical doctrine as the visible manifestation of the playwright's choice of event, choice of the day to be represented on stage, choice of the opening of the theater, as close as possible to the catastrophe. The event thus becomes the choice of the event, and the catastrophe orients the perspective that leads the theater to the event.

The Abbé d'Aubignac then describes the unfolding of tragedy as caught between the "negotiation of the stage" and "the freedom to extend the passions and other discourses". We recognize the latter as the Aristotelian pathos, the discourse of feeling; but what is this "negotiation of the stage" that should be reduced to a minimum? It's the stewardship of the event, what needs to be negotiated on stage as a prerequisite to the representation of the event. A negotiation is a transaction, an exchange: on one side of the scale are the explanations, speeches and plot threads that need to be produced on stage to lead the spectator to an understanding of the event, and on the other, the visual evidence of the event. The more the scene shows, the less there is to report, the less there is to negotiate.

The preparation of the event thus becomes the great business of theatrical composition. Just because we need to concentrate the stage's negotiation time as much as possible doesn't mean that this negotiation is secondary: on the contrary, it's here that the central spring of composition, or more precisely its knot, resides. For Aristotle, the knot of the plot (desis) constitutes its liminal obscurity, to which the end brings a denouement (lusis), i.e. a resolution, a clarification. For d'Aubignac, the denouement is a "catastrophe²", a point of convergence where all the "lines" of the plots, all the "paths" must "culminate" for the catastrophe to unravel all the threads of the plot. The introgue, or rather the scene's negotiation, consisted in knotting them. Upstream of the event, then, we have to think the negotiation, which implies a violence done to time:

"the Poet then must study to assemble all his incidents so adroitly in one day, that it does not appear affected or violated; & to achieve this, he must rectify the times of things happened before the opening of the Theatre, suppose some happened before, & join them all so artfully that they seem related by their nature, & not by the Poet's mind. [...] But what we must take care of, is not to join the times of various incidens so hastily, that verisimilitude is injured" (II, 7, p. 160).

Like the negotiation of the scene, the violence done to the temporal succession of facts must be minimal, almost invisible. But like it, it is the essential business. It is in this violence that the reversal of perspective that increasingly affects our relationship to events at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is played out. If the stage, at the moment of performance, presents itself to the spectator as a convergence towards the event, towards the catastrophe, the composition of the poem on the contrary, for the playwright, focuses on the sparing of incidents that precipitate the catastrophe, i.e., a good play must be composed in reverse.

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To negotiate well, you're going to have to rig the causes: build, backwards from the disaster-event, a logical and rapid sequence of incidents. Composition is forcing, however weak or imperceptible: the dramatist brings together the "incidents" scattered along the chain of time, tightening their links; as discreetly as possible, he violates the facts. To compose is to concentrate and knot.

"Opening the theater" (beginning the play) as close as possible to the catastrophe allows time to be abolished during the play. The play doesn't play out a succession of events; it merges with the Event. From the play's event, i.e., from its virtually motionless, timeless location, the "passions and discourses" that occupy the stage unfold what will have produced the catastrophe, orienting the stage's relationship to the event in the direction of retrospection³. But this retrospection is not itself the exact reconstitution of the sequence of facts: these are rearranged and condensed as close as possible to the event in which the scene installs us, so that the ascent that is made towards the past, the causes, motives and grievances, is not parasitized by the development on stage of a succession oriented towards the future.

The reversal of perspective in the relationship to the event is thus accompanied by a conceptualization of the event (a notion which, like that of catastrophe, is not Aristotelian), which ceases to be understood as a given of reality, or of history, to become a construction by condensation of facts. The event becomes a produced reality and, through its artificiality, acquires the coherence, concentration and operability of a stage object. Differentiating itself from the "adventure⁴", it disassociates itself from the succession of times, reconfiguring time from within itself. Then, in this reconfigured time, the event makes an image; it attests itself as an event through the image it delivers of itself.

Beyond the wounded vanities and baseness of the quarrel that festered between Corneille and Abbé d'Aubignac after the publication of La Pratique du théâtre in 1657 and Corneille's three Discourses in 1660, it is striking that the controversy is not about whether or not "rules" are respected, but about how the forcing of facts is conducted to produce the event. In other words, as d'Aubignac himself agreed in 1663⁵, no one respects the said rules, which are erected only to measure, during the theatrical performance, the transgression gap produced by the event. Verisimilitude is not the smooth continuity of a norm, but the management of permissible deviations. Marking a threshold of tolerance for this deviation, it is the sole criterion for assessing the event, which it is posited not only can, but must transgress the rule of the three unities, and more particularly that of the unit of time.

The same questions that run through the classical doctrine of composition in the dramatic poem emerge a decade later in thinking about composition in painting. One of the first lectures at the brand-new Académie royale de peinture, and the first devoted to a French painting, was Charles Le Brun's November 5, 1667 lecture on La Manne by Poussin⁶. The choice of the subject to introduce, after Raphael, the French model of history painting takes us back to the classical conception of the event as a manifestation of Providence, as it appears in Furetière: the biblical episode of the manna falling in the desert to feed the starving Israelites has no earthly hero and triggers no chain of events. It stands on its own as a manifestation of God, giving retrospective meaning and support to the Exodus and the journey to the Promised Land. Even historically projected into the distant past, the manna event manifests itself as the future of the chosen people, as the promise of salvation to come. The manna is an e-event: the spectator is supposed to forget that the episode takes place in the course of a long history, and to grasp the picture before him as an image of that which comes at the end, i.e. dece which gives destinal meaning both to holy history and to the life of each individual.

For Le Brun, La Manne is composed of three groups, the one in the foreground on the left, the one in the foreground on the right, and finally the one formed by Moses and Aaron in the background in the center. Let's say right away for ease of understanding that the first group on the left represents hunger before the arrival of the manna, the second on the right stages the harvest itself, and the third in the center describes thanksgiving after the harvest.

It's only in the 4th^th and final part of his presentation that Le Brun realizes that Moses and Aaron "are like the two heroes of his subject⁷", the action of Moses is not the subject of the painting. The sequence of its three parts is a sequence in time that excludes him as protagonist: the first group is still unaware that the manna has fallen, the mother is still dividing her milk between her mother and son, while the old man behind her is dying. They are the cause of the event, its origin. The second group picks up the manna, deploying itself in the present of the event, manifesting its centrifugal power from the woman with her back turned. The third group, in an inverse movement, gives thanks and comes to coincide with the classical definition of the event, which designates the denouement, the providential outcome through which divine power and purpose are manifested.

Or this center is extinguished:

"For Moses and those around him, we see that they are only illuminated by a light extinguished by the interposition of the air that lies in the distance between them and the others who are on the front of the painting, and that they receive even less daylight according to how farther away each figure is⁸".

The event manifests a truth; but the truth only manifests itself veiled in the event. Here, Poussin breaks with the iconographic tradition of depicting the Manna episode, which makes Moses the protagonist of the scene.

While Le Brun never addresses the painting's relationship to history, to time, to the event , and deliberately confines his analysis to a strictly technical point of view, the discussion that follows the lecture focuses exclusively on this point. Criticism rained down on Poussin for not respecting the letter of the biblical text: the Manna fell in the early hours of the morning, so the Jews did not see it fall; the Manna fell after the quails, so the Jews were already satiated. Consequently, the famine scene in the 1^er shot on the left "does not suit the time of the action."

To this objection, Le Brun responds with a formula which, while appearing to singularize painting, in fact echoes the method advocated by Abbé d'Aubignac in La Pratique du théâtre :

"To this M. Le Brun distributes that painting is not like history. That a historian makes himself heard by an arrangement of words and a sequence of speeches that forms an image of the things he wants to say and successively represents such action as he pleases. But since the painter has only one moment in which to take the thing he wants to depict, in order to represent what happened in that moment, it is sometimes necessary for him to join together many incidents that have preceded in order to make the subject he is exposing clear, without which those who see his work would be no better instructed than if this historian, instead of telling the whole subject of his story, were content to tell only the end⁹. "

The stakes involved in this conjunction of incidents become clear here: it's a matter of "forming an image" of the event, of "figuring" it, of "representing what happened", of "making it com-prendre", i.e. grasping it all at once, in a single effect.

Le Brun comes to the question of the temporality of painting only under the compulsion of the discussion that followed his talk. Until then, he had confined himself in a more technical, factual way to questions of layout, spatial organization and figures. Asked to explain the relationship between the image and the event, Le Brun transposed his structural theory of the group, the figure and expression to the temporal field. He thinks of the painter's instant as a grouping of groups: just as the group breaks down into figures, which themselves break down into expressions, and ideally into mixed expressions, so the painter's instant will break down into "incidents" that will have preceded the event: incident is theater vocabulary; instant is painting.

The defense of Poussin that concludes the 1667 discussion introduces the notion of event:

"Someone added to what M. Le Brun had just said that, if by the rules of the theater, poets are permitted to join together several events that have occurred at different times to make a single action, provided there is nothing to contradict each other and verisimilitude is exactly observed, it is even more just that painters should take this license, since without it their works would remain deprived of that which makes their composition more admirable and makes known the beauty of their author's genius¹⁰. "

The conjunction of events is noted here explicitly as coming from the doctrine of theater, just as the insistence on verisimilitude refers to Abbé d'Aubignac. But Le Brun no longer distinguishes incidents from the terminal event they negotiate and prepare. And for good reason: painting cannot establish in time a knotting process of incidents, or intermediate events, which would unravel in the event-catastrophe. By the same token, it reveals an essential dimension of the concept of event in gestation here, which is its composite character: the coupling of heterogeneous temporalities is materialized on canvas by the arrangement of groups and the management of breaks in coherence (temporal, or rather circumstantial, i.e. logical) between these groups. The event's consistency (its admirable composition) is its verisimilitude, i.e. the maintenance of inconsistencies between groups below the threshold of acceptability (fair license).

In Poussin's painting, the point is not to represent the event of manna falling from heaven, but

"the state in which the Jewish people were then, who, in the midst of the desert, were in extreme necessity and dreadful languor, but who in this moment saw themselves relieved by the help of Heaven. So that some seem to suffer without yet knowing the assistance sent to them. And the others who are the first to feel its effects are in different actions¹¹."

The event makes differentiate the actions, i.e. on the one hand it delays them (the group on the left is still in hunger and despair when the manna has already fallen) and on the other hand it diversifies them (the figures react differently to the fall of the manna). In the coherence of the event works the interplay of these heterogeneities that differ¹². As for the principle of this coherence (Moses presiding over the event), it remains, if not invisible, at least veiled (behind the thickness of the air), or in the background (in the third plane), or even scattered (instead of Moses, whom Le Brun differs from evoking, an effect of light spread across the canvas). In this way, Le Brun works through the image of the différance in the event, deconstructing the figure. In the classical economy of representation, the figure is the support, the structural mechanism by which the event (the subject in history painting) is imaged on canvas. As soon as the event manifests itself as différance, the figure enters a process of deconstruction:

"this great painter did not arrange his figures to fill only the space of his picture, but [he] did so well that they all seemed to move, either by actions of the body or by movements of the soul¹³"

Movement, action, mouvoir, mouvements: the Aristotelian vocabulary of theatrical plotting here enters into discord with the fixed forms (figures) and frame the space of the tableau. The representation of the event involves the impossible coherence of this logical incoherence.

It's when it comes to describing the expression of the mother caught in the dilemma of her two duties and her two charities, to feed her mother or feed her child, that we best see the figure unravel:

"He showed why this same woman does not look at her mother as she renders her charitable aid, but leans toward her child. He said that the desire she had to rescue them both makes her do a double mother's deed. On the one hand, she sees the one who gave birth to her in extreme distress, and on the other, the one she gave birth to asks her for food that belongs to her, which she steals by giving it to another. Thus duty and piety urge her equally."

The mother "does not look", but "she sees", and she sees doubly: this doubling cracks the event and exacerbates the contradiction of the figure, which is and cannot be both that of maternal duty and that of filial duty. This contradiction manifests itself in a visually impossible expression, a "don't look", a crossed-out image. Through this subtraction from the visible, the figure defaults to the original gaze which, as an impossible double seeing, is necessarily lacking. Again and again, the viewer will come up against this subtracted gaze, through which the pain of the event unfolds, hauntingly. Faced with the canvas, he will experience the pathos of the scene in this failure of the gaze, he will make up, with his own stumbling gaze, for the gaze of the mother-daughter who never ceases to be missing. He will reconstitute, in this woman who is neither mother nor daughter, in this figure impossible to characterize, a kind of inner discourse, or rather the aporia of a retrospection¹⁴.

Such is the work of différance in the assumption of the event: it not only highlights the incoherent coherence of the heterogeneous incidents that constitute it; it renders problematic this very evidence, by pinpointing in the figure the impossibility of expression.

The mother turns away from her mother, to whom she nevertheless gives her milk, towards her child, to whom she refuses it. The mother's gaze moves in the direction of the event, which is the direction of the future, even as her action thwarts it. Because the image is constituted as a trace of the event, it tends to privilege the "to come" dimension of the event, at the very moment when the notion of event changes its meaning and retreats towards the apprehension, from the point of completion of the action, of its triggering elements. The contradiction between gesture and gaze expresses the reversal that is taking place, and consecrates the emergence of the concept of event.

The future of the event is its destinical dimension, through which what happens is thought of, reflected as an event: what has been done there, what has just taken place will enter history, will have a posterity, will enter the grand narrative of a destiny. With La Manne, we're talking about the destiny of the Jewish people, which itself represents, from a Christian perspective, the promise of grace. It is only from this destiny, this promise, that the story of La Manne will ultimately have been an event. Only the future will be able to attest in retrospect that what happens was an event. To take on the dimension of an event, then, what happens must be projected into the future anterior; the person who acts, who lives in the event, the immediate spectators of the event become aware of, or even decide that, later, in posterity, it will have been an event.

In 1657, the same year that Abbé d'Aubignac published La Pratique du théâtre, a translation of Lucain's La Pharsale by Georges de Brébeuf, a friend of Corneille, appeared in Paris with Antoine de Sommaville. The edition is illustrated, and its frontispiece engraved by Chauveau depicts the episode that triggered the civil war whose conclusion was the Battle of Pharsalus: it was Julius Caesar's crossing, in 49 BC, of the Rubicon, which marked the border between Cisalpine Gaul, of which he was the governor, and Roman Italy, where no general was allowed to enter with his army.

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Lucain depicts the event of the Rubicon crossing through the confrontation of two speeches¹⁵: the speech of the imago patriæ rising from between the reeds of the Rubicon on the one hand; Caesar's speech invoking the gods on the other. On the threshold of the decisive action, all previous history is recalled and condensed: the Gallic War, the crossing of the Alps, the sluggish return to Rome to avoid being ousted from power by Pompey.

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The emergence of the imago patriæ marks the event. There is an event because an image presents itself at the point where the action condenses, where all the threads of history converge and knot together in the dramatic suspense of the face-off, before unravelling in the outbreak of civil war. The event makes an image: it elicits the imago (effigy, simulacrum, ghost, older than the very gods that Caesar will evoke in return): "ingens visa duci Patriae trepidantis imago | clara per obscuram voltu maestissima noctem", the immense image of the frightened Fatherland appeared to the general, its face of light filled with sadness in the dark night. Brébeuf introduces something else: "toute défigurée", he writes. No figure in the Latin text, which does not enter into an economy of the event.

On Chauveau's engraving, the bank of the Rubicon on the right, brilliantly lit, zigzags across the image and marks the political frontier that is here historically at stake. It also materializes the ramp of the theatrical stage. It delimits the screen between what Caesar sees, and the image that looks at him. Here, the stage is the canonical device adopted by the representation of the event. Caesar is the subject of the scene, projecting himself towards the imago that denies him by blocking his passage, but at the same time accomplishes him by recognizing in his army his standards, in Latin the signa¹⁶. Like the hero of the tragic scene, Caesar sees beyond the scene; he sees and is both driven and prevented by what he sees. Chauveau depicts this double movement: the young woman representing the fatherland on the left raises her arms to the sky and draws back with her knees; but her face is turned towards Caesar and her bust offered to his gaze as to ours. She flees, but gives herself to be seen, thereby sketching the loop of the chiasmus of the visible.

On close inspection, the luminous border at the edge of the Rubicon doesn't trace a simple line of demarcation, but a T. In the foreground, it separates Caesar from the Fatherland, but it also separates this foreground taken as a whole from the background where Caesar's army is standing by, watching the scene. Caesar's face-to-face confrontation is thus itself circumscribed by the soldiers' gaze, which transposes that of the spectator-reader in front of him from the back of the theater. The equivalence thus established between Caesar's army and the audience is the real equivalence, established by the scenic device. Caesar insists that the army is the Roman people: they are "your Romans", "your Children" whom he brings with him. But as soon as the face-to-face confrontation is arranged in the manner of a stage, to attend the scene is to take the place, as audience, of the Roman people: the people are the audience of the spectacle, the audience constitutes the posterity of the people, they are the Roman people to be.

Thus, the theatricalization of the event and its constitution as a scenic device are accompanied by a movement of chiasmus, of interlacing, which is not only the chiasmus of the visible described by Merleau-Ponty and taken up by Lacan, but also inaugurates a chiasmus of temporalities, exchanging the spectral past of the people (the ghostly apparition of the imago patriæ) with its political future (the community of the public, of spectator-judges) in the present of the event (the spectator army, preparing to cross the Rubicon with Caesar).

Chauveau has emphasized this fated presence of the future in the image of the event by adding an allegory of Fortune flying over the Rubicon, between Caesar and the imago, brandishing the sword of the war to come and bearing on her shield the name of the epic that sings it: a sword for the event and a shield for its image; a shield for the screen worn by the event and a sword to slice through, break that screen by establishing an image in spite of everything. Fortune, however, is not looking at Caesar: she is looking at us, the public, superimposing on Caesar's face-to-face encounter, from right to left, with the ghost of the past, the face-to-face encounter, from back to front, of the crossing of the Rubicon with the future public of this crossing, with ourselves, the spectators.

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The event involves this pause, this reversal, which is the reversal of the relationship to time that is being prepared in the second half of the 17th century: in the 1657 edition of the Pharsale, after Chauveau's frontispiece engraving, the following unsigned engraving, which opens Book I¹⁷, depicts the actual crossing of the Rubicon. In the foreground on the right, Caesar leads the way, brandishing his baton of command, as he climbs the opposite bank, on which, as it were, we spectators find ourselves. Behind him, horsemen and infantrymen are still below. Caesar then turns away from us towards them, checking that the army is following him. With this reversal in progression, he reverses the perspective of time, introduces retrospection and opens up the dimension of the event.

Alexandre Kojève takes precisely this example of the crossing of the Rubicon to analyze the emergence of time as a concept in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit¹⁸:

"A man walks at night beside a small river. In other words, something extremely banal, nothing "historical". For, even if the man in question were Caesar, there would be nothing "historic" about the event if Caesar were strolling like this only because of some insomnia. The moment is historic because the night-walker is thinking of a coup d'état, civil war, the conquest of Rome and world domination. And let's not forget: because he has the project to do so, for all this is still in the future. The event in question would therefore not be "historical" if there were no real presence (Gegenwart) of the future in the Real World (first of all, in Caesar's brain). The present is therefore "historical" only because there is in it a relation to the future, or, more exactly, because it is a function of the future (Caesar walks because he thinks about the future). And it's in this sense that we can speak of a primacy of the future in Historical Time."

There is no event simply because Caesar sees the future (his project), but because he makes it become the present (his action). The event consists in Caesar's reversal from the future he dreams, into which he projects himself and the world with him, to the present where he acts: the army, the Roman people on the march and who must follow.

It begins with an idea in the air, nothing concrete: "all this is still in the future ", "first of all in Caesar's brain". The future, then, is an idea, the idea of the present: the present is driven by an idea of the future, "it is a function of the future". It is this idea that gives the present the meaning of a project, the shape of a political gesture, the destinial power of a concept.

Kojève identifies this steering of the event by the future with desire. The event of the Rubicon crossing is driven by Caesar's desire, which is the desire to make present what does not yet exist, the new imperial Rome, in a situation of power vacancy, in the lack, the absence that characterizes the political scene of the present.

Or Caesar is caught in the face-off with Pompey: Pompey is in charge in Rome, perhaps in decline but still at the height of his power. It's not Pompey's position that Caesar desires, but what it enables him to achieve: the political refoundation of Rome.

The driving function of the future in the present of the event is thus defined as the desire of a desire, which Kojève identifies with the desire for recognition in the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave¹⁹: at the principle of the event is the desire for recognition. It is through this process of recognition that the knotting of desire, which is fundamentally unreal, to the event, which is the fulfillment of reality itself, takes place.

Facing Caesar, "the real that has ceased to be" manifests itself in the appearance of the imago patriæ. The ghost of the fatherland produces the image of the past that persists in the present that Caesar's desire is about to deny: the present that effectively places Pompey in command of Rome is indeed the collapsed legacy of Rome's republican past, whose protective laws forbid Caesar to cross the Rubicon. Caesar's "desire to deny the real or present given" is therefore not the desire to deny the past, but what the past has given the present. What is denied is both discourse and real: it is the discourse of the imago that Caesar refutes, but he refutes it as a general who speaks at the moment of acting, not as a rhetorician; and it is also the real, the political and legal situation that Caesar decides to ignore in order to put his desire before it. The "negation of the given reality", which is the negation of the discourse of reality at the same time as the negation of the very reality established by the persistence of the past in the present, ties desire to the real and constitutes "the reality of desire".

The past denied in the real given of the present by the idea of the future carried by the desire of the other's desire manifests itself as imago denied: this is the ghost that Caesar conjures. The ghost is what articulates the event to the image, understood not as the representation of a painting, as the image of the scene of the event, but as the presence of absence in the event, as the denied past, as persistence.

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The event understood in this relation to the ghost is no longer the theatrical event : it becomes spectralized, that is, its relation to the image changes; from the tableau-image we pass to the ghost-image; from a scene of the event, we pass to a conjuration of the event.

When Hubert Gravelot illustrated Marmontel's new translation of La Pharsale in 1766, he very obviously drew inspiration for the engraving of Book I from the frontispiece produced by Chauveau a century earlier. But here the homeland appears in a cloud of white smoke that signals its spectral dimension; it is this cloud that marks the separation, no longer between Cisalpine Gaul and the territory of Rome, but between Caesar and his desire, his dream, and in this dream what it is a question of denying in order to make an event.

On Chauveau's engraving, Caesar mounted on horseback outstrips the nymph before him by a head: visually, physically, he has the advantage. In Gravelot's composition, the balance of power is reversed. Mounted on his cloud, the ghost of the fatherland surpasses with his entire bust a Caesar who must raise his head to consider her. Chauveau had interpreted the imago patriæ from the theatrical location of the stage, like a nymph emerging from the reeds. Gravelot creates an imago terribilis : an image of terror that needs to be conjured, an image of fantasy that needs to be appropriated.

By becoming a ghost, the image that stands before Caesar combines the past that the crossing of the Rubicon will bring to an end and the future that the general desires, with all the attributes that it's a matter of seizing: lictor's beam, SPQR shield, Roman eagle. The phantom is not so much the objective imago that emerges from the past to be denied, as Caesar's own fantasy, i.e. his project, his desire for recognition which, from the future he projects, dictates the calendar of events. The event becomes theatrical and spectral when, faced with the phantom, it triggers the triple dynamic of conjuration: the dynamic of negation, of the phantom that must be conjured up and made to disappear; the dynamic of projection, of the phantasm that must be made to appear in the real, to become the present; the dynamic of coalition, of the image that unites the community in action, the knotting of the event²⁰.

The spectral event marks the assumption of the imago terribilis. To assume its triple function of negation, projection and coalition, the ghost institutes an economy of terror. More precisely, terror, which already constituted one of the essential springs of the tragic scene, the privileged form of expression of the pathos of the event, changes nature and defines a new division: the event no longer arouses the terror of the spectator; the event becomes terror itself.

On Richard Westall's 1793 watercolor, the ingens imago standing before Caesar, rearing his horse, is clearly the image of a ghost²¹. The Rubicon has disappeared, the sun is veiled by the haze of the apparition and projects its red disk into the thickness of the darkened air. It is this projection that establishes the invisible boundary between Caesar and his ghost: Caesar's horse has already half crossed it, crossing the projection of the movement of Caesar and his army with the projection of light. The event is the projection: here, there is no longer any reversal, knotting or denouement, but the mere crossing of projections, which establishes the spectral device on the rubble of the collapsed theatrical device.

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Westall's watercolor announces the second revolution of the event, the advent of the spectral event in place of the theatrical event. The theatrical event is the invention of a mode of representing the event, the scenic device, which will always remain the reference device; the spectral event reflects the device: it articulates a concept to this device. As Kojève shows, the conceptualization of the event comes to us from Hegel, and involves the unprecedented knotting of the three temporalities through which we can think time: the future, where the idea is formed and from it desire, the past, which this desire negates in the present, and finally the present, where this negation impels the action that makes an event.

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This knotting does not undo the classic device of stage representation of the event, but it profoundly alters its spring and purpose. This is obvious from the vocabulary we use: the event is no longer a dénouement, but a nouage. It doesn't stop a course of events in a tableau; it triggers a process, it projects. This is what gives the (largely deceptive) impression that the event cursor is moving upstream in the course of time.

The ghost-image is the instrument of the event's knotting: it not only manifests, intermingled, the idea of the future, the project towards which that future is oriented, and the representation of the past, that which through the event will be past. It expresses, through this manifestation, the presence-absence of the present, i.e. what is happening, what is being played out at the very moment of the event, and at the same time what is missing, what is lacking in the event that is taking place. Through the ghost-image, the scenic device persists (making visible what the subject should not see and, from this given-to-see, establishing a point of view on the subject), and at the same time radically transforms itself: there will no longer be a moment of the event, the choice of an instant and the optical cutting of a tableau, but in place of the moment a trace, a haunting, a repetition. The ghost, because it is both idea and action, or because it is the medium through which the idea is tied to an action, steps out of the ordinary presence of the present; it introduces presence-absence as the central mode of apprehending the modern event at the end of the Enlightenment and the turn of Romanticism.

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The advent of the spectral event coincides with the French Revolution. As much as to say that this form of the event is no longer the one of today. Just as the disfigurement of the figure undermined the theatrical event, the disjunction of the present in the knot that constitutes it as a spectral event today shatters the radical heterogeneity of the presents we experience. The image strikes the event with the suspicion of its facticity, and directs us towards the irreplaceable presence of the living witness, the only authenticator. Today's event has split in two: on the one hand, the attack, with no image, no perpetrators, no purpose, the pure explosion of a desire for recognition, with no future. In the attack, the imago has taken the place of the image, potentiating the event in the globalized haunting of its repetitions. On the other side, the arrival of migrants, saturated with images, wounded identities, colliding the thrust of its desire for the future with the refusal of the hospitality demanded. In this arrival, the imago borders the image. In it, from the classic event, remains imperious and terrifying, the gaze of the mother who will not breastfeed her child.

Notes