ABSTRACT
Although familiar to us from twentieth-century poetics, avant-garde performance practices, and the philosophy of history, “the event” took on a new shape in the wake of World War II. Since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagaski and the discovery of the camps, what happens became historically aligned with what is socially impossible to process, culturally and psychologically unabsorbable, and highly resistant to linguistic, visual, and/or performative symbolization. Although the event’s impact on post-WorldWar-II expressive culture was undeniable, its theorization has proceeded only obliquely. In the above quote from Michel Foucault’s inaugural address at the Collège de France in 1971, for example, the discursive event under discussion has as its determining characteristic a material dispersion that, we note, can also exist outside or alongside language. Indeed, the determining notion of event itself is not linguistic, but acts on language. In the wake of 9/11 the event has taken on a new immediacy: no longer one among a number of possible accidents and/or tragedies to be sequenced and framed as historical, the event now challenges our very reliance on sequence, chronology, and the implicit usefulness of these classifications for either continuity and/or to future change.2 But, the event, which Foucault characterizes as existing at a level of material dispersion, also exists at a level of theoretical dispersion.
