ABSTRACT
‘The category of perhaps’, Derrida contends, ‘is perhaps the best category to refer to what remains to come’. The ampersand between ‘literature’ and ‘event’ in the title refers as much to their entangled relation as to their uncertain, approximative interaction; of how language, as written text or utterance, opens itself up to the indeterminate event. Literature occupies, or rather invents, the ‘category of perhaps’, and in doing so sets up an encounter with the event without appropriating it, explaining it, or rushing its arrival. The event does not find in literature a spokesperson, or a scribe, nor does literature utilise the cataclysmic and catastrophic nature of the event as a trope among tropes. The decision that kairos demands from the subject, decision that Aristotle, in his scheme of rhetoric, deems agential and context-bound, also becomes an imperative in all contemporary political and ethical accounts of the event.
