Genealogies of the Event

Nathan Widder’s Genealogies of Difference is an ambitious book, in which several agendas are at work. On one level, it is an investigation of the ancient and medieval roots of an important contemporary idea: that ineffable something (the negative, différance, the semiotic, the virtual, non-identity, the invisible, the unconscious)[1] that both makes possible and disrupts any scheme of identity and hierarchy. Widder adopts the Deleuzean language of the event to talk about this “difference that differs from identity and difference” (4). On another level, Widder argues that ontologies that leave out something like the event are ultimately incoherent, unable to meet even their own criteria of success. Finally, Widder sketches the outlines of a politics and a political theory rooted in an ontology of the event.

The strengths of the book seem to me Widder’s admirable ability to show the roots of this apparently modern ontology in ancient and medieval thought (especially his very engaging discussion of the Gnostics) and the way in which his sharp statement of the issues helps to clarify what is at stake in the renewed interest in ontology that has emerged in political theory over the past few years.[2] The book’s weaknesses seem to me the brevity of Widder’s discussion of the more robust pluralism he envisions, and a dense and difficult chapter on Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. As I argue below, I also think that Widder has overlooked problems within the ontology of the event for which he argues, and that he has thus missed an opportunity to explicate and defend it more fully.

For readers who are intimately familiar with the work of Deleuze, I imagine that much of Genealogies of Difference will be familiar. However, for those interested in the genealogy of the event, and for those interested in contemporary debates about ontology, there is much to be gained from this book. Widder’s evident passion for the issues makes for lively reading, and his preliminary explorations of a plurality that springs from a “groundless difference” are as intriguing as they are incomplete (7).

Ontologies Eventful and Total

Clearly, it is very difficult to talk about an unrepresentable something whose manifestations have in common only their resistance to being subsumed under a single organizing schema. (Diana Coole has an excellent discussion of this difficulty in her recent Politics and Negativity, which looks at the concept of “negativity” in thinkers from the 19th and 20th centuries.) Widder does a nice job of expressing this key concept: “This singular-multiple event, precisely by being unlocalizable, implies a certain movement: a flux by which it consistently surpasses itself while eluding capture by a telos, dialectic, or other representational schema; and a repetition that involves a recurrence not of ‘identical states’ but rather of the excessive heterogeneity that destroys all models of identity” (6).

Widder’s most fundamental argument is that theories of identity — even dialectical theories that acknowledge the constitutive role of difference — are inadequate and ultimately incoherent if they do not recognize that there is a fugitive, unrepresentable force in the cosmos that simultaneously makes possible and undermines any determinate conceptualization of identity. He writes: “For as will become clear in subsequent chapters, thinking that attempts to conceive difference and plurality through the strictures of identity must invariably introduce exogenous factors that compromise the very task it has set itself” (4). Through his genealogical investigation of the singular-multiple event, and the more determinate theories in response to which it developed, Widder offers us a chance to assess this claim.

Widder begins his investigation with Hegel, whose dialectical conception of identity manages both to promise the recognition of destabilizing difference and, simultaneously, to domesticate it. As I read him, Widder’s main criticism is that Hegel cannot account for the momentum of dialectical development. At each moment in the dialectic, one form of being is confronted with another that is apparently opposed to it. Hegel argued that the opposition would be resolved through the creation of a new and more determinate identity...