“This is the third volume (originally published in French as Il y a, 2003) in Claude Romano’s ‘evential hermeneutics’ project. It evolved from Event and World (2009; L’événement et le monde, 1998) and Event and Time (2014; L’événement et le temps, 1999). This third volume laid the groundwork for Romano’s major work, At the Heart of Reason (2015; Au cœur de la raison, la phénoménologie, 2010).”
“In that later work, Romano developed an in-depth confrontation between phenomenology and its analytic criticisms, and he argued for the legitimacy of a renewal of phenomenology that addresses some of the main challenges of contemporary thought.”
“Why an ‘evenential hermeneutics’? What are its purpose and its tasks?”
“Romano’s philosophical project (introduced in Event and Time and Event and World) analyses the impact of fundamental events on a person’s existence.”
“These events contribute to configuring the meaning of the world within which her decisions, actions, understanding of herself, and more generally her life, takes place.”
“This project is phenomenological insofar as it aims at analysing the conditions of the appearing of such events. It draws on the main figures of the phenomenological tradition (Husserl and Heidegger first and foremost, but also their French inheritors: Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Ricœur, Maldiney, and Levinas) in order to unveil the temporal structures and bring out the existential meaning that the “coming about” of the event involves.”
“An ‘event’, Romano claims, “upsets the hierarchy of the agent’s objectives, the configuration of his possibilities, the way in which he understands them, and himself in light of them, that is, his world as such” (15).”
“This aspect of the event entails that its phenomenological description requires a hermeneutics, because this notion of the event always involves the possibility of understanding the meaning of one’s existence. Events always carry the tragic weight of a crisis through which “the possibility of understanding himself is opened to man” (4).”
“In contrast to mere facts, which are fundamentally subject to a causal inquiry and somehow reducible to the causes they follow from, events belong to the domain of meaning, “that is, to a domain in which the understanding of a situation by an agent comes into play” (12-13).”
“Events do not only happen. Their “coming about” is essentially characterized by their significant impact on the human lives that they affect and transform.”
“Events necessarily carry a certain meaning that is to be revealed in light of the possibilities of existence they contribute in reconfiguring.”
“Events happen to us, so to speak, without us; they reconfigure our possibilities and determine our place within the world beyond our reach.”
“A particularly fascinating aspect of Romano’s project is its complex and ambiguous relation to Heidegger’s ontology. In his last tribute to Levinas, Derrida described his relation to Husserl as a kind of paradoxical unfaithful fidelity – “infidèle fidélité”. This analysis perfectly fits Romano’s ambiguous relation to the author of Being and Time and could be applied to his critical but respectful reading of Heidegger, whose influence on his work is constant and unquestionable.”