French Philosophies of the Event: Cavaillès' Mathematical Becoming and Foucault's Historical Critique
Abstract
This dissertation examines a pivotal yet understudied trajectory in 20th-century French philosophy. It begins with Jean Cavaillès’ intervention in the philosophy of mathematics and examines its implications for understanding history and the notion of the event. At its core lies an irreconcilability between two conceptions of history: mathematical becoming (devenir), which is defined by a dialectic of novelty and necessity, and histoire, which is defined by the arbitrary and contingent unfolding of mere historical events. This tension, I argue, inaugurates a unique philosophical problematic concerning the nature of the event, the concept of the transcendental, and the role of the subject in knowledge formation—a problematic that Michel Foucault later inherits and, I argue, resolves with a conception of history complementary to mathematics. I contend Cavaillès’ problematic can be divided into three unresolved problems between histoire and devenir: the concept of events; the function of the transcendental; and the role of the subject when its sensible acts mediate novelty yet cannot serve as their origin. Foucault offers what I call a “historicist approach” to resolving this threefold problematic. Rather than collapsing these histories, Foucault reconciles them by offering an historical method complementary to mathematical becoming. Mathematical becoming is preserved as a privileged discourse within history whose structure need not be generalized to all forms of historicity for the two to be reconciled. Foucault shows that history itself operates according to its own motor irreducible to the mere contingencies of empirical reality of which Cavaillès was suspicious. As such, Foucault is not only able to show how mathematical becoming (devenir) and history (histoire) can exist in the same world, but also how exactly the event figures in history, the way its unfolding is structured (transcendental), and the place of the subject in remaining displaced as the origin of phenomenal reality. What emerges is a rigorous depiction of historical reality that resolves each of the problems Cavaillès’ leaves behind.