Human Studies

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-021-09597-0

THEORETICAL / PHILOSOPHICAL PAPER

Personal Uniqueness and Events

Petr Prášek1,2 

Accepted: 29 June 2021

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021

Abstract
In contrast to Anglophone debates on personal identity initially formed by John
Locke’s investigation of personal identity in the sense of personal continuity or
persistence through time, the Continental tradition focuses on what constitutes
ipseity (ipséité, Selbstsein, selfhood) in the sense of individuality or uniqueness of
the human being “constituted” by its continuous transformation through changing
experience. In this study, I claim that contemporary phenomenological research
in France—especially the “phenomenology of the event” as represented by Henri
Maldiney and Claude Romano—contributes to this Continental discussion in a sig-
nificant way: it formulates the conditions of personal uniqueness or distinctiveness
with regard to other persons, conditions not to be found in Heidegger’s existential
conception of selfhood in Being and Time. More precisely, Maldiney and Romano
allow us to answer the principal questions of this study: In what does the personal
uniqueness consist? What exactly individualizes the first-person selfhood disclosed
in Dasein’s relation to death? In my three-stage analysis, I first deal with Heidegger’s
conception of selfhood in Being and Time and its limits with respect to the question
of personal uniqueness. Next, I analyse Maldiney’s conception of “eventful self-
hood” in which he “completes” Heidegger’s conception of selfhood by describing
Dasein’s openness to ontical, and yet fully authentic events. Finally, I develop the
argumentation by presenting Romano’s even more radical conception of the “hap-
pening subjectivity” (advenant), which allows us to return to the second major fea-
ture of personal identity: personal persistence. Nonetheless, I conclude that the con-
nection between personal uniqueness and persistence is not sufficiently examined
in the phenomenology of the event, which opens the path towards another related
inquiry into the following problem: What is the proper subjective dimension or the
“underlying thing” (ὑποκείμενον) in the background of personal persistence which
somehow resists events?

Keywords  Personal identity · Selfhood · Uniqueness · Event · French

Phenomenology

* Petr Prášek
petrprasek@email.cz
Extended author information available on the last page of the article

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 P. Prášek

Introduction

In contrast to Anglophone debates on personal identity, famously launched by

John Locke’s investigation of personal identity in the sense of personal continu-
ity or persistence through time (Locke 2008:  208f.), “the Continental tradition
included remarkably intense debates on the individual or the self as being unique
or ‘concrete,’ deeply temporal and […] unable to have any identity, if not one
externally imposed” (Čapek and Loidolt 2021:  217, 221). Needless to say, both
the problem of personal persistence and that of individuation are interrelated.
John Drummond, for example, distinguishes between “self identity” and “per-
sonal identity,” where the former – i.e., the “pure ego” – is the formal stable or
identical structure of all experiences, while the latter is the concrete and chang-
ing content of this structure, i.e., a unique person formed by what he or she con-
cretely experiences in his or her life (Drummond 2021: 235–247).
In this study, I claim that contemporary phenomenological research in France
– especially the “phenomenology of the event” as represented by Henri Maldiney
and Claude Romano – contributes to the Continental discussion on personal unique-
ness in a significant way. Contemporary French phenomenology understands the
phenomenon by virtue of its dynamism, spontaneity, and also unpredictability – fea-
tures that turn the phenomenon into an event (Tengelyi 2010; Gondek and Tengelyi
2011; Tengelyi 2012; Sommer 2014; Virri 2017; Raffoul 2020; Maldiney 1991: 316;
Romano 2009a: 1; Marion 2016: 179; Barbaras 2019: 43, etc.). An event of sense
is characterized by the fact that one cannot determine in advance its conditions of
appearing because an event brings these conditions with itself. This new conception
of the phenomenon prompted French phenomenologists to definitively liberate phe-
nomena from their captivity in all types of subjectivism often based on a strong con-
cept of subjective identity. Following in the footsteps of first-generation phenome-
nologists in France, and above all in the footsteps of Levinas, they hold that an event
of sense is neither a work of intentionality nor that of the capacity of understanding
Being, but a work of that which manifests itself through the event – an event is first
and foremost an expression of appearing transcendence.
For the purposes of this study, I must emphasize one of the conclusions of
this new phenomenon paradigm: subjectivity must be reconsidered as a receiv-
ing instance of the appearing transcendence that continuously invades subjective
identity and makes subjectivity into a singular person distinguished from other
people. In this text, I limit myself to the work of Henri Maldiney and Claude
Romano who are concerned not only with the phenomenon considered as an
event but with the event itself understood as a rift in experience singularly shap-
ing the individual existence. I shall claim that by describing the structures of
human openness to events, Maldiney and Romano clarify the sufficient conditions
of personal uniqueness, conditions not to be found in Heidegger’s existential con-
ception of selfhood in Being and Time; Maldiney and Romano pick up where
Heidegger left off and allow us to answer the principal questions of this study: In
what does the personal uniqueness consist? What exactly individualizes the first-
person selfhood disclosed in Dasein’s relation to death?

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Personal Uniqueness and Events

To be able to describe clearly the problem of personal uniqueness and the rela-
tions between Heidegger’s, Maldiney’s and Romano’s conceptions of the self, the
analysis proceeds in three stages to which three sub-chapters are devoted. In the
first one, I deal with Heidegger’s conception of selfhood in Being and Time, and
also its limits with respect to the question of personal uniqueness. Next, I analyse
Maldiney’s conception of “eventful selfhood” in which he “completes” Heidegger’s
conception of selfhood by describing Dasein’s openness to ontical, and yet fully
authentic events. Finally, I develop my argumentation by presenting Romano’s even
more radical conception of the “happening subjectivity” (advenant), which allows
us, besides other things, to return to the second major feature of personal identity:
personal persistence. More precisely, I formulate the following question: How can
one already have one’s personal history and, at the same time, receive one’s person-
ality purely from events coming from the future?
However, despite this final attempt to reconcile the question of personal unique-
ness and that of personal persistence, I conclude that their connection is not suf-
ficiently examined in the phenomenology of the event. This opens the path towards
another related inquiry into the following problem: What is the proper subjective
dimension or the “underlying thing” (ὑποκείμενον) in the background of personal
persistence which somehow resists events?

The Concept of Selfhood in Being and Time and Its Principal

Deficiency in Relation to the Question of Personal Uniqueness

It is important to mention that Heidegger’s main question was not that of personal
uniqueness but that of Being which is addressed via the  existential analytic of
Dasein. In other words, the question of the self is overshadowed from the outset by
the question of Being: Heidegger investigates the mode of being of Dasein because
it is concerned about (its own) being and therefore supposed to give us access to
the question of Being (see Guignon 2015: 10). Nonetheless, since Dasein is always
me myself or, more generally, a self (Selbst), Heidegger’s investigation also under-
takes an existential clarification of the concept of selfhood (Selbstsein). The problem
is to ontologically determine Dasein’s relationship with itself, the “always-being-
my-own-being” (Jemeinigkeit) of Dasein. Although Dasein says “I,” Heidegger
underlines that the self is not the same persisting thing, substance or isolated sub-
ject (1996: §25). On the contrary, the self is always a concrete being immersed in
the world of practical engagement which it shares with others (1996:  §26). As a
consequence of this engagement, Dasein initially tends to understand itself from the
surrounding world of which it takes care; for the most part, everyday Dasein is dis-
persed or absorbed by the public world of its engagement and fails to see itself in the
sense of the being it is itself (1996: §27, §64, 296). Hence, the “who” of Dasein is
not a unique person but the averageness of everyday being-with-one-another: “The
‘who’ is the neuter: the they (das Man)” (1996: 119).
According to some other authors, the fact that personal identity is endowed with
a social aspect is not completely negative. The notion of the person as an individual
does not make sense without other persons from whom one distinguishes oneself.

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 P. Prášek

This important aspect was, for example, in the centre of Hannah Arendt’s concep-
tion of personal identity: “who one is” is not some private affair but is expressed or
performed through speaking and acting in the public space of the political (Arendt
1998:  175–188; Loidolt 2020). However, when aiming at elucidating a person’s
uniqueness, one must raise the following questions: What exactly is that which
expresses itself in the intersubjective space? Who is she? She obviously cannot be
reduced to a set of distinctive marks attributed to her by other people. The every-
day “public” answer to the question “who is she?” as an enumeration of distinctive
features, including various social masks or roles, which allow us to reidentify an
individual,1 may be an expression of her personality under the condition that she
has said or done something on whose basis these qualities can be attributed to her.
This condition is decisive because the qualities attributed by the others are gen-
eral properties and therefore do not constitute sufficient conditions for determining
personal identity understood as personal uniqueness. We can always imagine, says
Claude Romano (2016a), that this description of a person by means of a set of quali-
ties applies to several individuals. That is why he affirms (2016a: 55–58; see also
Romano 2019: 743), as well as many other phenomenologists, including Heidegger,
that the answer to the question “who one is” is not “third-person identity” but “first-
person identity” for which we are – in the very broad sense of the word – responsi-
ble. Some qualities or features are ours or express who we really are only insofar as
they somehow depend on us as “first-persons”.
Likewise, Division One of Being and Time presents what we may call an exis-
tential version of “third-person selfhood,” the anonymous “they-self” in which the
first-person self is lost from sight because immersed in other people’s existential
possibilities – in what one ordinarily thinks or does (das Man). As S. Crowell puts
it: “The sort of ‘self-awareness’ that accompanies all my practical engagements as
a person – what Division I terms acting ‘for the sake of’ being something – does
not bring the ontological structure of the self into view in a phenomenologically
adequate way” (Crowell 2021: 274). Accordingly, one of the core problems of Being
and Time is not the issue of personal uniqueness as such but “how is it possible to
establish and achieve a genuine and direct relationship with oneself if we are already
thrown and fallen in the public-one primarily articulated in idle talk?” (Escudero
2014: 13).
This problem, first and foremost the problem of the access to the first-person
self, is then solved in Division Two of the book. Dasein gains access to itself in the
breakdown of its third-person public self which happens in anxiety (Angst) in the
face of death (see Escudero 2014: 14). To put it another way, it is death that indi-
vidualizes Dasein in such a way that it reveals to Dasein its own individual being:
“I see that the meaning of the objects that I encounter is determined by the life I
happen to be living…” (McManus 2015: 173) More precisely, in Angst in the face
of death, “the things at hand in the surrounding world sink away, and so do inner-
worldly beings in general […] Thus Angst takes away from Dasein the possibility of

1
 See Ricœur’s definition of individual character: “By ‘character’ I understand the set of distinctive
marks which permit the reidentification of a human individual as being the same” (Ricœur 1992: 119).

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understanding itself, falling prey, in terms of the ‘world’ and the public way of being
interpreted. It throws Dasein back upon that for which it is anxious, its authentic-
potentiality-for-being-in-the-world. Angst individuates Dasein to its ownmost being-
in-the-world which, as understanding, projects itself essentially upon possibilities”
(Heidegger 1996: 175f.).
Dasein as an individual is Dasein that understands itself from its own existential
possibilities revealed by death as “the ownmost possibility of Dasein” (Heidegger
1996: 243). However, the first-person authentic selfhood is thus not achieved once
and for all. The authentic selfhood is merely an available mode of being or a pos-
sibility for Dasein that may be achieved by taking responsibility for its own life
– by choosing what has been disclosed in anxiety (McManus 2015: 164f.; Guignon
2015:  15f.; Crowell 2021:  275). What is requested in the call of conscience (Hei-
degger 1996: 252f.) is to “realize some sort of […] ipseity […] through steadiness
of the stance we take on our lives” (Guignon 2015:13). This stance we may take in
the face of death is called anticipatory resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) (Heidegger
1996: 296f.).
Thus, I exist authentically or “in person” or I am myself (ipse2) insofar as I am
ready to hear the call of conscience and to resolutely face up to death, insofar as I
am ready to be coherent instead of relying on the They and all the contingencies of
my life in the surrounding public world. Hence, according to Heidegger, the core
of the person is the constancy of the self (Selbst-ständigkeit), misunderstood as the
persistence of the subject saying “I,” which lies in the anticipatory resoluteness in
the face of death. Being a person is tantamount to being the constant process of
self-unification of oneself that provides one’s existential possibilities with coherence
or stability manifested “in a certain style, carrying over from situation to situation”
(Wrathall 2015: 213).
However, as death individualizes Dasein only in such a way that it reveals or pro-
vides evidence of Dasein’s first-person selfhood as lost in its public interpretation,
and also guarantees (in the case of a firm attitude towards death) the constancy of
being the first-person self, we cannot stop our questioning here and have to raise
another question: What is that which individualizes the first-person selfhood itself?
Romano’s questions are fully relevant: “How can this unsubstitutable possibility
of Dasein, the potentiality-to-die, confer individuality on existence, unless it has
already received it from that existence? Cannot death only be determined as my ulti-
mate and not-to-be-outstripped possibility if existence is already principally defined
by mineness (Jemeinigkeit)?” (2009a: 139) In other words, if we inquire into the
singularity of a person, individualization by death cannot be the last answer – as
Heidegger himself was very well aware: “Anticipatory self-projection upon the pos-
sibility of existence not to-be-bypassed – on death – guarantees only the totality and

2
  Note that Latin ipse is employed to emphasize that it is precisely the person in question, the person
herself. Romano (2016a: 45) clearly defines Latin ipse in this manner: “ipse Caesar: Caesar himself […]
ipse is only employed as an expression of emphasis by which one indicates that it is the person herself,
or the very person who is in question”. See with Ricœur’s definition (1992: 3) of “oneself”: “‘Oneself’
(soi-même) is only an emphatic form of ‘self’, the expression même serving to indicate that it is precisely
a matter of the being or the thing in question”.

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 P. Prášek

authenticity of resoluteness. But the factically disclosed possibilities of existence are

not to be taken from death” (Heidegger 1996: 350, my emphasis).
Dasein as an individual is the Dasein of these factically disclosed existential pos-
sibilities: it understands itself from its own singular existential possibilities. But if
we were willing to explore further these factical possibilities, we would be situated
on the very boundaries of Heidegger’s analytic, or even behind them: “In the exis-
tential analytic we cannot, in principle, discuss what Dasein factically resolves upon.
Our present inquiry excludes even the existential project of factical possibilities of
existence”. We may only ask “whence in general can the possibilities be drawn upon
which Dasein factically projects itself?” (Heidegger 1996: 350) According to Hei-
degger, Dasein’s “individual” possibilities are inherited. So far, I have been talk-
ing about the constancy of Dasein only with regards to how it exists “forward” or
towards its death without mentioning the second direction of its movement which
elucidates its factical individualization – Dasein is also a being-toward-beginning
(1996: 342). Factical individualization of Dasein consists in the particular factual
conditions of every Dasein, its historical, social and other conditions, which are
taken over as thrown by resoluteness. That is why Heidegger says that the facti-
cally disclosed possibilities are inherited, and yet chosen – an authentic Dasein may
choose amongst them, it “may choose its heroes” (1996: 352).
Thus, we see that the above-mentioned constancy of a person is the specific
movement (Geschehen) between birth and death making Dasein into a historical
being called fate (Schicksal). However, it is obvious that, for Heidegger, the decisive
role in this dialectic of two movements is played by Dasein’s movement towards
death because – as said above – it is this movement only that gives rise to the per-
son’s constancy: “But if fate constitutes the primordial historicity of Dasein, his-
tory has its essential weight neither in what is past nor in the today and its ‘connec-
tion’ with what is past, but in the authentic occurrence (Geschehen) of existence
that arises from the future of Dasein. […] Authentic being-toward-death, that is, the
finitude of temporality, is the concealed ground of the historicity of Dasein” (1996:
353).
This is how the factical individualization of Dasein loses its importance in
Being and Time. First and foremost, Heidegger sees the core of the person in the
maintaining of the first-person self (Selbst-ständigkeit) and that is why he does not
pay attention to the “circumstances and events” (1996: 345): these are ontologi-
cally inadequate for understanding Dasein’s constancy. Whatever may happen to
Dasein, it is only part of the inauthentic understanding of existence (see Romano
2010:  22–25). Whatever it is in its thrownness, Dasein becomes (first-)person by
making it – thanks to its forerunning into death – its own possibility (see Maldiney
1991: 387–394; Romano 2009a:§3).
Hence we have to raise questions decisive for our quest for personal uniqueness:
What makes Dasein a singular person? In Heidegger, it must be Dasein’s free choice
amongst traditional, inherited possibilities. But on the basis of what does Dasein
retrieve this or that inherited possibility? In what does its individuality consist that
manifests itself in this purely individual choice? To Heidegger, this is a mystery (see
Abettan 2015: 286), although it is obvious that this individual choice – apart from
being possible thanks to the clairvoyance of resoluteness – is somehow related to the

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particular historical and social situation of this or that concrete Dasein. That is all
we can find on personal uniqueness in Being and Time. To sum up, the most impor-
tant reasons for this (to a certain degree) deliberate omission are: (1) the problem
of personal uniqueness was not in the centre of Heidegger’s questioning around the
question of Being; (2) Heidegger’s issue was in the first place how to establish a
direct relationship with the first-person self as lost in the public interpretation; (3)
the person’s core consists in the constancy of this relationship assured by the authen-
tic movement towards death; (4) the factical individualization of Dasein belongs to
the inauthentic understanding of existence.
As we will see, Maldiney and Romano pick up where Heidegger left off and
thematize what makes Dasein a unique person. They focus on the description of
essential or general structures of Dasein’s individualization by events happening to
it. With respect to the particular phenomenality of events, ignored by Heidegger in
Being and Time, they claim that Heidegger was wrong in saying that events merely
depend on fate conceived of as the movement (Geschehen) of Dasein. According
to them, it is the other way round: events do have their proper existential status. As
the event is irreducible to thrownness, it must be considered as a new existential
that shapes – always in a singular way – Dasein in its authenticity. We may, conse-
quently, hope that Maldiney and Romano could contribute considerably to the prob-
lem of personal uniqueness as it has been sketched so far, namely to the question of
what makes Dasein choose this or that inherited possibility.

The radical Alterity of Events and a New Account of Selfhood

in the Work of Henri Maldiney

In a chapter of his book Thinking Man and Madness entitled “Person,” Henri
Maldiney (1991) argues that the notion of person fluctuates between two mean-
ings symbolized by two words: Latin persona and Ancient Greek πρόσωπον. In a
point quoted by Maldiney (1991: 325), M. Mauss writes that persona is a word of
Etruscan origin that denoted a theatre mask but also – formerly – a posthumous wax
mask of family’s ancestors exhibited in the entrance hall of their houses. According
to Mauss, all the clan-societies throughout the world were characterized by ritual
use of masks that represented personages endowed with certain roles and names;
each clan was the unity of its personages. However, having examined the historical
evolution of persona, Maldiney (1991: 340) rightly concludes that this term cannot
help to elucidate the phenomenological problem of personal identity because the lat-
ter concerns persons as unique individuals: indeed, this assembly of socially con-
structed masks with highly anonymous functions or roles, of names and titles within
a family or a society, clearly lacks the persons one can encounter and ask, “Who are
you?” And this is how we return to the second term of Maldiney’s distinction, to the
Ancient Greek πρόσωπον which means an individual face and refers to someone’s
presence in (first-)person (see Maldiney 1991: 346–348). A person manifests herself
as an individual face one can encounter behind all masks, as someone unique. Thus,
Maldiney arrives  at conclusions similar to Heidegger’s but – as already indicated

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– he also pushes the investigation further by describing the process of Dasein’s

individualization.
If we intend to elucidate further this process, we have to focus on what was
outside the focus of interest in classical phenomenology (Marion 2002:  11) and
what became the main topic only in contemporary phenomenology in France: the
dynamic aspect both of appearing and of individual existence. Of course, neither
Husserl nor Heidegger ignored it completely. The phenomenon of event is not an
altogether new discovery of contemporary phenomenology. For instance, in Experi-
ence and Judgment, Husserl describes essences of individual factual differentiation
of objects that resides in new primal source-points of the now given in the continual
unity of transcendental ego (Husserl 1973: 380–389). In this context of Husserlian
transcendental phenomenology, what Maldiney and Romano call “event” is noth-
ing other than “primal impression” (Urimpression) as “the living source-point of
being” (Husserl 1991: 71). Yet, according to the French philosophers, neither Hus-
serl’s nor Heidegger’s descriptions accurately capture a particular phenomenality of
events. Maldiney’s and Romano’s contribution to phenomenology consists in new
essential descriptions of the events and the becoming-other of existence. Since an
event affects the whole existence conceived as being-in-the-world, its phenomeno-
logical sense cannot be described as the Husserlian “primal impression,” as a part
of the immanent flow of consciousness (see Maldiney 1991:  272). But turning to
Heidegger’s Being and Time, we have noticed that existential analytic is another pro-
ject of “solipsism,” only this time ontological (see Marion 2013: 423), for events are
conditioned by Dasein understood as fate. Nothing illustrates this better than §74
devoted to Dasein’s becoming (Geschehen). Events may affect Dasein because it
is, as being-toward-death, this capacity to understand them as fortunate or cruel:
„Dasein can only be reached by the blows of fate because in the basis of its being it
is fate in the sense described. Existing fatefully in resoluteness handing itself down,
Dasein is disclosed as being-in-the-world for the ‘coming’ of ‘fortunate’ circum-
stances and for the cruelty of chance. Fate does not first originate with the collision
of circumstances and events” (Heidegger 1996: 351).
According to Maldiney, these descriptions are symptomatic of an excessive prior-
itization of human subjectivity resulting in “heroic” ethics that interiorizes the fate
of Being (1991: 419). As Levinas famously put it: “[Dasein’s] freedom writes his
history which is one; his projects delineate a fate of which he is master and slave. An
existant remains the principle of the transcendence of power” (Levinas 1979: 275).
The problem consists primarily in the fact that the Heideggerian conception of the
event – resulting in such a heroic description of human being that seems to “replay
the scenario of the permanency” of metaphysical subjectivity (Romano 2010:  38)
– does not correspond to how the event appears. For the event is irreducible to
thrownness that is taken over by Dasein. As such, it poses a challenge to fate – it is
an ahistorical element to which the historicity of Dasein is subordinated (Maldiney
1991: 421; see Abettan 2015: 288). As is obvious in the cases of traumatic events
leading to severe mental disorders, the event has even the power to undermine the
constancy of the affected person (Maldiney 1991: 6); in schizophrenia, for instance,
the patients’ existential possibilities are rigidly determined by a traumatic event in
which they are stuck (Malidney 1991; 277, 316, 400; see Escoubas 2006: 80–82).

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Personal Uniqueness and Events

Hence the title of Maldiney’s most significant book on the event: Thinking Man and
Madness.
Heidegger himself was interested in these psychiatric issues. It is known that
between 1959 and 1969 he delivered a series of Zollikon seminars (Heidegger 2001)
organized by his friend M. Boss, founder of “therapeutic Daseinsanalysis”. Nonethe-
less, as P. Kouba demonstrates in his book on The Phenomenon of Mental Disorder,
Heidegger’s or Boss’ Daseinsanalysis focuses on the description of disturbed and
non-disturbed modes of being-in-the-world without describing the reasons or condi-
tions enabling its overall breakdown – why Dasein can go insane (2015: 113). To
describe sufficiently such disintegration, one needs to take into account the imper-
sonal processes of human individualization capable of undermining the constancy
of Dasein (Kouba 2015: 52f.). And this is exactly what Maldiney does. According
to him, there are two major areas in which we learn about the event: apart from
madness, in which the existential structures are in question, the privileged entrance
into the phenomenology of human existence is the work of art.3 The common point
of both art and psychiatry is the event happening in human sensation (sentir) and
understood as an existential crisis that may result in a mental disorder (see Escoubas
2006: 69–82). As the proper place of the encounter with the event is the Dasein’s
body or the “pathic moment” (moment pathique) of Dasein’s sensation (sentir),
Dasein is altogether passive when faced with the event (Maldiney 1991:  321).
Hence, Maldiney concludes that Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein must be reworked
based on its “pathic moment” or openness to events (see Jacquet 2017: 36).
More precisely, Maldiney came up with the idea that the event is such a tran-
scendence spoken about, for example, by Levinas in his idea of the face of the other,
that is, such a transcendence that is much stronger than the transcendence of Dasein’s
projection. However, unlike Levinas, Maldiney enumerates many more examples of
this transcendence that manifests itself in events of different sorts: apart from the
face-to-face encounter, an event might be a natural catastrophe or serious illness, but
also an encounter with a work of art or even a minuscule sensation (sentir).4 Thus,
if Dasein becomes other or transformed after enduring an event, it does not refer to
other people but to an essential alterity inherent to human existence, to “inappropri-
able” transcendence similar to that of Levinas.
All these events are singularities happening only once and that is why they are
irreducible to any horizon determinable a priori – they come up literally from noth-
ing (p. 322; Maldiney 2012:  204). As Maldiney repeats in all his books, Dasein’s

3
 As J.-L. Chrétien remarks, before becoming a widely known philosopher, Maldiney had long been
respected in artistic and psychiatric circles (Chrétien 2012:  7–29). His conception of human existence
draws upon his encounters with friends and acquaintances from both disciplines: for example, with art-
ists such as Tal Coat, J. Bazaine, F. Ponge or A. du Bouchet, and with psychiatrists such as J. Schotte, L.
Binswanger, L. Szondi or R. Kuhn.
4
  Maldiney describes such a transcendence that is irreducible to the transcendence of Dasein’s projec-
tion. That is why he groups together (under the name of event) what Levinas strictly distinguishes: the
metaphysical transcendence of the Other and the transcendence of impersonal element from which sub-
jectivity lives (vivre de…). Moreover, Levinas does not employ the term “event” for an individualizing
event but for “an event of being, as the openness of a dimension indispensable, in the economy of being,
for the production of infinity” (1979: 240).

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 P. Prášek

“evential” reality or real experience (in contrast to every possible experience of

Kant or Husserl) cannot be described only as a fulfilled intention: “The real (le réel)
is always what one didn’t expect” (Maldiney 1991:  143; see Maldiney 1973:  182,
Maldiney 2012: 282). Nor does Dasein’s openness to events have the structure of the
project: the horizon from which an event comes is opened by this event. Maldiney
gives an illustrative example quoting a hunter’s description of his encounter with a
chamois: “We didn’t see it coming – all of a sudden it was there, like a breeze, like
a void (comme un rien), like a dream” (Maldiney 1991:  406). Such an encounter
goes beyond the intention or the project of the chase in which the hunter doubt-
lessly anticipated what would happen: “The sensation of [the hunter’s] emotion goes
beyond the expectation and the meaning of the chase. It is overturning to the extent
in which it overturned the world. The appearance of the chamois does not fit an
already existing configuration: to the contrary, it abolishes it”.5 Of course, this sur-
prising encounter with a chamois is not absolutely incomprehensible because the
hunter may still understand it within the project of the chase. Everything had been
prepared in the world of the chase whose space–time had been determined by the
project of the chase before, all of a sudden, the chamois appeared. Everything had
been prepared except for the appearing of the animal transforming the “there” of
“being-there” (Da-sein). Consequently, there is an experience of surplus to which
the hunter must adapt himself; the emergence of the animal is the point-origin of
a new space–time (Maldiney 1991: 406–408). While the projection is nothing but
the side of the Openness (Ouvert) of appearing turned towards us, the event is the
manifestation of its side turned away from us (Maldiney 2012: 204). The dark side
of the Openness of appearing gives rise to an event in which the Nothingness of
absolute transcendence (non-being) passes into a being, the chamois for example
(see Maldiney 2001: 107). Therefore, the essence of the event is not the appearing
of something but the “impossible possibility of appearing itself” (l’impossible pos-
sibilité de l’apparaître, Maldiney 2012: 282).
Thus, “the real real” (le réel réel) (Maldiney 2001: 93) is an event taking place
in the form of a breach or a crisis in Dasein’s existence (2001: 74) and thereby indi-
cates that existence cannot be reduced to projection (2001: 91); existence cannot
be totalized by the authentic signification of death. In his later thought, Heidegger
himself came to similar conclusions. As Maldiney notes, Heidegger abandoned his
central concept of projection and replaced it with the concept of releasement (Gelas-
senheit) as the appropriate comportment of human beings towards the Openness
of appearing, i.e., comportment which consists in waiting for the opening of “that-
which-regions” (die freie Weite). (Heidegger 1966:  74; see Maldiney 2012:  204,
280f.; Maldiney 1991:  113; Dastur 2016:  42f.) Nonetheless, there is one impor-
tant difference between late Heidegger on the one hand and contemporary French
phenomenology, represented here by Maldiney and Romano, on the other: while

5
 “L’émotion ressentie excède l’attente et le sens de la quête. Elle est bouleversante à la mesure du
monde bouleversé. L’apparition du chamois ne s’inscrit pas dans une configuration préalable qu’au con-
traire elle annule” (Maldiney 1991: 406). I use and slightly modify S. Thoma’s translation of this passage
(Thoma 2014).

13
Personal Uniqueness and Events

contemporary French phenomenology shares with late Heidegger his turn towards
the event (of Being), towards the openness of Dasein’s projection, it still remains
phenomenology in that it attempts to describe structures of events in relation to
individual existence (which constitutes a necessary pole of the phenomenological
correlation). In other words, whereas late Heidegger sought to overcome the insuf-
ficiencies of the transcendental-ontological approach of his Being and Time and to
think the event of Being itself in a “thoughtful poetizing” (denkerische Dichtung)
(see McNeill 2020:  83–99), Maldiney and Romano develop some of Heidegger’s
later ideas with the intention of describing phenomenological structures of human
“evential” existence. I will now focus on what follows from this project for the issue
of personal uniqueness.
Reading both the Heidegger of Being and Time and the later Heidegger, Maldiney
set out to describe phenomenologically (by capturing general structures) how “onti-
cal” events affect Dasein in its authentic existence. His goal is obviously not to over-
come Heidegger, but rather to complete fundamental ontology by an “introduction
of the Self into Dasein” (introduire dans le Dasein le Soi) (1991: 323). As Dasein is
a unique self only in its openness to events (1991: 293), “the introduction of the self
into Dasein” amounts to an addition of new existentials to the Heideggerian ones,
especially Dasein’s faculty or capacity to be open to the radical and unprecedented
alterity of events – Dasein’s “transpassibility” (transpassibilité) (1991: 422–424).
Maldiney and other phenomenologists learned from Heidegger that the self is a con-
crete and historically situated living human being, deeply immersed in the world.
Consequently, if one wants to analyse the self, one should be concerned with our
worldly experiences (see Escudero 2014:  11). However, in contrast to Heidegger,
Maldiney notices that the most real, always singular experience in which a unique
self is born is nothing other than the event: an unexpected or even impossible event
enters into existence and opens up a new world from which Dasein is to understand
itself differently; an event, happening only once, confers onto existence a new sin-
gular sense, reconfigures the totality of inherited possibilities in a personal way,
discloses someone’s factical authentic possibilities; the self rests on how Dasein
accepts (accueille) the events it experiences in its life – how Dasein endures these
events’ invasion into the constancy of its personality (see Maldiney 1991:  322f.,
351f., 422f.).
Thus, the selfhood, that is, what is unique in someone’s personal identity, is noth-
ing constant or identical but it is incessantly in play: “Identity is not ipseity. Ipseity
is the selfhood which is always at play. Identity is already something established
to which we reduce the rest […] It is ipseity that counts: identity means reducing
everything to the same”.6 It is this incessant change of the self which has been over-
shadowed in Heidegger by the “identity” (constancy) of Dasein facing death. But
my identity becomes personal once I sacrifice what is identical (in the sense of my
continuity) in favour of my becoming-other whereby I paradoxically become myself

6
  “L’identité n’est pas l’ipséité. L’ipséité, c’est le soi-même qui est toujours en jeu. L’identité, c’est déjà
quelque chose d’établi, à quoi on ramène le reste […] C’est l’ipséité qui compte: l’identité, c’est tout
ramener au même” (Maldiney 1997: 113; see Maldiney 1991: 351).

13
 P. Prášek

(Maldiney 2001: 92; 1991:71; 1997: 95). The reason is that I am such an existence

that includes the radical alterity of events: to exist means not only to transcend into
the world but, first and foremost, into the Nothingness as a source of unforeseeable
and surprising events I face in my life (Maldiney 2010:  456; see Housset 2002).
That is why my personal identity (as an enumeration of distinctive features allow-
ing to other people to identify myself) cannot be an identity of a thing (Maldiney
1991: 422). My identity is personally unique because I ceaselessly subordinate all
the constants of my life to what I experience for the first time.
This means, though, that Dasein is not only open to the crisis but is also capable
of overcoming it by its own transformation through an integration of a new sense
brought along with an event, through a reconfiguration of its existential possibil-
ities: “To resolve a crisis is to integrate the event through one’s own transforma-
tion”.7 This transformation, taking place spontaneously in a healthy existence, is not
always perceptible. In most cases, it is even unconscious because there are many
types of events including tiny sensations. The transformation is most perceptible
in the cases of rare tragical events. For example, the death of a close person with
which I may be coping for the rest of my life is such an existential crisis followed by
my very slow transformation, by my becoming-other, which is another new existen-
tial termed “transpossibility” (transpossibilité) by Maldiney (1991: 81; see Jacquet
2017: 269–278).
Thus, it seems that the event is an operator of our uniqueness we have been
searching for: Dasein’s uniqueness depends on how it accepts or endures the inva-
sion of the event’s alterity into the constancy of its personality. More precisely,
Dasein’s uniqueness depends on its singular appropriation of the event and not on
the event as such. Most events are impersonal or shareable: even the most private
and intimate event such as one’s serious illness is impersonal insofar as it is shared
by the patient’s family or friends and its experience has to be ascribed not only to
the patient but to all of them. It follows that that which individuates us and creates
unique persons out of us is not the event as such but rather the singular appropriation
of its new sense (see Dastur 2016: 44). But doesn’t that mean that one already has to
be a person in order to personally appropriate the event and become another person
after facing it? Isn’t it something of a vicious circle? How could events be the source
of someone’s uniqueness if they (their singular appropriation) presuppose that one
already is unique? In my opinion, Claude Romano’s principal contribution to the
problem of personal uniqueness (articulated within an existential phenomenology of
events) consists in elucidating these questions: the event is an operator of personal
uniqueness because it occurs against the background of someone’s personal history
made up of all the events this person has experienced in her previous life.

7
  “Résoudre la crise c’est intégrer l’événement en se transformant” (Maldiney 1991: 320).

13
Personal Uniqueness and Events

Selfhood as a Capacity to Change According to Claude Romano

Romano employs the same definition of event as Maldiney: an event is a reversal

of individual existence (Romano 2009b: 16). Unlike Maldiney, he focuses on large
existential transformations.8 He also affirms that Maldiney’s endeavour to complete
Heideggerian ontology is insufficient for the notion of event as radical alterity irre-
ducible to Dasein’s projection requires a reformulation of all the concepts of funda-
mental ontology (2009b: 16f.). That is to say, ontology has to get rid of the remains
of the “subjectivist” perspective: “Being-in-the-world is a relational structure of
Dasein-in-the-world – if one may speak in this way – and not of Dasein taken in
isolation. […] It […] absolutely transcends the subject’s (finite) powers, its projects
and its ‘potentiality-for-Being’, so that it makes no sense here to say that the world
is ‘formed’ by Dasein, or that Dasein is ‘world-forming’ (Weltbildend)” (Romano
2015: 352). Accordingly, existence has to be conceived on the basis of its becoming-
other and thereby not as Dasein but under the term of advenant (an existent that
“advenes” or a “happening subject”). In the remainder of this essay, in which I can-
not do justice to the entire reformulation laid out in Romano’s three books on events
(Romano 2009a, 2014, 2016b), I shall focus on his conception of selfhood (see espe-
cially Romano 2009a:  91–101; Romano 2014:  192–199, 227–239) which deepens
that of Maldiney’s. The advenant is the existent conceived purely on the basis of
what happens to him (see Canullo 2013: 91); as such, an advenant can understand
himself only through an experience, through a new sense introduced into existence
by an event.
What Romano terms the “evential (événemential) concept of selfhood”9 is based
on an original concept of personal history different from biography (understood as
objectively perceived events that can be narrated). The difference resides in the fact
that the narrated histories of someone’s life receive their sense from an explana-
tory context of a causal chain of facts, while personal histories draw their sense
from events incomprehensible in the light of any context: events illuminate every
prior context “backwards,” that is, by the new existential possibilities that they open
(2009a:  91f.; 2014:  229). Although it is impossible, one may, for example, try to
enumerate all the causes of someone’s illness, determine all its phases, collect all
the facts, including psychological reactions of the patient, but the proper “evential”
sense of the illness consists in singular transformation of the patient: in how her
experience with the illness, the way she has endured it, has changed her understand-
ing of the world, of the others and herself (see Romano 2009a:  148f.). To put it

8
  Even though they both define event as an existential transformation, it seems that they do not agree on
what leads to this reversal. While Maldiney considers every single small sensation as an event, Romano
focuses on rare intense transformations through events like the above-mentioned death of a close friend.
Thus, Romano’s books on events lack reflections on what is crucial for Maldiney: on sensation (sentir).
(see Dika et al. 2012: 201).
9
  Inspired by Heidegger, Romano (2009a:  32–39) distinguishes events in their evential (événemential)
and evental (événementiel) sense: while the latter is the usual French adjective referring to events as they
occur in everyday interpretation as innerworldly facts, the former is a neologism referring to their exis-
tential definition.

13
 P. Prášek

another way, an event does not enter into a history but makes a history from which
an existent is to understand himself differently: “selfhood signifies an advenant’s
capacity to be open to events, insofar as these events happen to him unsubstitutably,
the capacity to be implicated himself in what happens, or the capacity to understand
himself from a history and the possibilities it articulates” (2009a: 91f.).
So far, Romano describes selfhood in a fashion very similar to Maldiney, the only
exception being that he introduces an important concept of personal history which
could be decisive in answering the question raised above: How can one already have
one’s personal history and, at the same time, receive one’s personality purely from
events coming from the future?
Insofar as the transformation of existence through an event occurs not as a change
of an innerworldly fact that is anticipated, perceived and then retained, insofar as
existence is not a simple succession of facts or an immanent flow of consciousness,
Romano’s “evential hermeneutics” (herméneutique événementiale) results in a her-
meneutics of temporality. Here he distinguishes three existentials or rather “even-
tials” (événementiaux) related to the temporality of the advenant: in addition to his
“availability” (2014:  171–184) for an event coming from the future (which is an
existential systematically close to Maldiney’s “transpassibility”), and in addition to
his “transformation” (2014: 185–192) in the present in which the advenant relates to
an event (which is an existential close to “transpossibility”), the important existen-
tial is undoubtedly “memory” – it is in this memory that personal history is rooted.
For there to be a singular appropriation of a new event on which an advenant’s
uniqueness is based, this new event must be experienced on the basis of his past
events. Thus, Romano’s phenomenology of the event cannot be described as pure
“evential empiricism” in which the advenant would be born again and again in this
or that event – a new world only emerges in contrast to the old one (see MacKinlay
2005:  178). As Maldiney himself puts it, an event is a transformation of who one
(already) is. Consequently, these past events have to be deposited, so to speak, in
“memory”. Of course, this memory, which is supposed to retain not factual events
we can recall but rather existential possibilities opened by these events, cannot be
a capacity of the human brain or that of the body only. Rather, it is a capacity of a
being-in-the-world whereby past events, such as the event of “learning to walk,” do
not cease to influence our present projects in which we transcend into the world. It
means that new existential possibilities opened by the event of “learning to walk”
are not only acquired skills of my body but also new possibilities of things in the
world: “To say that we are dealing here with a possibility of my body is insufficient.
This possibility is also the possibility of things to lend themselves to being reached
by me in the form of an individual-capable-of-walking; it manifests the very way in
which things offer themselves to my skilful activity. It is the very world to which I
am present that lends itself thus to being apprehended as a world where most things
– not, certainly, the clouds or the stars – lend themselves to being reached by walk-
ing. And yet, walking is not a possibility that was always there in this world, since it
was of course necessary for me to learn it one day” (Romano 2014: 157).
What does all this mean for the issue of personal uniqueness? We learn that every
new history begins with an event such as “learning to walk” but its singular appro-
priation (on which my uniqueness is based) consists in that this event overturns my

13
Personal Uniqueness and Events

preceding histories, that is, the totality of my existential possibilities “conserved” in

memory. Unique appropriation of an event consists in that it overturns the very man-
ner in which I am in the world. Since Romano defines the event as an “epoch-mak-
ing” reversal, he enumerates other transformative events that are not always events
in which a new habit is created: “The death of a close friend, a love encounter, the
sudden appearance of an incurable illness, the birth of a child, a brutal accident, the
discovery of a vocation: all these are epoch-making events that suspend the meaning
of my peripeties, render them suddenly insignificant; and, thereby, open a new chap-
ter in my histories and signify, at the evential level, both the beginning and the end
of a new era” (Romano 2014: 230) Most often, a new event shuts down some his-
tories and makes some possibilities in-actual, like a new love encounter, but some-
times an event may happen in such a way that it develops possibilities opened by
preceding events, like the birth of a child developing the history of love between her
parents (Romano 2014: 231f.).
It is therefore due to memory that past histories are unified and an advenant is
available for a new event that will transform him in a personal way. Thus, Roma-
no’s notion of personal history seems not that far from that of transcendental per-
son (or ego in its fullest “concretion”; see, for example, Husserl 1960: §§32f.; Luft
2005: 10–15; Jacobs 2010: 333–361) in Husserl’s later work: an event opens up a
new dimension in personal history which is expressed in the manner in which one
concretely experiences the surrounding world. However, both Maldiney and Romano
follow in Heidegger’s footsteps in such a way that they move away from Husserl’s
“paradigm of consciousness” and its firm link to the theory of the “unparticipating
observer” which “deworlds” existence, or treats it too theoretically (Luft 2005: 28;
see Housset 2007: 222). Even though Maldiney’s method may be described as sav-
age or spontaneous artistic epoché or reduction (Jacquet 2017: 19), it is clear that the
methodological sense of his phenomenological description is – just as with Romano
– a hermeneutic interpretation through which the existent articulates their changing
existential understanding. The horizon of what appears is happening existence, and
not consciousness. In other words, Maldiney and Romano substitute an investigation
of existence as it is happening (investigation “of things themselves,” one may say)
for Husserl’s scientific ideal of certainty and evidence for consciousness.
Hence, we may say that Romano’s personal history is something like the “tran-
scendental history of Dasein’s personality,” except that the decisive role is played,
unlike in Heidegger’s conception in Being and Time, by events coming from the
unforeseeable future irreducible to Dasein’s relation to death. That is why “evential”
memory – providing the existent’s continuity – is not the only defining feature of
our uniqueness. As they are irreducible to events that have already happened, new
events coming from the future are at least of the same importance as past events.
That is why Romano defines selfhood more generally. Insofar as a new event is char-
acterized by a certain excess irreducible to its relation to past events, the selfhood
has to be defined as the advenant’s capacity to be open to events, to new possibilities
they bring, his capacity in which all the three above-mentioned existentials (mem-
ory, availability, transformation) are implied. It is in this capacity that the very unity
of someone’s personal history and, at the same time, its fundamental mobility are
rooted: “Singularity – that is to say, the set of desires, projections, constants of my

13
 P. Prášek

affective life, which can bring an answer to the question Who…?, and according to
which or in conformity with which I can understand myself as myself – this singu-
larity is defined by its fundamental mobility: it unceasingly transforms itself in light
of the constellations of meaning inaugurated, in each case, by inaugurating events”
(Romano 2014: 233f.).10

Conclusion

Following the phenomenological tradition, the problem of personal identity has here
been understood not in the sense of personal continuity but that of personal individ-
uality related to the process of the continuous transformation of human experience.
I began to elucidate this process by analysing Heidegger’s conception of the self
in Being and Time. Existential analytic has turned out unable to deliver sufficient
conditions for a person’s uniqueness: as it was not the central problem of Being and
Time, Heidegger did not pose the question of what exactly individualizes the first-
person Dasein disclosed via its relation to death. Even though it is quite obvious that
this individualization proceeds through factical “circumstances and events,” these
are ontologically inadequate for understanding what Heidegger himself sees as the
core of Dasein’s personality: its constancy (Selbst-ständigkeit).
That is why the essay dealt with contemporary French phenomenology or, more
specifically, Maldiney and Romano who claim that factical events transform Dasein
in its authentic existence, and focus on describing phenomenological structures of
this happening. The capacity of Dasein to be open to events beyond its projection
might indeed be an answer to the questions Heidegger did not answer: If Dasein’s
possibilities are inherited ones, how is it that, in its anxiety in the face of death,
Dasein is opened to its own individual possibilities? What makes it choose its own
possibilities? What makes Dasein a unique person? In response to these ques-
tions guiding my investigation, both Maldiney and Romano maintain that personal
uniqueness resides in the ability to be implied in what one experiences. We are not
identical (same) persons. We are unique individuals because we constantly reconfig-
ure our existential possibilities in the light of a new sense brought by events: one’s
self rests on how one accepts the events one experiences in life – how one endures
these events’ invasion into the constancy of one’s personality; an unexpected event
enters into existence, opening up a new world from which one is to understand

10
  I have to remark here that Romano’s position is still evolving and it is not absolutely clear what the
relation is between his early theory of selfhood, laid out in his books on the event, and the theory he
holds today. With regard to his habilitation work (Romano 2015), one may say that while “evential self-
hood” is still relevant for Romano’s current theory, he takes into account two other important aspects of
human existence neglected in his books on event, namely “natural” capabilities (corporeality) and cul-
ture. However, although he recently published a book on “being-oneself” (Romano 2019), he shed no
light on the relation between what he designates as three different capabilities (capacités) of the existent,
that is, “‘natural’ capabilities that we share with other living beings, capabilities that depend on a specifi-
cally human culture, [and] capabilities-of-being in the Heideggerian sense” (see Romano 2015: 400).

13
Personal Uniqueness and Events

oneself differently; an event, happening only once, confers onto existence a new sin-
gular sense and discloses one’s factical existential possibilities.
And yet, this process of personal becoming through the invasion of inappropri-
able alterity does not challenge our personal continuity. Romano’s conception of
personal history demonstrates how it is possible that we sometimes quite drastically
change while there is still a strong personal continuity – not only in the sense of
third-person identities (name, sex, nationality, etc.) but in the sense of our deeper
first-person history. It holds true that “the child that I was is certainly not the ‘same’
[…] as the old man I will be” (Romano 2014: 233) but it also holds true that I will
not be an absolutely different person than I was as a child; I would not be this old
man without my personal history, in which my past events, including my childhood,
are sedimented and never cease to affect who I am.
Thus, the idea of personal history confirms that events cannot be the only defin-
ing feature of who one is. Romano’s “memory” points out another feature related to
personal identity, this time not in the sense of uniqueness, but in the sense of con-
tinuity or persistence. For it is something that – to a certain extent – resists change.
But what is that which constitutes a proper “subjective” dimension of evential exist-
ence? What is this “underlying thing” (ὑποκείμενον) which is irreducible to what
happens to it? How is it possible that events form sediments within personal his-
tory? Whatever the answers to these questions may be, they point to the fact that
Maldiney’s and Romano’s “phenomenology of the event” – in which the existent
is conceived on the basis of what happens to him – did not completely abandon the
classical question of personal persistence, instead presupposed it, leaving it largely
unexplained.
Were we to sufficiently account for the problem of who one is, we would have to
examine not only the structures of happening existence but also those of personal
continuity as its necessary background. In doing so, it clearly be the case that the
core of this continuity – flexible enough to allow for the invasion of events with the
power to dismantle or depersonalize subjectivity – can be constituted neither by the
transcendental ego nor by the coherent and constant Dasein. And yet, despite their
destructive power, events surprisingly leave intact one’s personal history that con-
stitutes a new type of personal persistence. However, this investigation goes beyond
the scope of this essay dealing with the issue of personal uniqueness in the phenom-
enology of the event.11 The main reason for this – obviously deliberate – omission
of the issue of personal persistence by Maldiney and Romano is that the problem of
personhood, as I have attempted to demonstrate throughout this text, is associated
not only with someone’s subjective or enduring features but also, and perhaps first
and foremost, with the opposite pole of the phenomenological correlation: with the
transcendent world and events. It is especially in this respect that the phenomenol-
ogy of the event might be of special interest for all projects struggling with the prob-
lem of personal identity.

11
 I deal with these questions in a related study on the subjective continuity of happening existence
according to M. Richir (Prášek 2021).

13
 P. Prášek

Acknowledgements  The author would like to thank Jakub Čapek, Sophie Loidolt  and the  anonymous
reviewers for their valuable comments and efforts towards improving the manuscript.

Funding  The author gratefully acknowledges that this work was supported by the Czech Science Foun-
dation, financing the project “Personal Identity at the Crossroads: Phenomenological, Genealogical, and
Hegelian Perspectives” (GAČR 18-16622S).

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 P. Prášek

Authors and Affiliations

Petr Prášek1,2 
1
Department of Contemporary Continental Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy of Czech
Academy of Sciences, Jilská 1, 110 00 Prague, Czech Republic
2
Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Náměstí Jana Palacha 1/2, 116 38 Prague, Czech Republic

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