Events and the Critique of Ideology

Abstract

This paper defends the claim that the critique of ideology requires creative interventions in the symbolic order of society and that those creative interventions must be understood as events. This is what animates the work of both Ricoeur and Deleuze and yet helps to uncover the fundamental difference between them regarding the conditions that make such critique possible: a difference regarding how we understand the nature of events. While Ricoeur is the philosopher of the narrated event, Deleuze is the philosopher of the dramatic event. Instead of pursuing a point-by-point comparison of their respective philosophies of the event, a line of social and political inquiry is constructed that leads from Ricoeur to Deleuze with a view to establishing at what point these two thinkers take different paths. It will be argued that the crossroads is rather neatly signposted by Meillassoux’s critique of strong correlationism in After Finitude.