To address this question, we need to take a further look at the word under investigation here: being. Or rather, perhaps, Sein. For the word being, as a present participle turned substantive, already takes us further in the direction which the German Sein only suggests, resisting it a bit more, tarrying a while longer this side of metaphysics, before allowing it to slip into representation. Before being a noun, before having been reified by the inevitable and long since legitimized impulse of representational thought, Sein is a verb. And an infinitive. And verbs, particularly in the infinitive, refer to events, first and foremost. They refer to those events that are subject-less, those events to which belongs a certain anonymity or, rather, a certain preindividuality, events, in other words, that refer to a certain happening, to something of which we can say that it is taking place, without its taking place being the effect or the doing of any thing or agent—an event, in other words, which is not an accident of a substance. Thus, being as event must be distinguished not only from ousia and quidditas, from essence in its classical determination, but also from the sense of accidens complicit with such a determination, in which an accident is seen as something that happens to a pregiven substance, a substance given entirely independently of the movement of accident to which it is subjected. The thinking of being as event will require a reversal of this order, so that substances themselves will come to be seen as happenings, as accidents, as it were, of a primordial and forever recurring event, which itself cannot be assimilated with another more primordial and superior form of substantiality. Examples of pure events, with which the event of being would have some affinity, would be revealed in propositions such as: "it is raining," "it is snowing," "es regnet," "llueve," "piove," Crh ("it is necessary"), etc. In each case, the verb is pointing purely to that which is taking place or rather to the taking place or the happening itself, which is entirely indissociable from that which is actually taking place. There is no subject withdrawn from or in excess of the taking place: the taking place is itself the subject: in "es regnet," or "it rains," the "es" or the "it" is not so much the subject of the verb as the doubling or the underlying of the verb-event (Spanish and Italian, Latin and Ancient Greek do not even have recourse to such semblances of subject). Here, the subject is the verb, and the verb is pure event. Such, then, is the way in which being itself must be heard and experienced: as an event, as something that is happening or taking place, yet not on the basis of something other than itself—a pure event, a subject-event. As Heidegger himself puts it, after the series of transformations to which the Seinsfrage is submitted in the course of nearly fifty years: "es gibt Sein," "das Sein west," "das Ereignis ereignet," etc. In this regard, it is no different from the event "rain." And yet, in another sense, it is quite different from the event "rain," insofar as it designates not so much a particular event, an event alongside other events, but the event of all events, or better said perhaps, the eventness or eventuality of all events. To address the question regarding the type of discourse that is adequate to being, we need to go one step further and raise the question regarding the kind of question that is suited to events and to the event of being in particular. For this question can evidently not be that question that so decisively shaped the fate of philosophy, the question with which, in the face of a thing or an object, philosophical inquiry says we must begin: quid est?, what is it? Indeed, this question, the question that will have guided metaphysics throughout its history, is such as to point inevitably and from the outset in the direction of essences. It is a question that is adapted to a certain interpretation of being as ousia, and of ousia as upokeimenon, in other words, as essence-substance. And, as Heidegger will have shown, this type of inquiry inevitably and lamentably points to what is most general and most common amongst beings, and so to something ultimately seen as vague and empty, "general" in the most vacuous sense of the term. Events escape the grasp of metaphysics, for they are without essence: their very essence is to not obey the law of essence understood as quiddity. Now if Heidegger does indeed deploy the classical determination of essence (Wesen) anew, rescuing it from its metaphysical appropriation, it is only at the cost of a formidable and daring transformation that equates the operation of essence with movement as such, verbalizing it, de-reifying it, allowing it to coincide with the very movement of unfolding, with being as such; it is only, and ironically, to overturn the notion of essence so that, from being the first and highest substance, it becomes a pure event, being as becoming or happening. Thus, the essence of a flower is not its eidoV, but its flowering, much in the same sense in which, in Perrault’s tale, the grass is grasped in its essence as "greening" (verdoyer) and the summer sun as "dusting" (poudroyer). The essence of being itself is to be; it is the movement of essence as such: wesen. It is, in other words, the unfolding that is proper to the thing in its thinging, the event or the eventing of the thing. It is, if you prefer, the event of all events or, more specifically still, the eventfulness of every event or Wesen. Essences, on the other hand, at least in their classical formulation as quiddity, are equated with the being of a thing precisely as the negation of the becoming or the eventuality that is implicated in the thing, which is then relegated to the status of contingency, accidentality.

¶ 2:31 PM