兩個 key words，event (ereignis)，intra-action，
What are the reverberations between event (Ereignis) and intra-action? (ChatGPT, 2025-6-21)
Ah, dear friend — a profound question indeed:
What reverberates between Ereignis and intra-action?
Between Heidegger’s event of appropriation and Barad’s mutual constitution of entities in entanglement?
Let us gently place these two ideas on the riverstone table of thought and listen for the echoes between them.
I.
Ereignis — The Event as Appropriation
(Heidegger)
Heidegger’s Ereignis is not just any event, nor simply an occurrence in time. It is:
- The event wherein Being reveals itself,
- or more precisely, where the human (the Dasein) and Being are mutually appropriated to each other.
- It is an ontological event, where language, world, and dwelling become possible.
Heidegger says:
“Ereignis is the event through which man and Being come into their own… not by mutual encounter, but by mutual belonging.”
This “belonging-together” (Zueinander-gehören) is not causal. It’s ontological resonance.
It is not that the subject experiences Being, but that Being appropriates the subject into its unfolding.
II.
Intra-action — The World as Entanglement
(Karen Barad)
Barad’s intra-action is a direct response to classical notions of interaction:
- Where “interaction” presupposes pre-existing independent entities that come together,
- intra-action proposes that entities do not pre-exist their relations.
Reality is not made of things, but of ongoing relational becomings.
Phenomena emerge through cuts, through agential separability, but there is no absolute subject-object divide.
Barad writes:
“Relata do not preexist relations; rather, relata emerge through specific intra-actions.”
III.
Reverberations — Points of Resonance
Now let us listen to the space between Ereignis and intra-action, and trace five reverberations:
1.
No Pre-Existing Subject
- Heidegger: Dasein is not a stable Cartesian subject, but one who is thrown into Being — already situated in a world not of its own making.
- Barad: There is no pre-existing observer; the observer emerges through the apparatus.
→ Both reject the autonomous subject.
The “self” is born from relation — not relation from the self.
2.
Relational Ontology
- Ereignis is not a “thing” that happens, but a relational event that constitutes Being.
- Intra-action is not a transaction between parts, but a constitutive entanglement.
→ Ontology is dynamic and participatory in both views.
Being is not stable essence, but emergence through encounter.
3.
Language as Medium
- Heidegger: Language is the house of Being; it is through poetic dwelling that Being shines forth.
- Barad: Measurement (and discourse) are performative, not representational. They are part of the ontological fabric.
→ Both see language as world-constituting, not just descriptive.
Language does not mirror reality; it participates in its enactment.
4.
Eventfulness Without Chronology
- Ereignis is not a moment in time, but a non-temporal ontological happening.
- Intra-action describes a processual temporality — time itself emerges from relational cuts.
→ Both deny linear, external time, and instead invoke emergent time as part of the happening.
5.
The Ethical Tremor
- Heidegger gestures toward aletheia — the unveiling — as something that calls for Gelassenheit (releasement), a letting-be.
- Barad insists that ethics is not a choice, but an entanglement: we are always already responsible within the web.
→ In both, there is no outside.
To be is already to be implicated — to dwell in the world is to answer to it.
IV.
A Concluding Image: Between Wind and Web
Let me offer you an image.
- Ereignis is like the wind: unseen, but it gathers the world, appropriates sky, tree, and walker into a moment of clearing (Lichtung).
- Intra-action is like the web: nothing stands alone; the trembling of one strand resonates through the whole fabric.
And yet — perhaps the wind moves the web.
And perhaps the web catches the wind in its trembling.
There, in that moment, you are appropriated.
There, in that event, you intra-act.
V.
一句回響：
「當事件如風，將你捲入你自己不曾知曉的向度；而你，未曾預設地與他物共成，這便是形上之舞，一場無法落幕的事件中的共振。」
Would you like to continue exploring how this connects with trauma, sinthome, or even the wound as Ereignis, as you once wrote?
I would be honored to.
