difference, truth, and event | 179
while that generative process is exactly the self-differentiation of each aspect from ‘itself’ and in turn from the other. Thus, each aspect is determined by the other such that it bears a structural, constitutive reference to the other, that is, to that which enables it to be.
This provides a genetic explanation of the domain of propriety based on the logic of difference. In this account, the differentiation of difference from itself can be said to enact appropriation in two essentially correlated senses: (1) it is the origination of a domain of propriety, and (2) since that domain is constituted by nothing other than determinate difference, it is the appropriation – in the sense of taking over – of difference in a determinate, intensive structure. Taking these senses together, appropriation is the self-determination of beyng. It will be worth keeping in mind that this is the same movement that the problematic of truth described. In terms of truth, the structure of distension is the field of openness and the event’s self-appropriation or origination of a domain of propriety is the origination of that openness.
What, then, of Enteignis or expropriation – the event’s origination of a structural alienation from propriety? To make sense (genetically) of this, we can begin by looking at the form it takes in the register of truth. In terms of truth, openness is correlative with concealment. Not only are openness and concealment generated by the same operation of the event, but each is structurally dependent upon the other, from which it gains contrast. We can see this by looking at each in turn. On the one hand, concealment is the event’s self-refusal from the openness it originates and therefore it is defined in contradistinction from openness. On the other, openness is the field of the event’s distension, but it is originated by the event’s concealing withdrawal or refusal, in contradistinction from which openness gains determinacy. In terms of truth, if openness is a domain of propriety, then concealment (the event’s refusal or withdrawal from that propriety) is expropriation – the genesis of a constitutive alienation from propriety. In this case, the event’s self-appropriation as openness entails its simultaneous self-expropriation as concealment. In other words, precisely the same operation by which the event self-determines in the structure of appropriation/openness entails the self-determination of the event in the structure of expropriation/concealment. Each is genetically bound to the other.
But beyng as event is not reducible to the framework of truth; expropriation, like appropriation, must be given a systematic definition in terms of the logic of difference, not simply cast as concealment. How? Beyng as event is self-differentiation – the differentiation of difference from itself. By differing from itself, difference distends. This distension is the origination of a domain of propriety, that is, distension is appropriation.