Ereignis

Ereignis is Heidegger's late term for the "event of appropriation" — the happening through which Being itself comes to presence as radically historical, finite, and without any grounding super-subject behind it. As Žižek traces the movement in Less than Nothing, Heidegger's early work in Sein und Zeit still operated within a quasi-transcendental, formal-analytic framework: Dasein's structures (thrownness, care, anxiety, authenticity/inauthenticity) functioned as something like existential a prioris, and the tension between authentic resolve and everyday withdrawal remained internally unresolved. The shift to Ereignis marks the point where those very transcendental horizons are themselves surrendered to radical historicity — Being is no longer a stable horizon of disclosure that Dasein navigates, but an event that sends epochs, withdraws, and arrives without a subject or telos steering it. Ereignis thus names the historicity of historicity itself: not merely that beings appear historically, but that the very conditions under which beings can appear at all are themselves contingent, epochal, and non-necessary.

For Žižek, this move is theoretically decisive because it "thoroughly undermines the idea of Being as a kind of super-subject of history" — and this is precisely where Heidegger diverges from Badiou on the question of ontological difference. Where Badiou (following a broadly mathematical-Platonic line) posits ontological difference through the formal rupture of the event within a consistent multiplicity, Heidegger's Ereignis radicalizes historicity to the point where no meta-ontological position — no position of Absolute Knowing, no dialectical synthesis — can stabilize what "Being" means across epochs. The concept thus sits at the intersection of radical historicity and the critique of any residual subject-philosophy.

In slavoj-zizek-less-than-nothing-hegel-and-the-shadow-of-dialectical-materialism-v, Ereignis appears as a pivotal term in Žižek's comparative mapping of Heidegger, Hegel, and Badiou. It is cross-referenced with Radical Historicity (of which it is the late-Heideggerian definitive formulation), Ontological Difference (which Heidegger and Badiou articulate differently, with Ereignis marking Heidegger's distinctively non-mathematical path), and Dialectics (against which Ereignis is implicitly posed — Ereignis refuses any Hegelian-style sublation or resolution of the tensions internal to Sein und Zeit). It also resonates with Essence as the corpus defines it: just as essence in the Hegelian-Lacanian reading is not a hidden substrate but a retroactive, reflexive effect, Ereignis similarly dissolves any stable, pre-given ground of Being into a contingent historical sending. The concept is adjacent to Absolute Knowing in a critical sense — Ereignis is precisely what forecloses any position of Absolute Knowing about Being, since no super-subject subtends its epochal shifts.

The concept functions in Žižek's argument as a diagnostic instrument rather than an endorsement of Heidegger. By showing that Ereignis resolves the internal tension of Sein und Zeit (authenticity vs. inauthenticity, engagement vs. withdrawal) only by abandoning the quasi-transcendental framework altogether, Žižek positions late Heidegger as a limit-case that illuminates what distinguishes a genuinely materialist account of ontological difference — one that would need to incorporate something like the Lacanian Real and the Badiouian event — from a phenomenological historicism that still lacks a theory of the subject of the event.

Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical MaterialismSlavoj Žižek · 2012 (page unknown)

This radical historicity reaches its definitive formulation with the shift from Being to Ereignis, which thoroughly undermines the idea of Being as a kind of super-subject of history

The phrase "super-subject of history" is theoretically loaded because it names the precise anthropomorphic or metaphysical residue that Ereignis is meant to expunge: the idea that Being functions as a hidden agent or telos organizing historical epochs. By saying Ereignis "thoroughly undermines" this idea, Žižek signals that the move is not a partial correction but a structural dissolution — the very grammar of subject-predicate, ground-consequence, is what gets abandoned, aligning Heidegger's late thought with (while also distinguishing it from) the post-Hegelian critiques of any remaining subject-philosophy.