Do art and philosophy share a concept of experience of this sort, one aiming at an event that is excluded, by definition, from the apparatus of established realities but emerges, as what is excluded, in the space of fact? How can we assert such an emergence without hypostatizing it into a divine advent, an obscure miracle, or a sublime event? By recalling that the break with consistency is always already taking place and hence not an objective counter-figure to what François Jullien (referring to the I Ching: “China’s most ancient book” (F. Juliien)) calls silent transformations, which he regards, in the perspective of Chinese thought, as opposed to the occident’s “mythology of the event” and the “rupture.” Consistency—knowledge, familiarity, reality—exists only as a response to the experience of the unexperienceable, for the latter takes place permanently, like Jullien’s processual transformations (or “gradual becoming,” as François Cheng calls them): in the mode of imperceptible efficiency. That is why Deleuze can present “emergence,” which he opposes—with “new things being formed” and Foucault’s conception of “actuality,” but also with the Aristotelian “energeia” and Nietzsche’s concept of the “untimely”—to metaphysical timelessness, and be it “the timelessness of time,” as a concept describing an alternative to the original eruption of an original truth. We must “catch things where they [are] at work, in the middle,” instead of invoking something absolutely unheard of that is more apt to prevent an event than to be one. What Deleuze calls the insertion of a plane of consistency implies the acknowledgment of what in it retains an inconsistency, what is incommensurable in reality. Art and philosophy remain related to this incommensurability as they allow the subject to have experiences that it cannot integrate, wholly or once and for all, into its model of itself and its reality, and that have yet have long been part of that reality. But how are we to imagine such an experience of the unexperienceable? What does it mean to touch upon chaos? It need not be the “encounter with the face of the Gorgon,” the pathos of elemental terror, of absolute discontinuity and the “revolutionary rupture” Rancière, taking a critical view, associates with Lacan, Deleuze, and Badiou, the encounter with the incommensurable real/ chaos/ event, with what cannot be directly confronted: the Kantian noumenon, the Platonic idea of the good, the fatal sun Icarus veers too close to. Gorgós is the ancient Greek word for dreadful. He who beholds a Gorgon is said to turn to stone. There are things—the thing itself, the thing in itself—we better avoid, things we can approach only through indirections and not without protection. Although they constitute the edge or the impossibility of what can be addressed, of visibility and tactility, of experience or representation, of what the subject can be expected to bear, the subject is drawn to this unbearable. A certain eroticism of terror, of dread and the intolerable seems to be constitutive of occidental culture, whence beauty is—according to Rilke’s First Duino Elegy—“nothing else/ but the beginning of terror, which we are just able to bear” and admire “because it so serenely disdains/ to destroy us.” The fact that the encounter with the Gorgon—the snake-headed monster—cannot be immediate if it is to remain the encounter of a subject with the incommensurable means that an infinitesimal quantum of familiarity with this monstrous entity is the condition of the possibility of its experience, which need not be shock-like, since it is at work, though often unnoticed, in all experience, presenting itself as the very inconspicuous, as the invisible presence of the incommensurable in all of the subject’s impulses.