the invention event

Never will an invention have taken place, never will it happen, without an inaugurating event. Nor, without an advent, if one understands by this last word, the establishment for the future of a possibility or a power that will remain at the disposal of all. Advent, since the event of an invention, its inaugural act of production, must, once recognised, once legitimated, and counter-signed by a social consensus, according to a system of conventions, be valid for the future. It will only receive its status of invention, moreover, in the measure that this socialisation of the invented thing be guaranteed by a system of conventions that will assure, in the same gesture, its inscription in a communal history, its participation in a culture… 

J. Derrida, Psyché – inventions of the other (trans. A. Pont).