This chapter explores the thought of the event in our three thinkers. Notably, there is no question of the event's centrality to the work of both Deleuze and Badiou; whether Lacan has any comparable interest in the event has to date been under-considered. What this chapter therefore does first is examine Lacan's situation, and the places in which his thought touches on something that could be considered under this heading. On the basis of what we might call his fundamental pessimism regarding the chance of an event – which doesn't mean that there is no such thing for him – we then turn to an account of Deleuze's and Badiou's development of a concept of event as central to their thought.

Undoubtedly, a rethinking of ‘the event’ is considered an urgent requirement for the contemporaneousness of contemporary thought. As Justin Clemens and Oliver Feltham put it in an article titled ‘The Thought of Stupefaction; or, Event and Decision as Non-ontological and Pre-political Factors in the Work of Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou’: