4 - Event
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
Summary
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.
Back to the event
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’:
We will characterise the situation as a knot of legacies and opacities: Heidegger's thought of the event as Ereignis and language as the house of being; Hegel as delivering the problem of becoming considered in terms of negation; Saussure's conception of language as a diacritical system of differences which provides a scientific model for a systematic thought of systems; Freud's antiphilosophical theorisation of repression and repetition.…
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- Information
- Lacan Deleuze Badiou , pp. 117 - 163Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014