Event: A Philosophical Journey through a Concept

[Slavoj Zizek]'s book, one of six he published in English in 2014, is the livelier of the two: the sheer energy with which the author sends the argument hurtling forward makes for a fun, and fast, reading experience. Zizek frames his approach in almost the broadest possible terms: "Already with this approximate definition, we find ourselves at the very heart of philosophy," an exploration of which will invariably "culminate in some notion of Event" (5-6). From this promising, if bombastic, beginning, the ride itself cannot help be something of a letdown. Readers familiar with Zizek's work will recognize many of his main lines of argumentation: regular recourse to Marx, a recurring ideology critique, and many, many cinematic illustrations. The breadth of reference in a book of this length may obscure the fact that the core argument of the book is in fact quite simple. An event, in Zizek's account, is "an effect which exceeds its causes" (6). But such a definition is in fact unhelpful, and so one must encounter the event to define it: "The only appropriate solution is thus to approach events in an evental way" (7), and the subway conceit is born. Here is the overview of the book: "Let us then imagine that we are on a subway trip with many stops and connections, with each stop standing for a putative definition of event." He goes on to enumerate the stops: the first is "a change or disintegration of the frame through which reality appears to us," the second "a religious Fall," the third "the breaking of symmetry," the fourth "Buddhist Enlightenment" and so on via encounters with self-knowledge, encounters with absolute truth, and trauma, until "the rise of a new 'Master-Signifier,' a signifier which structures an entire field of meaning; the experience of the pure flow of (non)sense; a radical political rupture; and the undoing of an evental achievement" (7-8).