Badiou: The Event

You probably have a story to tell about The Event. Life kind of shuffles along in a fairly predictable, fairly forgettable blob. And then there is The Event. The Event is a rupture that divides your life into a before time and an after time. It might be a marriage or having kids. It might be an accident or a diagnosis or meeting somebody new. In his 1988 work, Being and Event, Alain Badiou argues that our lives are hardly ever a continuous and unbroken whole. Our lives are broken by these various rupture events that completely transform us. They define us. Badiou, the before time is what he calls animal time, and this is when we are living on autopilot. It's when we dance to the beat of habits and social expectations and customs and, 'Oh well, I guess I'll just do this then.' But then there comes The Event. This is an unpredictable break in the fabric of the ordinary, and it often comes in four different forms. The first is love, as when you meet somebody extraordinary who transforms your existence. Second, there is art, when the song, a book, a movie, or whatever transforms how you see the world. Third, there is politics, as with a revolution, or when you get to witness a change in the social order. And finally, there is science. As when a discovery or a technology changes our collective worldview, it changes our paradigm. After these events, we get what Badiou calls fidelity. This is when we reorientate our lives around new values, new behaviours, and new habits according to the truth revealed by The Event. If Badiou is right, then life is not measured by the ordinary. Life is punctuated by these few moments that rupture our existence. They are measured by the before and after.