Philosophy Compass 7/8 (2012): 507–516, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2012.00498.

Deleuze and Badiou on the Nature of Events

Brent Adkins*
Roanoke College

Abstract
While any number of topics would serve to compare and contrast Deleuze and Badiou, this article
will focus on the event. Focusing on the event serves several purposes. First, it provides a vantage
point from which to elucidate a number of key topics in both philosophers. Second, while
Badiou’s most recent work is already organized around his conception of the event, Deleuze’s
discussion of the event is more diffuse. Thus, a discussion of the event in Deleuze will serve as
heuristic to relate several of Deleuze’s (Deleuze and Guattari’s) texts. Finally, focusing on a single
issue will clarify what is at stake in each conception of the event.

1. Introduction
In 1970 Alain Badiou and Judith Miller created a course at the recently founded Univer-
sité Paris VIII – Vincennes in order to scrutinize the political content of other courses in
the philosophy department. Gilles Deleuze, along with other members of the philosophy
faculty such as Jean-François Lyotard were targets of Badiou’s ‘‘brigade,’’ and they would
often interrupt Deleuze’s class and not allow him to finish. Alain Roger, one of Deleuze’s
students, reported that on one ‘‘inspection’’ day Deleuze said, ‘‘I’ve got to go because
I’ve got Badiou’s gang coming’’ (qtd. in Dosse, 367). Badiou himself once intervened in
one of Deleuze’s classes (Badiou, Deleuze 2). Badiou’s attempts to incite Deleuze reached
their culmination in 1977 when Badiou published two articles in the Maoist journal
Cahier Yenan denouncing Anti-Oedipus and the recently published Rhizome, which would
become the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus. In the articles Badiou accuses Deleuze
of being an enemy of the people and a proto-fascist. Depsite these provocations, Deleuze
seems never to have retaliated or even engaged with those interrupting his class. As the
years passed at Vincennes and the Maoist influence faded, Badiou also seems to have soft-
ened somewhat toward Deleuze. Badiou wrote a positive review of Deleuze’s The Fold,
and upon the publication of Badiou’s Being and Event in 1988, Badiou initiated an
exchange of letters in an attempt to compare and differentiate their views. Unfortunately,
at the end of their correspondence Deleuze refused to publish it and destroyed his copies
of it. While Badiou is in possession of the entire correspondence he cannot publish it
either. Two years after Deleuze’s death Badiou wrote his book on Deleuze, which he
described as ‘‘one last, long posthumous letter’’ in which he would complete ‘‘a conflic-
tual friendship that, in a certain sense, had never taken place’’ (Badiou, Deleuze 6).
What, though, is at stake in this conflictual friendship that never took place? For
Badiou the answer is clear. Deleuze remains his opponent, perhaps his only opponent.
Badiou writes, ‘‘I gradually became aware [after the publication of Being and Event] that,
in developing an ontology of the multiple, it was vis-à-vis Deleuze and no one else that
I was positioning my endeavor’’ (Deleuze 3). Even in his recent Logics of Worlds Badiou
devotes an entire chapter to Deleuze that takes the form of a point by point refutation of

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508 Deleuze and Badiou on the Nature of Events

Deleuze’s concept of the event (381–7). At the same time, however, Deleuze was gener-
ally opposed to the idea of philosophy as agonistic contest. A ‘‘conversation between
friends has never produced a single concept’’ (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?
6).1 So, while Badiou consistently distinguishes himself from Deleuze and frequently
refers to him in his writings, Deleuze only refers to Badiou once in his last work with
Guattari, What is Philosophy? (151–3). Even here, the discussion of Badiou does not take
the form of a confrontation, but an illustration (albeit negative) of the relation between
philosophy and science, in particular the relation between functions and concepts.2
As a result of the asymmetrical nature of the relation between Deleuze and Badiou,
responses to Badiou’s criticisms of Deleuze have been left in the hands of commentators.
While any number of topics would serve to compare and contrast Deleuze and Badiou,
this article will focus on the event. Focusing on the event serves several purposes. First, it
provides a vantage point from which to elucidate a number of key topics in both philoso-
phers. Second, while Badiou’s most recent work is already organized around his concep-
tion of the event, Deleuze’s discussion of events is more diffuse. Thus, a discussion of
events in Deleuze will serve as heuristic to relate several of Deleuze’s (Deleuze and
Guattari’s) texts.3 Finally, focusing on a single issue will clarify what is at stake in each
conception of the event.

2. Deleuze and Events

The three primary texts in which Deleuze explicitly discusses events are The Logic of
Sense, The Fold, and What is Philosophy? However, there are a myriad of related terms
such as singularity, multiplicity, concept, difference, repetition, the new, etc., which
attempt to explicate the same idea. One way we might think about this is the difference
between the singular and the ordinary in mathematics. Notice, first of all, that in mathe-
matics the singular is not opposed to the universal, as it is in traditional philosophy, but
to the ordinary. In this use of the term singular, a singular point is where ‘‘something
(new) happens.’’ An ordinary point, though, is where ‘‘nothing (new) happens.’’ If we
take the geometric figure of a square as an example, the four corners are singularities, the
points at which ‘‘something happens.’’ Between the corners, however, are an infinity of
ordinary points where ‘‘nothing happens.’’ The singular point at which something
happens is what Deleuze refers to as an event (Difference and Repetition, 189).4
The issue becomes somewhat more complicated, though, as we begin to think about
things that are more complex than squares. Not only will it become more difficult to tell
the difference between the singular and the ordinary, but the relation between the singu-
lar and the ordinary will be undergoing continual change. Furthermore, as we imagine
the interaction among things the constant flux of the singular and the ordinary will only
increase. For example, an audience in a movie theater is already a highly complex combi-
nation of the ordinary and the singular, what Deleuze would call a multiplicity of multi-
plicities, which is further engaged with the additional combination of the ordinary and
singular that is the movie (itself a multiplicity of multiplicities). Let’s suppose two things:
first, that the movie is a comedy, and second that some of the audience members have
seen it before. When the first big laugh of the movie comes the audience members who
haven’t seen the movie will shift from an ordinary physiological and psychological state
to a singular one. They will laugh. Those who have seen it before, though, are less likely
to laugh, since they won’t be caught by surprise by what made them laugh the first time.
They might, however, smile and nod as they enjoy everyone around them laughing.
Thus, while some members of the audience would be singularities, places where

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 Deleuze and Badiou on the Nature of Events 509

something (new) happens, others would remain ordinary, places where nothing (new)
happens. The entire movie experience could be plotted as the rising and falling of physio-
logical and psychological intensities. Each point that marks the change in direction (from
rising to falling or vice versa) is an event for Deleuze.
Thinking in terms of rising and falling intensities brings us to the heart of Deleuze’s
ontology. Deleuze’s ontology is not populated by subjects, objects, substances, or essences
but zones of intensity in constant flux. As these zones of intensity interact with other
zones of intensity a threshold may be reached and the intensity may reach a higher or
lower degree. The point of change in an intensity is an event for Deleuze. Deleuze and
his commentators have used numerous examples to illustrate what Deleuze has in mind
here. Water reaching its freezing or boiling point is a change in degree of intensity that
has extensive effects, a liquid becoming solid or gas. An egg is riddled with zones of inten-
sity some of which upon encountering different enzymes become an eye or a beak or a
foot. Thus, the difference in intensities accounts for the articulation of a process into dis-
crete, extensive components. The mistake of some ontologies has been to treat these dis-
crete, extensive components as if they were primary rather than derivative, and as a result
fail to understand events.5
Intensities, however, have a double articulation in Deleuze’s philosophy, the virtual
and the actual. As all commentators on Deleuze point out, the virtual-actual dyad is not
the possible-real dyad. The possible-real dyad is dependent on a traditional, Platonic con-
ception of essence, which determines what is possible for an entity, and existence, which
narrows these possibilities to those that are realized. In contrast to this, for Deleuze both
the virtual and the actual are real, because both are articulations of intensities. The virtual
is the abstract articulation of the differential relation among ordinary and singular points.
This differential relation can be actualized in numerous ways, not as a move from the
possible to the real, or even from the abstract to the concrete, but as an expression of a
particular differential relation. This is the meaning of Deleuze’s claim that a plow horse
has more in common with an ox than a race horse (Deleuze, Spinoza 124). The differen-
tial relations of an ox and a plow horse are much more similar to each other than either
is to a race horse. Crucially, though, both the differential relation and its expression are
equally real (Smith, ‘‘Conditions of the New’’ 5–8).6
A discussion of events and intensities, however, does not quite answer the question
we’re pursuing. The issue is not events, but the Event. Deleuze’s concern with the Event
arises out of the Stoic injunction to make oneself worthy of what happens to us that he
explores in The Logic of Sense. This injunction resonates with Deleuze’s readings of Nietz-
sche on the Eternal Return and Blanchot on the two deaths. Both of these readings are
taken up in a slightly different way in Anti-Oedipus (329–30; Adkins, Death and Desire
170–91). What we learn about the Event is in Nietzschean terms to affirm all of life as it
is, rather than allowing oneself to be consumed by the ressentiment that comes from wish-
ing life could be otherwise. ‘‘It is in this sense that the Amor fati is one with the struggle
of free men’’ (Logic of Sense 149). In order to understand the distinction between events
and the Event Deleuze articulates two competing notions of time, Chronos and Aion, in
The Logic of Sense:
We have seen that past, present, and future were not at all three parts of a single temporality,
but that they rather formed two readings of time, each one of which is complete and excludes
the other: on one hand, the always limited present, which measures the action of bodies as
causes and the state of their mixtures in depth (Chronos); on the other, the essentially unlimited
past and future, which gather incorporeal events, at the surface, as effects (Aion). (61)

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510 Deleuze and Badiou on the Nature of Events

Each reading of time can be seen as incorporating the other. The past and future can be
seen as absorbed with an infinite present (Chronos), or the present can be seen as infi-
nitely subdivided by past and future. Both events and the Event belong for Deleuze to
the Aion. Individual events are the continuous and infinite subdivisions of Chronos. The
Event, however, is the interconnection of all of these individual events with all other
individual events. Every singular point where ‘‘something happens’’ is related to every
other singular point where ‘‘something happens.’’ ‘‘Each event is adequate to the entire
Aion; each event communicates with all others, and they all form one and the same
Event, an event of the Aion where they have an eternal truth.’’ 7
What is this one and same Event formed by events and in which they have an eternal
truth? The temptation here is to understand this through some kind of transcendent the-
ology. However, Deleuze is explicit that the God of transcendent theology is the God of
infinite depth that absorbs past and future, the eternal now, Chronos, while Aion is the
contre-dieu, the counter-actualization of Chronos, the surface, the infinite subdivision of
Chronos. What is being affirmed in Deleuze’s theory of the Event, then is not oneness
but univocity, not sameness but difference. ‘‘It occurs, therefore, as a unique event for
everything that happens to the most diverse things, Eventum tantum for all events, the ulti-
mate form for all of the forms which remain disjointed in it, but which bring about the
resonance and the ramification of their disjunction’’ (Logic of Sense 179). There are only
intensities. This is Deleuze’s univocity. But, intensities can only be such by differing with
one another. Changes in intensities are events. The Event is the differential structure in
which all events are related to each other, the form of difference itself.

3. Badiou and the Event

In marked contrast to Deleuze’s diffuse treatment of the event, Badiou has made analysis
and explanation of the event his primary focus, especially since the publication in 1988 of
his landmark work Being and Event. While one can organize a reading of Deleuze around
the event, there are numerous other plausible ways to explain Deleuze’s philosophy. For
Badiou, however, it would be impossible to give an account of his work without
explaining what he means by event. Of course, explaining the event also requires the
explanation of related and opposing terms such as being, the state of the situation, the
subject, and fidelity. While we will not be able to work through the details of Badiou’s
proofs, we can get a sense of Badiou’s position and how it differs from Deleuze’s.
Badiou claims that, ‘‘Our entire artifice is based on the distinction between belonging
and inclusion’’ (Being and Event 97). Badiou takes up belonging and inclusion from math-
ematical set theory, and this distinction allows us to distinguish what he calls ‘‘the most
primitive concepts of any experience whatsoever’’ (97). Belonging is the relation that ele-
ments have to their sets, while inclusion is the relation that subsets have to their sets.
Thus, in the first diagram below B is an element of A. B belongs to A (B 2 A). In the
second diagram, though, the set C is a subset of A and therefore is included in A (CCA).
The three primitive concepts generated by belonging and inclusion describe the three
logical combinations of belonging and inclusion that are possible. The first possibility is
something that both belongs and is included. This generates the concept of the normal.
The second possibility is something that belongs but is not included. This is the singular for
Badiou. Finally, anything that is included but does not belong, Badiou calls the excrescent.
While this seems very abstract and formal, it is actually a very powerful way to think
about politics. Let’s take the United States at the time of its founding. In this case, the
US is the set. Is there a group of people who belong to the set as elements and also form

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 Deleuze and Badiou on the Nature of Events 511

A A

*B
C

Diagram 1 Diagram 2

a subset that’s included in the set? That is, who is ‘‘normal’’ in the early US? The citizen
is normal. The citizen belongs and is included, or as Badiou would say, the citizen is pre-
sented and represented in the early US Is there anyone who belongs to the US but is not
a citizen? Certainly. Women, slaves, and men who do not own property are all people
who belong but are not included. They are singular. The final primitive concept, excres-
cence is a little trickier. Here we have to imagine something that is included but does
not belong. A group of spies is the first thing that comes to mind. Spies actually work for
the government and so are included. However, the spies’ loyalties must remain secret and
so do not belong. If we imagine a colonial CIA, they can only get information insofar as
they appear to be loyal to the British. They cannot belong to the US, or their spying
becomes impossible (Hallward, Badiou 99).
The next distinction we need in place to explain Badiou’s concept of the event is
between the situation and the state of the situation. The situation is what is presented.
For Badiou this is simply the multiple that can be counted as belonging to the situation
(‘‘world’’ in Logics of Worlds). If we ask the question, what is the population of the
United States? The way to answer this question is to count the number of people in the
United States. In a census it is the people that count, or as Badiou would say ‘‘count as
one.’’ What we don’t count in a census, though, are animals. That is, in this situation
animals are not presented. They do not count. The state of the situation is the metastruc-
ture that guarantees the structure of the situation. In our example, what guarantees that
there is a United States that presents elements who count? The government of the
United States, that doubling metastructure that re-counts and re-presents the parts of the
situation. Of course, Badiou explicitly chooses to call this the ‘‘state’’ of the situation
because of a ‘‘metaphorical affinity’’ between set theory and politics (Being and Event 95).
As we saw above with the three primitive concepts of the normal, the singular, and
the excrescent, gaps can arise between the situation and the state of the situation. It is out
of these gaps that the Event can arise. The structure of the situation and the metastructure
of the state of the situation select some multiple and make it both presentable and repre-
sentable. However, of necessity there will be elements or parts of the multiple that are
either unpresentable or unrepresentable. In such a situation presenting these elements or
representing these parts is unthinkable. The Event is the thinking of the unthinkable.
Now while this may sound like an unwarranted leap into mysticism, as usual for Badiou,
the claim is very concrete. What was unthinkable for the founders of the United States?
The idea that everyone should vote, even women or men who did not own property,
this was unthinkable, laughable even. However, as more people became convinced that
gender should not be a determining factor in fully participating in governance, a move-
ment began to coalesce around the idea of women’s suffrage. In this case the goal of the

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512 Deleuze and Badiou on the Nature of Events

movement was to normalize the singular, take an element that belonged to the United
States and make it also included in the United States, make the unrepresented repre-
sented. This process is what Badiou calls an event (Badiou, St. Paul 19–23).
The event makes a claim to universality and thus forces people to make a decision.
Thus, in the case of women’s suffrage the claim to universality lying beneath it is: ‘‘All
people are equal.’’ Such a claim divides the world in half. There can be no intermediary
positions. Either all people are equal, or they are not. If one decides that all people are
equal then one will fight to transform the state of the situation such that all people are
represented equally. Acting on the basis of such a decision is what Badiou calls fidelity to
the event. Furthermore, it is fidelity to the event that constitutes subjectivity. Here in the
case of the political subject, Badiou is not thinking of the constitution of individual polit-
ical subjects, but the movement as whole as a subject. It is the movement as a whole that
acts, militates for change, and actually brings change about (Badiou, Ethics 95–6).
Badiou’s account of the nature of an event is thus an account of how something new
comes into the world. It is unpredictable because by definition an event cannot be
accounted for by the state of the situation, which is the same as saying the event does
not exist. However, an event has effects. It constitutes subjects as those who are faithful
to some particular event.

4. The Debate
In addition to Badiou’s own criticisms of Deleuze there have been commentators who
have amplified Badiou’s criticisms, in particular Peter Hallward and Slavoj Žižek. To a
lesser extent, but following in the wake Deleuze’s and Badiou’s influence and the rise of
the new materialism, thinkers such as Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier have sought
to distinguish themselves from both Badiou and Deleuze.8
There are, of course, commentators who simply seek to compare Deleuze and Badiou
without defending or amplifying either position. For example, James Williams writes a
particularly helpful article in which he not only compares and contrasts Deleuze and
Badiou on the event, but places their debate in the context of a similar debate going on
in analytic philosophy between Donald Davidson and Jaegwon Kim. Williams does two
things that are quite useful. First he lists, straightforwardly, the similarities and differences
between Badiou’s and Deleuze’s conceptions of the event:
Similarities:

1. The event does not have a well-defined spatio-temporal location.

2. The event does not happen to things or to persons, but rather happens through them.
3. Events are politically and ethically of the highest significance.
4. Relations between events are not causal.
5. The concept of genesis is central to the concept of the event.

Differences:

Badiou Deleuze

Events are rare Events are ubiquitous

Events have no well-defined spatio- temporal Events have no well-defined spatio- temporal
location because they cannot be recognized location because they are infinitely extended
from within a given established state and ongoing processes

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 Deleuze and Badiou on the Nature of Events 513

The event has an important relation
philosophical to truth
Logical and subject-led sets of actions posit and
then follow from an event.
Events organize and give order to political
experimentation and ethical behavior
Relations between events are a matter many of
logical implications punctuated by free
decisions
The event is prior to any conception of truth
Events do not generate relations of logical
entailment
Events are occasions for creative transformation
in political and ethical action
Relations between events are a matter of
different kinds of interdependent
determinations (Williams 101–2)

As you can see, the lists here exceed what I was able to discuss in this essay. Neverthe-
less, the lists clear away a great deal of clutter surrounding the issue. The second useful
thing that Williams does in the essay is that he uses a John Cheever short story and then
gives a Deleuzian and Badiouian reading of the story.
The debate between Deleuze and Badiou obviously concerns the list of differences
here. Not surprisingly, those commentators defending Deleuze have reached a consensus
that Badiou misreads Deleuze on several key points. Chief among these is that Badiou
misunderstands what Deleuze means by univocity, and in fact conflates univocity with
oneness (May, 67–76).9 Others argue that Badiou either misunderstands Spinoza, or mini-
mally misunderstands Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza (Bell, 399–425).10 This criticism has
numerous parallel iterations in which ‘‘Spinoza’’ is replaced by any other group or figure
that Deleuze has written on, Stoics, Nietzsche, Kant, etc. Another issue on which Dele-
uze commentators think that Badiou misreads Deleuze is on the issue of mathematics.
For the most part Deleuze takes his mathematical inspiration from differential calculus,
whereas Badiou takes his inspiration from set theory, particularly the work of Georg
Cantor (Smith, ‘‘Mathematics,’’ 411–49).11 Of course, the suggestion here is not that
there are no valid criticisms of Deleuze, but simply that for the most part commentators
on Deleuze do not find Badiou’s criticisms compelling, but see Badiou using Deleuze as
a prop to explain his own positions.
On the other side of the debate, of those who take Badiou’s critique of Deleuze to be
well-founded, Hallward’s Out of this World has been the most influential. For Hallward it
is not so much the explicit content of Badiou’s critique that animates his work as it is the
suspicion that Badiou raises that there is something transcendent and idealistic lurking at
the core of Deleuze’s philosophy. Žižek also raises this point in his ‘‘dialogue’’ with the
theologian John Milbank in The Monstrosity of Christ. The concern in all of these criticisms
is that Deleuze’s commitments, at best, preclude the possibility of political action and rein-
force the status quo in a kind of aesthetic quietism, or, at worst, actively destroy political
engagement because Deleuze seeks something beyond this world (Hallward, Out of this
World, 162–4) or Deleuze is simply the triumph of capitalism (Žižek, Organs 183–7).

5. Conclusion
There is no question that pursuing ‘‘the event’’ in Deleuze and Badiou provides insight into
both thinkers. However, insofar as Badiou is explicitly focused on the event, it seems that
more insight is gained here. Deleuze’s work is promiscuous in terms of generating new
vocabularies that overlap with previous vocabularies but the overlap is never perfect and
resists stabilization through anchoring in a single term like ‘‘event.’’ The rise in Badiou’s
popularity coupled with his insistence on distinguishing himself from Deleuze has made this
anchoring (however tentative) necessary from, at the very least, a pedagogical standpoint.

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Beyond the pedagogical value of comparing Deleuze and Badiou, though, there is a crucial
way that they differ that goes to the heart of both. It is the question of the new.
How does something different arise, whether in the political, scientific, artistic, erotic,
or philosophical arenas? How is a revolution possible? How is falling in love possible? Is
there anything new under the sun? For Badiou the new must be ex nihilo, miraculous, in
order to be new. Otherwise, it is not an event but a retrenchment of the state of the situ-
ation. For Deleuze, the bar is not so high. Any and every change in intensity is some-
thing new, a point at which difference is produced. Furthermore, every difference is
connected to every other difference as a differential structure. However, this rather mun-
dane view of the new still requires an account. From this perspective it is easy to see
why Badiou is so vehemently opposed to Deleuze. Deleuze’s account of the new threat-
ens to destroy what is new in Badiou’s thought. By the same token, of course, Badiou’s
account of the new relegates Deleuze’s to the repetition of the status quo, which is why
Badiou argues that Deleuze is politically disengaged. Each theory is both too big and too
small for the other theory. Each theory both subsumes and is subsumed by the other. We
are left with an aporia that has been one of the defining events in Continental philosophy
for the past fifteen years.

Short Biography
Brent Adkins is an Associate Professor of Philosophy. His primary interests are 19th and
20th Century European philosophy, Modern Philosophy, and politics. His most recent
books are Death and Desire in Hegel, Heidegger and Deleuze (2007) and True Freedom:
Spinoza’s Practical Philosophy (2009). He is currently working on a book entitled Rethink-
ing Philosophy & Theology with Deleuze: The Pursuit of Immanence and Imminence (2013). He
has published numerous articles in journals such as Kantian Review, International Philosophi-
cal Quarterly, and Philosophy Today. Brent received his BTh from Ozark Christian College,
his M.Phil. from the Institute for Christian Studies, and Ph.D. from Loyola University
Chicago.

Notes
* Correspondence: Department of Religion and Philosophy, Roanoke College, 221 College Lane, Salem, Virginia
24153, USA. Email: adkins@roanoke.edu.

1
At the same time, however, Deleuze was not shy about naming enemies. In Dialogues he writes, ‘‘What I
detested most was Hegelianism and dialectics. My book on Kant’s different; I like it. I did it as a book about an
enemy…’’ (6). With Badiou, Deleuze adopted the strategy of avoidance instead of confrontation.
2
From Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective Badiou has conflated the task of philosophy (i.e., the creation of con-
cepts) with the task of science (i.e., establishing functions). They, furthermore, argue that science (even Cantor’s set
theory) arrests infinity rather than giving it consistency, as philosophy does (What is Philosophy? 120–1).
3
Indeed, as we will see below, the issue is further complicated by the fact that Deleuze distinguishes between
‘‘events’’ and ‘‘the Event.’’
4
The illustration of the event using geometric figures is not without its problems. As Henri Bergson (one of Dele-
uze’s important inspirations) argues in Time and Free Will, duration is often confused with its spatial representation.
Duration is unextended and thus cannot be seen as a (spatial) juxtaposition of parts. So, while the example of the
square clearly illustrates the relation between the singular and the ordinary, it does so as a spatial relation. As we will
see, the key to fully understanding events lies in the shift from extensive (spatial) relations to intensive ones.
5
Deleuze gravitates toward philosophers that think in terms of underlying process. As we saw above, Bergson’s
‘‘duration’’ fits here as well as Lucretius, Nietzsche, and Spinoza. It would also be important to note the role of
Whitehead in Deleuze’s thinking of the event. See especially The Fold, (76–82). More recently a good case has been
made for Maimon’s critique of Kant. See, for example, Smith’s ‘‘Conditions of the New,’’ (5–8).

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 Deleuze and Badiou on the Nature of Events 515
6
Manuel DeLanda has appropriated many of Deleuze’s ideas in books such as A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
and Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. The difficulty with DeLanda’s reading is that he assumes that contempo-
rary science justifies Deleuze’s ontology and thus subordinates philosophy to science. ‘‘Deleuze is interested in the
metaphysics modern science needs, rather than the science philosophy needs’’ (Bell, ‘‘Realism’’ 3).
7
A confusion might arise at this point as a result of the difference between the French ‘‘événement’’ (usually trans-
lated ‘‘event’’) and the English ‘‘event.’’ In English everything that is happening can be properly called an ‘‘event,’’
while in French an événement is something momentous, important, unusual. This sense comes out in English in the
word ‘‘eventful.’’ In some respects Deleuze seems to be closer to the English use of the term, while Badiou (as we’ll
see) is wholly within the semantic domain of the French term. However, even for Deleuze there remains the dis-
tinction between the ordinary and the singular. Furthermore, as the distinction between Aion and Chronos shows,
Chronos corresponds much more closely to the English usage and is thus not an event. The event is doubled for
Deleuze as both the singular points and the interconnection of all singular points.
8
In particular, Meillassoux (a student of Badiou’s) in his After Finitude argues for a mathematized universality that
is no longer a correlate of thought (117). The reliance on mathematics certainly has its origins in Badiou, but fram-
ing the issue in terms of correlation allows Meillassoux to foreground his commitment to realism. Brassier in Nihil
Unbound takes the ultimate destruction of the universe and the correlative meaninglessness of human existence as his
fundamental starting point from which he criticizes all philosophies that privilege human meaning.
9
The doctrine of univocity claims that everything that exists, exists is exactly the same way. The goal here is to
eliminate an analogy of being in which things exist in different ways. What does not follow from this, however, is
that only one entity actually exists (cf. Logic of Sense, 177–80).
10
For Badiou, Spinoza’s great error lies in failing to distinguish between belonging and inclusion (Being and Event,
113). However, Bell argues that Badiou misinterprets Spinoza on the notion of attributes and thus misunderstands
Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza.
11
The crucial difference between calculus and set theory from Badiou’s perspective is Cantor’s positing of the
transfinite in set theory.

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