Slavoj Zizek

At first approach, an event is thus the effect that seems to exceed its causes – and the space of an event is that which opens up by the gap that separates an effect from its causes.

However, such an approach ignores the basic feature of an event: the surprising emergence of something new which undermines every stable scheme.

From its very inception, philosophy seems to oscillate between two approaches: the transcendental and the ontological or ontic.

What cannot but strike the traveller is that both approaches culminate in some notion of Event: the Event of the disclosure of Being – of the horizon of meaning which determines how we perceive and relate to reality – in Heidegger’s thought; and in the Big Bang (or, broken symmetry), the primordial Event out of which our entire universe emerged, in the ontic approach, upheld by quantum cosmology.

Philosophy often appears to its common-sense opponents as a kind of Sigmaringen of ideas, churning out its irrelevant fictions and pretending that it offers the public insights on which the fate of humanity depends, while real life goes on somewhere else, indifferent to philosophical gigantomachias.

For Lacan, the Unconscious is not a pre-logical (irrational) space of instinct, but a symbolically articulated knowledge ignored by the subject

As such, it is an event: at its most elementary, event is not something that occurs within the world, but is a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it