Aion and the Singularities of Event

Abstract

Deleuze speaks about specific time of the event, which he names – following  the stoics – Aion. Time that is eternal, immovable, incorporeal; time that is in opposition to Chronos, in which everything takes place and is corporeal.

To understand this temporality, one can explain the concept of an event by asking about its place.

An event is contained neither in objects nor in meanings nor in subjects. It is close to what Kapuściński calls „teatrum”: simultaneously a subject and an object.

These particular properties are the result of the makeup of an event, of the singularities which create an event as one transforms into another, causing a cloud of virtualities and becomings to emerge.

In the quotation from Kapuściński, the grandfather who foretells war to the children (after he has noticed the dots of planes in the sky) is those children to some extent: he projects his life onto them; the coming tragedy and the presence of children make him sensitive to „what needs to be saved in them”, which is also „what needs to be saved in him.”

This process of becoming, which here is a part of the „war” event (but in itself already constitutes an event) is not merely a subjective impression; as an event it seems to enjoy an existence of its own (expressed here with the impersonal „needs to be”), inseparable from the theatrum of circumstances or „states of being”.

Sense emerges from circumstances, yet it seems to be outside time, unmoving, always both already gone and coming: Aion.