Why Falling In Love Never Happens In The Present: Deleuze and the Logic of the Event
In the Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze makes a distinction between two conceptions of time, that he borrowed from the stoics: Chronos and Aion.
Chronos, for Deleuze, is the time of the eternal present. Chronos is the reality in which the past and future do not exist, all that exists is the present. The past and the future, from the perspective of Chronos, are simply what the present once was and what the present will be. Chronos is the time of the concrete states of affairs actualizing themselves.
Aion, on the other hand, is the time where the present does not exist. Aion is the time where only the past and the future exist, and the present is an infinitesimally small point or an infinitely divisible particle. The present, for Aion, tends towards zero, like a mathematical limit. One can make a visual analogy for Aion by drawing the line of real numbers and representing the present as zero, the future as positive numbers and the past as negative numbers: no matter how much you “zoom in” on this axis, you will never isolate the number zero, there will always be a real number that is bigger than zero and one that is smaller.
In the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel exemplifies the time of Aion through his analysis of sense-certainty (while obviously not calling it ‘Aion’). Hegel explains how the concept of “now” is never equal to itself. By the time a person says the word “now”, that now has already passed and transformed into another moment. ‘Now’ never is ‘now’. You can never say the word now in an instant, by the time you finish saying the word, time has already passed, and the now that was thought of in the first moment is different from the one of the statement. One might make a (somewhat stretched) analogy here to Lacan’s concept of the difference between the subject of the enunciation and the enunciated subject: that is, the difference between the speaking subject who makes a statement and the “I” in the actual statement that is signified by a word such as the personal pronoun “I”.
Going back to Deleuze, the time of events is not Chronos, but Aion. Deleuze explicitly says that events do not exist, but rather “insist or subsist”¹. For Deleuze, events “are not substantives or adjectives but verbs”². They are not actually existing present moments, but infinitives: “the unlimited Aion, the becoming which divides itself infinitely in past and future and always eludes the present”³. Deleuze explains the difference between Chronos and Aion as follows:
“Only the present exists in time and gathers together or absorbs the past and future [Chronos]. But only the past and future inhere in time and divide each present infinitely [Aion]. These are not three successive dimensions, but two simultaneous readings of time.”⁴
Deleuze makes a distinction between events and accidents. Events are ideal and do not exist in our material world while accidents are the states of affairs that are an instantiation of a specific event. The former (events) live in the time of Aion while the latter (accidents) live in the time of Chronos. In this way, the relation between an event and an accident is analogous with the Platonic relationship between a universal form and a concrete particular instantiation of it: “To reverse Platonism is first and foremost to remove essences and to substitute events in their place, as jets of singularities”⁵.
Deleuze exemplifies the paradoxical nature of events through the example of becoming. In the first chapter of the Logic of Sense, Deleuze gives the example “Alice becomes larger”: which means that she is at the same time larger than she was and smaller than she is becoming. In this way we are given the impression that Alice is smaller and larger simultaneously. Deleuze explains: “This is the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present. Insofar as it eludes the present, becoming does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before and after, or of past and future. It pertains to the essence of becoming to move and to pull in both directions at once: Alice does not grow without shrinking, and vice versa.”⁶
Slavoj Žižek draws attention to this peculiar collapse of logic in the realms of love and religious faith. For Žižek, love and faith share a kindred spirit — they are experiences where the usual mechanics of reason, time, and causality fall apart. And it is precisely because of this breakdown that these experiences allow us to encounter something much more profound and transformative.
Žižek often emphasizes that one does not simply “fall” in love, as though slipping on ice. Zizek says “you don’t just fall in love, all of a sudden you realize you already are in love”⁷. Love arrives unexpectedly, but with the shocking realization that it has already taken root. You suddenly discover that love has been growing beneath the surface of your consciousness, waiting for you to wake up to it. You don’t notice the exact moment when love arrives; it sneaks up on you, silently rewriting your past as if it had always been there.
Falling in love is not a specific moment that we can pin-point in time. Like any process or event, it’s a continuous or gradual process of becoming. It can either be a slow burn or a ‘faster’ fall, depending on the situation. But what distinguishes falling in love from other states of affairs is that it never happens in the present. One can either notice or not notice that one is in the process of falling in love, but one never notices when this process is finished. The moment you realize that you are fully in love, it’s already too late, it already happened some time in the past, but we don’t know when. In the same way, “now” is never now for Hegel — by the time you point out to what is happening now, it already passed. The temporality of love is the time of Aion: the time that “flees in both directions at once, toward the future and toward the past”⁸. Deleuze says of the event that it “has no present. It rather retreats and advances in two directions at once, being the perpetual object of a double question: What is going to happen? What has just happened? The agonizing aspect of the pure event is that it is always and at the same time something which has just happened and something about to happen; never something which is happening.”⁹
The French philosopher Alain Badiou offers a similar insight when he compares falling in love to an event. Badiou and Deleuze have different views on what an event is, however. For Badiou, an event is also, like with Deleuze, not just an occurrence; but it’s instead a rupture in the fabric of reality, something so seismic that it reconfigures the entire structure of our existence. An event relates to what Lacan would’ve called “a confrontation with the real” — a moment so powerful that it forces us to create a new world, a new fantasy to make sense of it. The birth of Christ is an event in this sense. Time itself was redefined by this singular event — history is now divided into “Before Christ” (BC) and “Anno Domini” (AD), marking a new era. An event, for Badiou, is an occurrence that writes its own history, forcing us to retroactively reinterpret our past to make sense of it.
Love, too, is an event. When you fall in love, it feels as though all of history has been leading up to this moment, as though every experience in your life has been preparing you for the arrival of this person. The entire narrative of your past is rewritten; everything that happened before seems like a prelude to this encounter. The experience of time itself changes. There is now a clear division between “before I met you” and “after I met you.”
In this way, love is both timeless and time-shattering. Like Badiou’s and Zizek’s concept of the event, love retroactively imbues past moments with new significance and meaning. The past becomes restructured in light of the present discovery, as if this love had been shaping one’s life all along. Similarly, for Deleuze, Aion — the time of the event — is timeless precisely because it reframes our perception of the past and the future without relying on a stable present. Aion does not register individual moments but instead weaves together a continuity of becoming, where each instance is caught in the flow of infinite potentialities.
Love, as Žižek and Badiou emphasize, does not arrive at a clear “now” but unfolds as a revelation that has always been part of our story, subtly weaving its influence through past and future. By recognizing that events occupy Aion — a realm where the present perpetually eludes us — Deleuze invites us to understand reality not as a succession of static instances but as an unfolding continuum, where the significance of each moment flows in both directions, pulling us toward infinite possibilities and transformations.
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REFERENCES:
1: Gilles Deleuze, “The Logic of Sense”, page 5
2: ibid.
3: ibid.
4: ibid.
5: ibid., pg. 53
6: ibid., pg. 1
7: Source: he says this all the time
8: Gilles Deleuze, “The Logic of Sense”, pg. 62
9: ibid., pg. 63
