It is hard not to recognize — as many commentators have — the striking homology between Alain Badiou’s theory of the event and the fate of Marcel Duchamp’s infamous 1917 ‘readymade’ Fountain. The congruence is in fact so marked that one of the easiest ways of grasping this key philosophical concept is simply by comparing it to Fountain’s simultaneously mundane and extraordinary story. Yet arguably the most important lesson to be drawn from this exercise is also the one that is most often ignored; to wit, far from presenting an unbridgeable divide, there in fact exists a paradoxical relation of continuity between the ‘event’ and the ‘everyday’. This article seeks to redress this critical oversight by using Fountain not only to ‘flesh out’ Badiou’s crucial concept but also to explore the frequently overlooked (but no less necessary) imbrication of the everyday in the event, and in this way counter claims that Badiou’s philosophy presents a straightforward or even naïve division between conservative continuity and radical rupture
