The event and politics: a cartography of the Brazilian mass protests

ABSTRACT It is common to understand mass demonstrations, like those belonging to the new cycle of contentious politics, as disruptive political events. However, there is no consensus on how to define what political events are, let alone how to investigate them. Most frequently, events are romanticized and understood as great ruptures, which makes the concept problematic as a means to investigate these new political phenomena. In this article, through the systematisation of Deleuze's philosophy of the event, I advance a theoretical approach that enables us to analyse and map the complexity of political events like mass protests. To demonstrate the potential of this approach, I elaborate a cartography of the Brazilian protests in 2013.