Abstract: In the frontier research on event, English narratologist Michael Sayeau took a departure from the usual approach in understanding the event from the perspective of singularity and, using Badiou as the starting point of his criticism, demonstrated the mysteriousness of the cause and the metaphysical crux, the two features underlying the singularity of event. As a result, he forthrightly put forward his “against the event” viewpoint and absorbed relevant critical theories while explaining how Flaubert and other writers deal with the conflict between interruption and repetition, thus creating a pioneering presentation of the modernist narrative. His interpretation can not only provide a deduction of “the daily constancy of coincidence”, but also help clarify, in depth, a turning point in academic history, that is, the time when early modernist writers highlighted the structure of discourse itself in their works and Saussure established the starting point for the theory of language simultaneously.

Key words: against the event, singularity, modernism, everydayness, linguistic theory