Reassembling the Event: Estonia's ‘Bronze Night’

At the end of April 2007, an event unfolded in Tallinn, Estonia, that came to be called the ‘Bronze Night’. Most of the research on this event—and on events in general—uses an after-the-act representational approach that treats events as effects whose cause lies elsewhere, external to the event in its becoming. Partially because of this, most research into events emphasizes temporal path-dependency and all but ignores the spatiality of events. Following Deleuze's philosophy of the event, I seek to learn from the Bronze Night as an event by using an in-the-act procedure of reassemblage. In reassembling the event, I pay special attention to its spatiality: to processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, to event-spaces produced and partially captured, and to the event's transitivity to new spaces. The paper ends with a discussion of the ways in which the conditions of the problem that actualized the event were newly determined in and through the event, creating opportunities for the event's counteractualization.