Is a man"s death an event? For his life, it is! To those around him, his relatives, his friends, it is a fact that has a high emotional and social impact! Can the death of a person be an international political event? If the individual in question was the most sought after organizer and inspirer of terrorist attacks, the promoter of a new system of terrorism, that affects the lives of millions of people at the same time, in the most distinct corners of the Earth, from New York to Bali and from London to Moscow, and on top of that his name is Bin Laden, then it is! How could it not be an event?

I will take the chance and say that the death of a man, of any man, is not an event, due to the very prosaic and banal reason that of all the things that happen in our life, death is the only certain thing! The disappearance of Osama Bin Laden, in this respect, isn"t an event either! It is a fact that places all of us outside the common, even though incoherent course of life, in that part of reality that the French call counter-event, and which is called an anti-event in English. The same part of life which saw a lot of unfair and gruesome deaths took place: those of the people who, on September 11th, were at work in the twin towers; those of the passengers of the airplanes turned into weapons of mass murder; of the firefighters and medical workers or of the local policemen struggling to rescue people from under the rubble and getting crushed by it. Just like the deaths of the soldiers killed in the explosion of U.S.S Cole, in the bomb attacks of Afghanistan, Spain, India or Pakistan, or those of the civilians captured in Iraq only to be beheaded live!

However, the killing of Bin Laden, following the military operation in Pakistan has the potential to become an event, in other words to realign the lives of many of the inhabitants of the Earth in a life less permeate