The event is the unit by which we mark out a particular moment as meaningful, unifying and congealing it into something that can be indexed and picked out as a whole. In their work Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant attempts to complicate this notion by introducing the “situation” and the “episode” as event-like structures that, each in its own way, challenge the ubiquity of the event as marker of meaningful experience. I then interpret this move of Berlant’s through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s term “Différance” (Difference + Deferral), arguing that in the act of signification or in the pointing out of an episode or situation, these happenings must collapse back into being an event. Further, I argue that this is due to a tension between Derrida’s deconstructive reading, which sees experience as always already in the process of interpretation, and Berlant’s affect theoretic reading in which “the present is perceived, first, affectively: the present is what makes itself present to us before it becomes anything else.” Ultimately, I find no clean resolution between these two readings, opting instead to embrace the irresolvable.