The event is not simply something that happens—it becomes meaningful only through collective uptake. That is, the event's political or ethical significance depends not on its objective features but on how people respond, how they interpret it together, and how they actualize its potential as a beginning.

Let’s unpack this further through Arendt’s lens:

1. Event as Beginning

Arendt sees action—and by extension, events—as capable of introducing something new into the world, something unpredictable. This capacity to begin (natality) is central to human freedom.

2. Actualization Requires a Public

However, for a beginning to become real in the political sense, it must be recognized, taken up, and responded to by others. This means politics is fundamentally relational and intersubjective. The world is not changed by mere happenings, but by how citizens interpret and act upon those happenings together.

3. Contingency and Responsibility

Zerilli emphasizes that what counts as an event isn’t predetermined—it’s contingent on uptake. This makes politics inherently open-ended and risky, but also a site of possibility and responsibility. It’s not enough to witness; we must respond in ways that disclose a shared world.

4. Against Determinism

This view resists deterministic or structural accounts of political change. An occurrence (even a catastrophe) does not automatically become an "event" that reshapes the world; we make it so—or not—through our actions and speech.

In essence, Zerilli, following Arendt, is making a claim about the ethics of attention and action: the world is not self-interpreting, and justice or meaning doesn’t emerge on its own. It must be willed into presence by people willing to speak, to respond, and to stake something in common.