An unemployed man killed himself in front of a Pôle-Emploi agency (French governmental agency which registers unemployed people), on 13th February 2013 in Nantes. The authors discuss the development of the discourse of social thought about this dramatic national event. After creating a corpus composed of 139 articles published between 2009 and 2013, and 427 comments put forth by readers, the authors noted two points to analyze and interpret these materials: temporality and causality. On the one hand, actors evoke the past and build a serialization to alert, to remember, and to suggest paths for the future; on the other hand, they seek competent officials to condemn, denounce, and prioritize social problems. Thinking the event then, brings about a paradox, since a news story only gains the status of event when it is placed in chronological or causal relationship with several events. This causality inscribes the event in a space where powerlessness in the face of the system makes the opening of meaning difficult.