The Adventure of French Philosophy is essential reading for anyone
interested in what Badiou calls the "French moment" in contemporary
thought.
Badiou explores the exceptionally rich and varied world of French
philosophy in a number of groundbreaking essays, published here for the
first time in English or in a revised translation. Included are the
often-quoted review of Louis Althusser's canonical works For Marx and
Reading Capital and the scathing critique of "potato fascism" in
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. There are
also talks on Michel Foucault and Jean-Luc Nancy, and reviews of the
work of Jean-François Lyotard and Barbara Cassin, notable points of
interest on an expansive tour of modern French thought.
Guided by a small set of fundamental questions concerning the nature of
being, the event, the subject, and truth, Badiou pushes to an extreme
the polemical force of his thinking. Against the formless continuum of
life, he posits the need for radical discontinuity; against the false
modesty of finitude, he pleads for the mathematical infinity of everyday
situations; against the various returns to Kant, he argues for the
persistence of the Hegelian dialectic; and against the lure of
ultraleftism, his texts from the 1970s vindicate the role of Maoism as a
driving force behind the communist Idea.
