I’ve spent the last few train journeys during which I was actually awake delving into Infinite Thought, which really ought to be the name of a GSV in one of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels (Excession, say…). Badiou turns a nice aphorism; I like his image of philosophy as an attic where one sharpens knives, as well as his claim that the world is telling philosophy, this time presumably in the guise of the paralytic, to “get up and walk!”.

There’s a lot of impressive elbow-work in this small volume. To use Richard Rorty’s pragmatic philosophical metalanguage, Badiou is engaged in the task of elaborating a new vocabulary, and this entails some fairly brutal shoving-about of other philosophers’ personae. Derrida for example would never have consented to being lined up with “the postmodernists”, and stressed repeatedly that what Badiou calls “idealinguistery”, or linguistic idealism, was precisely - yes, precisely - what such errant terms as diff?rance and diss?mination were meant to snag and scandalise.

Infinite Thought presents the vocabulary - of the event, the intervention, deduction, fidelity, militancy, truth, the subject and so on - separately from the meditations on the math?me through which these terms were formed and by means of which their concepts were to have been transmitted. That vocabulary is effective nevertheless because of the enigmatic discipline behind its usage: it’s clear that Badiou means something special by each of these key terms, and that there is a consistency to their deployment which is the consistency of a unique thought (compare the eerie asceticism of Lyotard’s The Differend). But it is left to Being and Event to replace the enigma of that consistency with an evacuated materialism, without which it would have been permanently beseiged by literalists on one side and mystics on the other.