A Question of Fidelity (Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy) (Book Review‪)‬

Peter Hallward (ed.), Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, Continuum, London, 2004. ISBN: HB: 0-8264-5906-4, PB: 0-8264-5907-2 To devote a collection of essays to the work of a practising philosopher is not of itself remarkable. To adopt as the title of such a volume an unequivocal exhortation is, if not unprecedented, striking to say the least. It signals immediately the interventionist character of Badiou's thought, its potential to puncture and transform the structures that underpin contemporary philosophy and, by extension, the plethora of critical perspectives that have evolved under the rubric of poststructuralist theory. At the same time it masks an ambivalence of address: just who is being asked to 'think again'? The most immediate answer is the myriad of doubters and sceptics whose voices can be heard at any seminar or conference paper devoted to Badiou's work. Inevitably there are objections from Kantians, Hegelians and Deleuzeans (to name just a few) who are disturbed, if not visibly incensed, by what they see as Badiou's 'misrepresentation' of their field of specialization. And most threatened, it would seem, are Heideggerians who refuse to countenance Badiou's radical separation of ontology, the science of being qua being, from any form of phenomenological consciousness. Other objections come from literary and cultural theorists: how, they ask, can Badiou claim that art is not political when the political content of so much art is self-evident? But it is not only the doubters who are targeted by Hallward's exhortation. Some of the most perceptive essays succeed in unveiling points at which Badiou's thought itself exposes its limits; in such instances it is Badiou who is urged to rethink particular aspects of his project. And to take yet another tack, one could read Hallward's title as a paean to what emerges once more as the very possibility of the philosophical enterprise, to Badiou's emphatic demonstration that philosophy's post-Nietzschean 'death' was no more than an extended hibernation.