First, let me emphasize just how much I love Badiou. Part of my militance against Badiou in certain posts arises from the anxiety of influence. I read Badiou for the first time towards the end of my dissertation work. I had read his Manifesto for Philosophy a year or so earlier, but it hadn’t left much of an impression of me because I simply wasn’t able to hear or understand what he was claiming. However, when I came across The Clamor of Being, all of this changed. Here was a work that was engaging Deleuze as a philosopher, brilliantly and carefully. This led me to the Ethics, which in turn led me to hone my French skills enough so I could read Being and Event prior to its translation. This was a period of great excitement for me. Badiou dared to say “truth”. He dared to give arguments.

Just like the title of Hallward’s famous edited collection, it felt as if it was possible, after Badiou, to think again. Indeed, this feeling was only confirmed by Hallward’s own study of Badiou along with his many articles. Where prior to Badiou we had a series of philosophical tribes, each engaged in their own dusty commentaries of master figures, Badiou’s ontology demanded argument. He was making substantial claims and suddenly, like the lifting of a cloud, it was possible once again to engage in something other than commentary, something other than “buggering philosophers to create a monstrous offspring”. Once again it had become possible to engage positions and worry over their claims.

Hallward’s study of Badiou did precisely this wonderfully. I feel in certain ways as if Badiou cured me of a particular institutional form through which philosophy was being done. Those were happy days. Each page was filled with a sort of excitement that provoked you to learn entirely new things like set theory and where you didn’t feel as if the aim of philosophy was simply to comment on the texts of the tradition. Suddenly an entire way of doing philosophy seemed as if it had passed and was but a bad dream.