Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy, Alain Badiou, editorial material and selection by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clements. Continuum: 196 pp., $19.95.

By Crispin Sartwell

One of the main activities of philosophy in the twentieth century was declaring its own demise. Philosophers of the most varied persuasions - positivists, existentialists, pragmatists, deconstructionists - declared for one reason and another that philosophy was over. Metaphysics, which attempts to explain what sorts of things there really are and how they are organized, was held to be exhausted or literally meaningless, and it was claimed that all we can know are our own interpretations or our own languages. Philosophy, according to these thinkers, produced not the Truth, but merely more and more words, often used in senseless ways.

The declaration of the end of philosophy started in some form with Hegel, and has been repeated by such figures as Heidegger, Carnap, Wittgenstein, and Rorty. However, as long as it was philosophers who were making this declaration in their philosophy books, the field was in no real danger; in fact, the claim that philosophy was over was itself a philosophical claim.

Nevertheless, like the end of art, history and more or less everything else that emerged from the millennial mood, the crisis of philosophy got boring. One of the many excellences of the work of the French philosopher Alain Badiou is that he not only declares the end of the end of philosophy, but then goes ahead and actually writes philosophy in a way that is both innovative and classical, that engages and surpasses the tradition.

Many of us have been waiting for this for a long time, waiting for the next wave of philosophy to emerge from Europe (or anywhere else, for that matter, though France, sadly, has a certain cachet), something that is not post-structuralism or post-modernism, or post-anythingism. In fact, it would be nice to see a philosophy that was pre-something, and now I think we've got it.

The idea of the death of philosophy has been connected to a crisis of truth, which is not surprising since in some ways truth is the idea around which all philosophy is of necessity organized. Truth is the central notion of Badiou's philosophy, but that is not a merely a reactionary gesture. Badiou's truth is radical, or it might be better to say that Badiou's truth is the radical itself: for Badiou, truth is what disturbs or destroys or interrupts the order of knowledge or politics. What's true is a realization that rips apart our categories of understanding and forces us to commit ourselves to some new idea or new world of ideas.

This slim book - the fourth of Badiou's to be translated into English recently, with at least six more (including his magnum opus Being and Event) soon to follow - is a collection of essays and lectures that begins with a fairly long introduction to Badiou's work and concludes with an interview. The second chapter, "Philosophy and Truth" is the best and most deeply subversive new piece of philosophy I have read in a quarter century. In it, Badiou says that "I will start with the following idea: a truth is, first of all, something new. What transmits, what repeats, we shall call knowledge." Hence truth is always a challenge to what we already know.

This claim is characteristically comprehensible (not that Badiou's writing is without its obscurities), which again separates Badiou from many of his continental rivals, who have a tendency toward obscurantism so pronounced that one begins to wonder whether there is actually anything there to understand and, if so, why we should bother. Truth for Badiou is both a commitment and an openness; we might say that the truth is something that to which we commit ourselves, but that it and we always must also remain open, because a new truth may strike at any time.

This is not only an epistemology, it turns out, but an ethics, as Badiou identifies evil as the attempt to create and live within a closed system of knowledge. "Evil," he says, "is the desire for 'Everything-to-be-said.'" It is the impulse to monopolize or determine or force all truths: that is also something we could call totalitarianism, or scientism, or fundamentalism. Human goodness is then, for Badiou, a deep or even total - but open - commitment. It is not merely open-mindedness or the scientific method: one takes the chance to commit oneself to a belief that is not yet knowledge. But the condition of truth is that it is always arriving, always coming on or attacking, so that even in our commitment to it we are always opening up possibilities.

Truth hence arrives as a disturbance of consensus and convention, as something that cannot be assimilated into the current state of knowledge, and it arrives because someone has the resoluteness to face it and hold to it, even alone. Perhaps the highest compliment we could pay to Alain Badiou on his own terms is to say that his philosophy is such a truth.

The philosophy of which I've just given a brief and obviously simplistic summary is remarkable both for its connections to the tradition - which Badiou has at his fingertips (illuminating observations about everyone from Parmenides to Lucretius to Heidegger abound in this volume) - and for its freshness. It takes up the existentialist emphasis on the individual person and the individual commitment as the site of truth, but it also holds open the possibility of real truth about the world. It is sophisticated in its discussion of language in its relations to people and the world, but it is not obsessed by and trapped in language as is the work of Wittgenstein, Quine, Derrida, or Rorty. "Philosophy," says Badiou, "is always the breaking of a mirror. This mirror is the surface of language, upon which the sophist places everything which philosophy deals with."

Infinite Thought explores many themes: among them psychoanalysis, film, terrorism, and communism. Often the discussions are frustratingly brief, but in almost every case they hint at the depth of thought that underlies them, throwing out rich suggestions and provocative formulations with immense profligacy. For example, "the place of cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art. . . . It always bears absolutely impure elements within it, drawn from ambient imagery [and] from the detritus of other arts."

There are also many problems with Badiou's work, some of them serious. Badiou in the seventies described himself as a "Maoist," and it is a bit disconcerting (at least to me) to find Mao quoted as a political or even philosophical authority, which of course hints that there might be a totalitarian undertow in Badiou's work as well as a critique of totalitarianism.

The chapter "Philosophy and the Death of Communism," for example, is notably weak and evasive. Badiou argues that the "idea" of communism is something pure and beautiful and necessary and even eternal, though the reality of the Soviet gulag and so on was a nightmare. In gratuitously sophisticated prose, he puts forward a very old argument, that the idea was good and the execution wrong, that Stalin had nothing to do with Marx or even Lenin. At a minimum this is insufficient (Marx and Lenin themselves were totalitarians), and the relations of the idea to its concrete application have to be explored critically and not just denied.

Indeed, this is the form of a problem that bedevils Badiou's work. He is so intent on terms such as "idea" and "thought" that it sometimes seems as though these things are floating entirely free of reality, so that his admiration of Mao could have nothing to do with anything Mao actually did or was. "Philosophy is never an interpretation of experience. It is an act of Truth with regard to truths." Even if that was clear, it would be gratuitously perverse.

And Badiou's critique of American hegemony and global capitalism, as represented in his discussion of terrorism and 9.11, really has nothing to add to the usual leftist complaints - plausible as many of these are - which is disappointing given the striking originality of his philosophy as a whole. As he describes the global applications of American power, he mentions Panama, Sebia, Vietnam, Libya, and Barbados. I don't myself recall the conflict in Barbados, and the reference is enough to make you want to go back and check every factual assertion, especially given Badiou's tone of overweening authority.

In fairness, it appears to me that Badiou's politics is still in flux, that he's still emerging from Maoism. There are hints in Infinite Thought that Badiou is actually moving toward a kind of anarchism or at least a critique of all state power that would be far more in keeping with other elements of his philosophy.

These really are major problems, and though some of them may reflect only my own disagreement with elements of Badiou's philosophy, others point up deep tensions within the philosophy itself. But even these tensions should be experienced at this point as opportunities for exploration, places for work.

Meanwhile the overwhelming response to Badiou has to be gratitude for his gift of a future.

Crispin Sartwell's most recent book is End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History.