Continental Philosophy

Infinite Thought

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Alain Badiou

2003

Infinite Thought is a collection of essays presenting Badiou's philosophy to an English-speaking audience, gathering texts from across the 1990s and early 2000s that lay out the essential elements of his system in a more accessible form than Being and Event or Logics of Worlds. The collection includes the landmark essay 'Philosophy and Desire,' in which Badiou argues against the dominant contemporary view that philosophy should dissolve into cultural hermeneutics or language-games, insisting that philosophy's task remains what it has always been: to think the universal conditions of truth. 'Being, Existence, Thought: Prose and Concept' addresses the relationship between philosophy and literature. 'The Definition of Philosophy' presents Badiou's most concentrated statement of what philosophy is and what distinguishes it from its four conditions (mathematics, politics, love, art). Other essays address the prospects for communist politics after the collapse of Soviet Marxism, the nature of ethical conviction, and the relationship between Platonism and twentieth-century mathematics. Infinite Thought is the best single-volume introduction to Badiou's thought and the clearest expression of his conviction that philosophy must assert the unconditional character of truth against the sophists of finitude, consensus, and cultural difference.