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''The Adventure of [[French ]] [[Philosophy]]'' is essential [[reading ]] for anyone interested in what [[Badiou ]] calls the “French moment” in contemporary [[thought]].

Badiou explores the exceptionally rich and varied [[world ]] of French philosophy in a [[number ]] of groundbreaking essays, published here for the first [[time ]] in [[English ]] or in a revised [[translation]]. Included are the often-quoted review of Louis Althusser’s canonical works ''For [[Marx]]'' and ''Reading [[Capital]]'' and the scathing critique of “potato fascism” in Gilles [[Deleuze ]] and Félix Guattari’s ''A Thousand Plateaus''. There are also talks on Michel [[Foucault ]] and [[Jean-Luc Nancy]], and reviews of the [[work ]] of Jean-François Lyotard and Barbara Cassin, notable points of interest on an expansive tour of modern French thought.

Guided by a small set of fundamental questions concerning the [[nature ]] of [[being]], the [[event]], the [[subject]], and [[truth]], Badiou pushes to an extreme the polemical force of his [[thinking]]. Against the formless continuum of [[life]], he posits the [[need ]] for radical discontinuity; against the [[false ]] [[modesty ]] of [[finitude]], he pleads for the [[mathematical ]] infinity of everyday situations; against the various returns to [[Kant]], he argues for the persistence of the [[Hegelian ]] [[dialectic]]; and against the [[lure ]] of ultraleftism, his [[texts ]] from the 1970s vindicate the [[role ]] of Maoism as a driving force behind the [[communist ]] [[Idea]].