Pocket Pantheon

July 20, 2009
An uneven and politically jaundiced collection of brief tributes to 14 deceased 20th-century French philosophers ranging from the renowned (Derrida, Foucault, Sartre) to those practically unknown outside of France (Gilles Châtelet, Françoise Proust) by one of the primary current contenders for the title of continental philosopher-king. Offering less an introductory primer on French thought than a series of theoretical appropriations and political alignments, Badiou (Being and Event
) reinforces his own ideas on the relationship between thought and political action, Being as multiplicity and, most frequently, his own Maoist commitments. With a tendency to self-mythologize through association (“Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Canguilhem, Verstraeten, Terray, and yours truly”) and repeated invocation of the May 1968 student revolts, the author identifies political revolutionary aspects not only in Althusser, as expected, but in the thought of Lacan and even Lyotard. Meanwhile, on the theoretical level, Derrida's notion of linguistic slippage is packaged into an account of “degrees of existence,” all the more confusing for its brevity. Neither a truly illuminating introduction to French philosophy nor to Badiou's own complex thought, this book's primary value is rather as a document of Badiou's strategic positionings and prejudices.