Alain Badiou.
 
London: Continuum, 2005. Octavo. Black boards covered by a pristine, mylar-wrapped jacket. 526 pages. First English language edition. Fine.
 
The only true and indisputable high spot of twenty-first century philosophy, Being and Event is a siesmic work. Slavoj Žižek, a sober and measured thinker, said of Badiou, “A figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us!” This book and its sequel, Logics of Worlds, are the reasons why. We know what you're thinking: never trust a Maoist disciple of Lacan, especially one that poses as a mathematician. Right, we get that, even so, Being and Event is already canonical, and for good reason. That we are not self-forming subjects or determined by circumstance but imprinted by events, eruptions of what Lacan called the Real within the Symbolic, the impossible that nevertheless arrives, is an idea changes everything. 
 
"We slaves, we can and will be free."