Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Note on Translations -- Abbreviations -- 1 Contexts and Parameters -- Three characteristics of modern French thought -- The legacy of Louis Althusser -- Concluding remarks -- 2 Alain Badiou: Event, Subject and Truth -- The role of philosophy -- Truth -- The event, movement and change -- Concluding remarks -- 3 The Paradoxes of Alain Badiou's Theory of Politics -- Politics, the event and truth procedures -- Against and beyond the postmodern -- Marxism and historical materialism -- Democracy -- Parliamentary politics -- Badiou's political activism -- Concluding remarks -- 4 Jacques Rancière: Politics is Equality is Democracy -- Listening to the unheard -- Liberal democracy and language -- Defining the political -- Democracy and post-democracy -- Concluding remarks -- 5 Etienne Balibar: Emancipation, Equaliberty and the Dilemmas of Modernity -- The political -- Ambivalence, universality, ideology -- Political violence -- Lenin and Gandhi -- Concluding remarks -- 6 With and Beyond Badiou, Balibar and Rancière -- References and Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Z.