What is usually stated is that the important point of Badiou's philosophical construction is the now famous equation ontology = mathematics. The tendency is to present this as a strictly original philosophical proposition, which continues the materialist line of thought beginning with the Platonic break and continuing through Galileo and restated by Badiou. This, it appears, rather misses what I suspect is the central trajectory of the text � that Being & Event is centrally written against Heidgger�s Being and Time. To avoid this issue is to avoid the central monumentalist intention of the book. Perhaps it seems a little naive to say, to suggest that Being & Event is in the now substantial line of attempts to write responses that are to supplant Heidegger's Being & Time, a list that includes Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Adorno's Negative Dialectics amongst others, but this central reactiveness of the text has not been discussed, probably because the idea of comparing B&E and B&T is simply to horrible a thought.

¶ 6:11 AM