Following the neo-Heideggerian infused poetics of many leftist French philosophers (Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe included), a distinctly different (counter-)movement can be traced in the work of Alain Badiou. Whereas Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe remain committed to the essentially Nietzschean-Heideggerian (and latterly Derridean) overthrow of Platonic metaphysics, Badiou, though arguably a post- (rather than anti-) Heideggerian, purposefully and clearly provocatively identifies himself not only as a neo-Platonist, but as the twenty-first-century's heir to Plato. Indeed, amidst his extensive and ceaselessly proliferating œuvre we find his acclaimed ‘hyper-translation’ of La République de Platon, a text that seems to confirm, as François Laruelle argues, the suspicion that Badiou sees himself (or asks us to read him) in relation to Plato the way that Lacan saw himself in relation to Freud: as a rereading or making available of its fundamental truth. As a result, though Badiou is quite evidently a soixante-huitard through and through– and indubitably the trace of his enduring fidelity to those events is written into his philosophy in a much more explicit way than with Nancy or Lacoue-Labarthe– we find a commitment in Badiou to philosophical principles that seem to run against the grain of much continental thought in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: to truth, universality, science (largely as mathematics), ‘great’ art, and to a rigorous, rational and organised philosophical system.