The shock of the new

French philosophy has often found itself playing the role of romantic object to Anglophone academia's desiring subject. The frequent attempts of the latter to devour the concepts put forward by the former are evidenced as much by the ongoing influence exerted by those grand spectres of twentieth-century French thought – the Derridas, the Foucaults, the Lyotards, the Deleuzes – as by the omnipresence of what is, after a fashion, their most abiding legacy, namely, poststructural and postmodern theory. Given the weight we grant French thought it is remarkable how long it has taken for the work of Alain Badiou – who without doubt is numbered among the most important philosophers of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – to receive serious attention. Although Badiou has published steadily since 1969's Le Concept de modèle, the inaugural English translation of one of his works – Norman Madarasz's rendering of Manifesto for Philosophy – only appeared comparatively recently in 1999. Meaning that, as far as English-speaking audiences go, Badiou barely scraped his way into the twentieth century (a fact not without a hint of irony, given that one of his most impressive and accessible works is consecrated to the same century).