THE STRUCTURE OF INTERMITTENCY

Alain Badiou is the most significant contemporary thinker of historical intermittency and the one to turn to in detail first. Badiou will allow us to grasp the meaning and structure of intermittency with unmatched power and clarity, if with certain lacunae. This is unsurprising: he is the major continental philosopher of the period. His thought is rooted in the conviction that, most of the time, the world knows neither truth, nor justice, nor good. This may seem to some like an unusual and even a perverse emphasis to begin with, as though one were deliberately looking at Badiou's thought down the wrong end of a telescope. But one might also put the point the other way round: so stark is Badiou's conviction that even his best commentators have usually had trouble quite recognizing it, or at least pursuing its full implications.

Badiou's stature in some degree derives from the intransigence with which he rethinks the world from the ground up on the basis of the absolute philosophical privilege of contingency. What matters is not the world as it is given us to think, already there before us, but the chance occurrences that break into that world and break it up, what Badiou calls events, and their consequences. To grant contingency a philosophical privilege, however, is not to assume that it has existential priority.