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Cover -- Title page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- Part I Structures and Notions, Becomings and Visions -- 1 The Neolithic Age, Capitalism, and Communism -- 2 The Notion of 'Crisis' -- 3 Science, Ideology, and the Middle Class -- 4 Lecture at the Institute of Political Sciences -- Genius -- Part II Thinking the Present from the To-Come -- 5 Lessons From the 'Gilets Jaunes' Movement -- 6 Pandemic, Ignorance, and New Sites of Collectivity -- 7 Movements Without an Idea and an Idea for Movements -- 8 World, Existence, Foreignness: A New Dawn for Politics -- EULA.

In June 2016, the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. As the EU's chief negotiator, for four years Michel Barnier had a seat at the table as the two sides thrashed out what 'Brexit' would really mean. The result would change Britain and Europe forever. During the 1600 days of complex and often acrimonious negotiations, Michel Barnier kept a secret diary. He recorded his private hopes and fears, and gave a blow-by-blow account as the negotiations oscillated between consensus and disagreement, transparency and lies. From Brussels to London, from Dublin to Nicosia, Michel Barnier's secret diary lifts the lid on what really happened behind the scenes of one of the most high-stakes negotiations in modern history. The result is a unique testimony from the ultimate insider on the hidden world of Brexit and those who made it happen.

On 13 November 2015, Paris suffered the second wave of brutal terrorist attacks in a year, leaving 130 dead and many more seriously injured. How are we to make sense of these violent acts and what do they tell us about the forces shaping our world today? In this short book the influential philosopher Alain Badiou argues that while these violent events are commonly portrayed as acts of Islamic terrorism, in fact they attest to a much deeper malaise that is connected to the triumph of global capitalism and to new forms of imperialism that involve the weakening of states, such that whole regions of the world have been turned into ungovernable zones run by armed gangs in which ordinary people are forced to live the most precarious lives. These zones have become the breeding ground for a new kind of nihilism that seeks revenge for the domination of the West. And it is this new nihilism, on to which Islam has been grafted, that exerts a particular appeal to the young men and women on the margins who carried out the atrocities in Paris. The tragedy of 13 November might appear at first sight to be rooted in immigration and Islam but our wound is not so recent: it is rooted in a deeper set of transformations that have reshaped our world, creating small islands of privilege amidst large masses of the destitute and depriving us of a politics that would offer a serious alternative to the present. Alain Badiou is a writer, philosopher and an Emeritus Professor at the École normale supérieure, Paris.

Foreword / Alain Badiou -- Preface -- The palace's night of red and gold: on the entry of France into the tertiary society -- Chaos as imposture, self-regulation as festive neoconservatism -- Hobbes's Robinson-particles: political arithmetic and mercantile empiricism -- The average man as statistical degradation of the ordinary man -- Democracy as political market, or: From market democracy to thermocracy -- Market democracy will be fluid or will not be at all: fluid nomads and viscous losers -- Robinsons on wheels and petronomads -- When good sense turns nasty: the Fordism of hate and the resentment industry -- The 'Béassine Memorial Lectures' on urban populism -- The new French exception: cultural upstarts -- The dissident Knights of Professor Walras, or Economic droit de seigneur -- Towards the end or the beginning of history: middle class yoghurt-maker or heroism of the anyone? -- Glossary for the reader uninitiated in political economy.

In this short, dense essay, Jean Cavaillès evaluates philosophical efforts to determine the origin - logical or ontological - of scientific thought, arguing that, rather than seeking to found science in original intentional acts, a priori meanings, or foundational logical relations, any adequate theory must involve a history of the concept. Cavaillès insists on a historical epistemology that is conceptual rather than phenomenological, and a logic that is dialectical rather than transcendental. His famous call (cited by Foucault) to abandon "a philosophy of consciousness" for "a philosophy of the concept" was crucial in displacing the focus of philosophical enquiry from aprioristic foundations toward structural historical shifts in the conceptual fabric. This new translation of Cavaillès's final work, written in 1942 during his imprisonment for Resistance activities, presents an opportunity to reencounter an original and lucid thinker. Cavaillès's subtle adjudication between positivistic claims that science has no need of philosophy, and philosophers' obstinate disregard for actual scientific events, speaks to a dilemma that remains pertinent for us today. His affirmation of the authority of scientific thinking combined with his commitment to conceptual creation yields a radical defense of the freedom of thought and the possibility of the new. --