At first sight it might seem strange that one of the leading contemporary French philosophers, renowned for his monumental works grounded in set-theory and contemporary mathematics, should devote a text to the current French president Nicholas Sarkozy. Elected in May 2007, Sarkozy (often referred to by the diminutive “Sarko”) might appear in need of explanation in France, but is a political figure very familiar from this side of the channel. A law-and-order politician – he pronounced the riots of 2005 the work of “scum” (racaille) when Minister of the Interior – Sarkozy is that typical modern phenomenon: a “modernising” conservative in a mutual love affair with the media, complete with an admiration for Tony Blair and a relationship with the singer and former model Carla Bruni. What meaning could he hold for philosophy?

During his election campaign Sarkozy declared that “In this election, we’re going to find out if the heritage of May 68 is going to be perpetuated or if it will be liquidated once and forever.” Of course “May 68” is the familiar sign of sixties revolution, when student protests led to mass strikes and the temporary paralysing of the French state, now often reduced to the object of anniversary “celebrations”, a kind of stage-managed nostalgia. Sarkozy’s desire to bury May 68 indicated that something more important might be at stake. This is particularly the case for Alain Badiou, who was politically radicalised by May 68, and regards his philosophy as inheriting and trying to preserve its politics of emancipation against obliteration by the usual images of street fighting, tear gas, and glamorous “youth” protest. For Badiou this is the only politics worthy of the name: a radical politics of change for all, rather than the constricted form of democracy we currently enjoy. Sarkozy’s desire to “normalise” France by burying this inheritance suggests a canny awareness of the threat of this sort of popular protest.

There is no doubt that this vigorously pursued polemic provides a certain morbid amusement for the reader, as we see Badiou bring his formidable intelligence and talent for insult to bear on Sarko. Badiou wastes little time in locating Sarkozy in a long tradition of French reactionary thinking, especially that associated with Marshal Pétain and the wartime collaborationist Vichy regime. Mixing the political and the philosophical, Badiou regards Sarkozy as an example of “transcendental Pétainism”.

The sceptic, however, might well argue that Badiou occupies the fundamentally nostalgic position of the last soixante-huitard (68er) – valiantly resisting the reactionary tide of the present. In fact, what Badiou makes clear is that the problem dogging the left is exactly this kind of nostalgia, which can combat the modernising rhetoric of Sarkozy only with the appeal that we hold on to past gains. Opposing this kind of ressentiment, so well diagnosed by Nietzsche, Badiou prefers to affirm a faith in the possibility of future events. If he remains faithful to May 68 it is also in the hope that just such a highly unexpected event could come to punctuate the present.

What should we do in the meantime? The most important essays in the book are those devoted to what it might mean to think politically in the time of what Badiou calls “restoration”. As Badiou’s philosophy is always conditioned by exterior events, the absence of such events would seem to cast doubt on its continuing vitality. His conclusion is that, in political terms, we are living in an interval between events. To hold on in such an interval, without succumbing to the siren calls of accommodation to existing politics, requires the virtue of courage. Badiou distinguishes courage from heroism. Whereas heroism is a momentary confrontation with a seemingly impossible situation, courage requires patient endurance, and the ability to operate against the “law of the world”.

Badiou’s diagnosis of this “law” is that we live in a world radically divided between the rich and the poor, those included in the market and those left outside. Despite the fall of the Berlin wall we have witnessed a proliferation of new walls and divisions, from gated communities and security cordons to border fences and immigration controls. Against these divisions Badiou argues we must affirm certain basic political “rules”, the most fundamental of which is the assertion “there is only one world”. This assertion runs against the usual discourse of globalisation, which supposes a world “unified” under a world-market and excludes those who cannot participate. It also runs against the dominant discourse of opposition, the “alter-globalisation” slogan “Another world is possible”. By affirming there is only one world we are forced to affirm our links with others, especially those left abandoned and excluded from the circulation of wealth.

While this might be an admirable ethical position, certainly compared to the endless emphasis on cultural differences that leaves divisions in place, there is little sense of how this position might be put into practice. This is a particularly acute problem for a philosopher like Badiou, who remains faithful to Marx’s injunction that the point is not simply to interpret the world, as philosophers have usually done, but to change it. The difficulty is compounded by a problem previously pointed out by sympathetic critics of Badiou like Peter Hallward and Daniel Bensaïd: Badiou’s lack of any sustained analysis of the conditions for the emergence of a new political event. This absence, despite Badiou’s rhetorical injunctions, threatens to leave us passively waiting around in the hope of an event which may never arrive.

Ben Noys is the author of The Culture of Death (Berg).