ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the work of Alain Badiou, which has played a crucial role in the formulation and exegesis of the author's own theses. Badiou has created an extraordinarily ambitious systematic ontology that draws on a range of developments in foundational mathematics, literature, politics, psychoanalysis, and the history of philosophy. The problem of a contemporary 'Platonism' is key to Badiou's work, and Badiou has made it a central slogan in his polemic against contemporary philosophy. Romanticism is obsessed with the problem of nihilism, which it often codes as 'Platonism'. Badiou aims to effect a reversal of Romanticism by a Platonic repetition: the demotion of poetry and the elevation of mathematics. Badiou will even go so far as to denominate the epoch opened up by Romanticism as 'the age of poets'; that is, in an epoch in which philosophy gave way on its own project, poetry took on roles that would otherwise be the province of philosophy.
