The title of this chapter was suggested to me some time ago by my best enemy – or my best fiend, to paraphrase Werner Herzog – who also happens to be a very good friend: Alain Badiou. The idea was to use the occasion to pursue our dispute – or chicane, to use a favourite expression of his – a dispute instigated by the publication in 1997 of Badiou's Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (1999).

Let it be noted in passing that this dispute prolonged a problematic that I had previously examined in a book-intervention entitled Of the Impossibility of Phenomenology: On Contemporary French Philosophy, published in 1995. With regard to the topic at hand, I argued that the philosophical field with a grip on our present – in other words, contemporary philosophy as a political ontology of the present – could be, and must be, thought starting from the idea of a maximal ontological tension between Deleuze and Badiou.