After the events of May ‘68 Alain Badiou launched himself into the wave of Maoist activism which engulfed France. Like many of his generation, disillusioned with the role of scholarly discourses in propping up the status quo, Badiou derided Althusser's Marxism as fit only for the seminar room (Badiou, Bellassen, and Mossot 2011: 14). Though not as harsh a criticism as those which Rancière (2011) put into print after also abandoning the Althusserian inner circle, Badiou's (2009a) turn towards Hegelian dialectics and to theorising the subject in the 1970s signalled a clear rejection of his mentor's paradigm. Decades later, however, Badiou conceded the lasting influence of Althusser's project for his mature oeuvre. As he generously maintains in Metapolitics: ‘Every truly contemporary philosophy must set out from the singular theses according to which Althusser identifies philosophy’ (Badiou 2006a: 63). Addressing Althusser's legacy, Badiou (2007a: 80) now concedes the role of changing historical conditions in its assessment:

These somewhat elusive remarks about the changing relationship between philosophy and politics should give us pause to think about the political import of Badiou's mature philosophy. After all, it is well known that in Being and Event Badiou restricts philosophy to providing a site of compossibility for truth procedures in art, love, science and politics – as humble a vocation for philosophy as any. Bosteels (2011: 18–19) surmises the implications: ‘[for Badiou] political events have no need for the philosopher to transmit from the outside what they themselves, as events, produce in terms of thinking or truth, or to judge which of them qualify as properly political events.’