This dialogue between Alain Badiou and Jean-Claude Milner is somewhat akin to the tumultuous ideological exchanges between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in the middle of the last century.

Badiou, despite realistically recognising that we are “awash in political scepticism today” leading to a pragmatic embrace of things as they are, still seeks a new communist path. But Milner appears to have rejected political progress, maintaining that the hard kernel of politics comes down to “the issue of bodies and their survival.”

Despite the complexities, this living conversation makes the language generally accessible to the reader interested in a political analysis based on an understanding of the ever-deepening crisis of global capitalism and consideration of possible future perspectives.

Badiou and Milner, Maoists during the revolutionary fervour of May 1968, confront from their respective positions the consequent demise of “revolution as an ideal” in answers to the destructive malaise of “capitalo-parliamentarianism.”

Differences over the mathematical relationship of the “infinite” to the “maximum” may tax the reader. Yet the arguments ranging over language, law, the state, and right and left in France and internationally perceptively strip away the bogus fronts put forward by the international power-mongers to cover their economic plunder.

An essential difference emerges in the discussion on the name “Jew,” where the philosophical, historical and linguistic exchanges resolve themselves into fundamental disagreements over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Milner is supportive of a Jewish nation state, believing that Palestinians are being killed, not in the interests of Israel but so that the current regimes in neighbouring states can remain in power. 

Badiou argues that “to be a Jew cannot mean to put up walls, to live only among yourselves, to cave in to the traditionalists’ imprecations, to herd foreigners into camps and shoot on sight the pitiful co-habitants of your land who attempt to climb over your barbed-wire fences.” What a refreshing change from the regurgitated consensual discussions that pass for political discourse in our media and intellectual life.

(Polity, £14.99)