This book on Alain Badiou's philosophy begins with a central theme: the attempt to trace how Badiou has replaced the tradition of critical theory and negation with an affirmative support of his four generic procedures (art, science, love, and art) as inseparable from his revitalization of both the subject and the concept of truth. By defining four procedures as conditions of philosophy, Badiou makes the attempt to establish each as inter-related and systematically necessary to make a new proposal for thought. The fidelity to Badiou's project for the 21st century, however, requires a fundamental examination: are his four truths complicated by an inescapable dilemma? And if so, can the four truths be retained, as a whole, or does the individual reader have to make a decision that will alter Badiou's project and conclusions? By presenting the dilemmas of his thought, the scholarly reader will be in a position to then pursue the necessary study to come to their own conclusions and, by doing so, become sufficiently free to resist the many coercions of social and political life in liberal democracies today.

The project examines the reasons for the many philosophical difficulties, and the failures, that Nietzsche sensed when he had concluded The Birth of Tragedy. The subsequent philosophical decision he made, on the way to reconceiving the classical ideas of tragedy, destiny, and martyrdom, allowed him to begin to conceive of what he would identify as a thinking devoted to affirmation. Everything he commits himself to writing after 1872, including the unpublished notes on myth from the Philosophenbuch, is a response to the disillusionment of his belief in Dionysos and the false promise of tragic affirmation. The Greek god had become a problem and an obstacle. Sustaining him, as a philosophical idea, was going to prove to be highly mixed; the struggle would become relentless. The Greek god is, in many ways, impossible to believe in as an ideal, in antiquity or for the present; and for a specific reason: the connection between the institution of the Dionysian festival and the religious ritual of sacrifice could not be ignored by Nietzsche. His sense of a "Dionysian nausea" has been overlooked. Tragedy and sacrifice are a binding relation in the Greek polis. Nietzsche seems to recognize the fact and commits himself to directly confronting the tragedy/sacrifice relation in all his subsequent works and with the intent on being a unique, individual resource for the truth of his self-revelations. He identifies himself with a new conception of the martyr (the witness) in order to provide an alternative to the classical martyr as the victim of violence and death and who, moreover, is executed by the state. Socrates and Jesus are omni-present for him. Nietzsche presents himself as new world-historical alternative and the self-revelations of a witness for the individuals he will often call (especially in Thus Spoke Zarathustra) his friends and neighbours and disciples. Is the whole of his philosophical enterprise successful? Do his self-revelations lead to the creation of the free spirit and therefore give him some assurance about the future of his legacy? Or does his commitment to the eternal recurrence, for example, lead him to a terrible realization? The study presents the force of Nietzsche's thought as he created the resources, which he hoped could be effectively transferred to a reader, to begin to create an affirmative reality he defines from out of the fullness of the free spirit and the philosopher.

In Ambrose's church in Milan, Augustine realized how a Catholic bishop could oppose the power of the Roman emperor and establish the church as both independent and pre-eminent. Once he realizes for the first time that the authority of a Catholic bishop could successfully oppose the pretensions of an emperor who, clearly, only had limited and by no means absolute secular power, he began to consider the possibility of a society utterly transformed from its present conditions. The state and its head were both vulnerable. The emergence of Catholicism at the end of the fourth century could provoke, challenge, and resist the edicts of an emperor made more and more vulnerable precisely by his worldly power. The fragility of the emperor reflected the tenuous and always shifting borders of a state; faith and the spirit had no such borders. Augustine had the audacity to imagine the church ultimately subsuming the state into itself. But this early perception changed. By the end of his life, Augustine's hope for a spiritual regeneration of the social world was ultimately relinquished, replaced with the division of the two cities, Jerusalem and Babylon, separate and never to be joined, each with its own legitimacy. The self-possessed youth fundamentally in opposition to Roman society had accepted the division of the two cities and therefore the impossibility of a spiritual regeneration of the world. Augustine, the individual of his autobiography, was finally if not irrevocably relinquished to become the adopted son of the church; in so doing, he could not reconcile the self-division that had formed him - the double-inheritance of his North African birth as Adamic and Roman. If, at the beginning of his ordination into the priesthood and the hopeful first few years of his leadership, he believed that human beings could be "conformed to the image of God through the rebirth of the renewed man ... and these things can be realized even in this life," by 412 he had definitively turned away from any such aspirations and instead chose to divide the two cities. He had, in the end, resigned himself. Instead of the regeneration of human beings and the world, Augustine accepted the respective identities and the separation of Jerusalem and Babylon and, by doing so, determined both his personal belief and the future of the Catholic church. This is how that came about.