The political regime of global capitalism reduces the world to an endlessnetwork of numbers within numbers but how many of us really understand whatnumbers are?... » 

The political regime of global capitalism reduces the world to an endlessnetwork of numbers within numbers but how many of us really understand whatnumbers are? Without such an understanding how can we challenge the regime ofnumber? In Number and Numbers Alain Badiou offers an philosophicallypenetrating account with a powerful political subtext of the attempts that havebeen made over the last century to define the special status of number. Badiouargues that number cannot be defined by the multiform calculative uses to whichnumbers are put nor is it exhausted by the various species described by numbertheory. Drawing on the mathematical theory of surreal numbers he develops aunified theory of Number as a particular form of being an infinite expanse towhich our access remains limited. This understanding of Number as beingharbours important philosophical truths about the structure of the world inwhich we live. In Badious view only by rigorously thinking through Number canphilosophy offer us some hope of breaking through the dense and apparentlyimpenetrable capitalist fabric of numerical relations. For this will finallyallow us to point to that which cannot be numbered the possibility of an eventthat would deliver us from our unthinking subordination of number. «