Alain Badiou is a writer, philosopher and an Emeritus Professor at the Ecole normale superieure, Paris.
Badiou's short book on the roots of recent terrorist attacks can be compared to a single long cinematographic take, which begins with a close-up of an object and then gradually withdraws, so that we see its historical context. This wider context is the dynamics of global capitalism and it is only from such a perspective that we can locate the causes of the attacks. The book reads like a theoretical detective fiction - it is simply unputdownable. Slavoj Zizek