"Ethical questions dominate today's political and academic agendas. While government think-tanks ponder the dilemmas of bio-ethics, medical ethics and professional ethics, respect for human rights and reverence for the Other have become matters of virtually instinctive consensus." "Alain Badiou, one of the most powerful and unusual voices in contemporary French philosophy, explodes the facile assumptions behind this recent ethical turn. He shows how our prevailing ethical principles serve to reinforce an ideology of the status quo and demonstrates that an ethics conceived in terms of negative human rights or tolerance of difference cannot sustain decisive and precisely situated interventions any more than they can underpin a coherent concept of evil. Our consensual ethical norms amount to nothing more than a jumbled confusion of legalistic formalism, scandalised opinion, and theological mystification."--Jacket.