In this concise volume, Badiou considers the election of Nicolas Sarkozy in France as symptomatic of a tendency toward abjection in French politics linked to capitulation and resignation (characterized in philosophical terms as a ‘transcentental Pétainism,’ referring to the Chief of State in Nazi-collaborator Vichy France during WWII), and proposes the ‘communist hypothesis’ as a way of rethinking a radical politics of the impossible today. See in particular ‘Only One World,’ ‘Must the Communist Hypothesis Be Abandoned?,’ and ‘The History of the Communist Hypothesis and Its Present Moment.’