Sometimes, We Are Eternal presents itself less as a tidy primer than as a deliberately knotted threshold to a system that aspires, paradoxically, to clarity about the very conditions under which clarity becomes possible.
The volume gathers three compact but far-ranging seminars in which Alain Badiou retraces and tests the arc of the Being and Event trilogy, flanked by Kenneth Reinhard’s synoptic essay and Jana Ndiaye Berankova’s probing Spinozist counter-reading; taken together, these elements refuse the comfort of a guided tour and instead stage a difficult but exacting encounter with a philosophy that wagers that truths—rare, exacting, and universal—can orient a finite life toward an immanent experience of the absolute.
It is a book that makes the reader feel what Badiou aims to demonstrate: that philosophy does not produce truths so much as organize our subjectivity around them, offering an orientation where knowledge alone cannot, and that the price of such orientation is a willingness to inhabit conceptual difficulty without the anesthetic of relativism. The format matters: as Nick Nesbitt notes in his preface, the conversations are not lecture summaries but “probing reflection and discussion” in which Badiou allows both the architecture and the pressure points of his system to appear under interrogation; much of the volume’s force comes from this performed vulnerability, which clarifies how the trilogy moves from ontology to appearing and finally to the immanent absoluteness of truths without appealing to transcendence.
Because the book is openly pedagogical in form, its first conceptual service is cartographic. The table of contents already delineates the itinerary that the seminars enact: Being and Event. Constructing a New Place of Thought, Logics of Worlds. What Is a World?, On The Immanence of Truths, bracketed by an introduction and two essays that press on the status of the absolute and the experience of eternity “sometimes.” All of this is keyed, aptly, by Spinoza’s sentence—“we feel and know by experience that we are eternal”—refracted by Badiou’s crucial adverb which supplies the collection’s title and indicates the temporal index of the eternal in his system. The result is a deliberately paradoxical promise: without sacrificing rigor, one can think a non-transcendent absoluteness, locate eternity in the present, and do so by anchoring philosophy in mathematics even while insisting on the irreducibility of truths to knowledge.
Nesbitt’s preface insists on the status of the Being and Event sequence itself as a philosophical event, at once a rupture with “discourses of finitude” and a systematic labor that restages the basic questions—being/appearance, truth/untruth, one/multiple—without nostalgia for foundationalism or resignation to skepticism. He locates the trilogy’s completion with The Immanence of Truths (2018) as the point at which Badiou’s system asserts an “immanence of the absolute without transcendence,” a claim that earns its right not by doctrinal fiat but by a traversal of finitudes and infinities whose didactic clarity is inseparable from their mathematical audacity. It is no accident that the preface characterizes the trilogy’s path as a sustained testing of its own evental claim; each volume both consolidates and exposes a limit in the previous one, and the seminars in this collection recapitulate that rhythm by returning to the decisive questions under pressure from new examples and questions
If Badiou’s philosophy is “fundamental” and “systematic,” as Reinhard carefully argues, it is so not because it closes the field but because it fixes three orientations: what is (ontology), how what-is appears (phenomenology of appearing across worlds), and how something genuinely new can happen (subjectivation and the truth procedure). Reinhard’s contribution is especially effective at stating, without dilation, the initial decision on which the whole edifice depends: being is multiple, not One, and philosophy must cede the discourse of being-qua-being to mathematics, specifically to set theory, even as it retains a distinct labor in situating truths, subjects, and the conditions (art, science, politics, love) that generate them. The supposed scandal is recalibrated: precisely because being is multiplicity without the One, philosophy must become meta-mathematical rather than metaphysical; precisely because truths are not reducible to knowledge, philosophy must be oriented by them without aspiring to produce them.
Reinhard’s lucid exposition of “democratic materialism” supplies the polemical horizon against which the volume moves. The democratic materialist thesis—that there are only bodies and languages—seems humane and tolerant, yet it erodes the very category that would secure any shared direction beyond opinion: truth. Badiou’s response is not to reject the thesis but to refine it dialectically: there are only bodies and languages except that there are, sometimes, truths. This “immanent excess” is not a ghostly third entity but an exceptional process that, while composed of the same material that composes the world, cannot be captured by the world’s encyclopedia; it is constructed, local, and finite in its operations, yet potentially infinite in its unfolding and universal in address. Democratic materialism allows only redistribution within a given world; the materialist dialectic insists that truths open new worlds. The demonstration hinges not on metaphors of sublimity but on the hard clarity of mathematics—Cantor’s and Cohen’s reconfiguration of infinity and genericity—that allows Badiou to argue for an immanent approach to the absolute without any concession to transcendence.
This double refusal—of transcendence and of relativist immanence—structures the seminars’ movement. In the first, Badiou revisits Being and Event not as a mausoleum of youth but as a melancholic construction, “a new house” built when the subjective sequence opened by May 1968 had reached its counter-revolutionary closure. The surprise is not the confession of affect but the way it sharpens his most impersonal thesis: ontology exists, and it is a science; mathematics is its discourse; philosophy must therefore move from polemics about the one and the multiple to the consequences of accepting set theory as ontology, including the formalization of event, subject, and truth. The conversation underscores Badiou’s long apprenticeship—in mathematics before May ’68, in seminars on Parmenides and Heidegger, in poetic meditations—behind the clean axiomatics of Being and Event, and it clarifies why politics, while formative, is bracketed in that book: the construction of an ontological place where the memory of an event can be thought as such.
That the book nonetheless remains haunted by politics becomes explicit in the second seminar, when Logics of Worlds is marked as the correction to three insufficiencies of the first volume: the too-abstract “situation” yields to the concrete category-theoretical “world”; the univocal subject becomes a typology of subjective figures; and the mathematical ground broadens from set theory to category theory to capture existence rather than being. Translation becomes the operative figure of universality: a truth that can “resurrect” in another world demonstrates its universality precisely in and through the labor of translation, which both preserves and alters; it is in this technical sense that Badiou can claim that a poem’s strength is measured by its translatability without loss of intensity, and that a political sequence can resurrect across names—Spartacus, Toussaint Louverture, Rosa Luxemburg—without identity collapsing into sameness.
The third seminar, devoted to The Immanence of Truths, supplies the system’s culminating wager: the universal is thinkable without God because absoluteness is immanent to the world in the form of truths that pass from the finite to the finite by way of the infinite. The book’s internal architecture is telling: from classical finitudes to contemporary finitudes of number and communication, into the ascending exploration of the forms of the infinite (including large cardinals), and back again to finitudes now saturated with the light of the absolute. What returns is neither dogma nor resignation but a resolved orientation: universal truths exist across worlds; their existence can be demonstrated in a materialist key; and the life oriented by them can name its own fidelity without appealing to transcendence. It is in this precise sense that the system proposes “absoluteness without divinity,” a phrase that indicates both the severity and the optimism of the enterprise.
If one asks what guidance such severity offers to life, the book supplies a direct answer in Badiou’s compact self-definition: philosophy does not mint new truths; it arranges an orientation toward the truths that exist in its conditions, and this orientation is always at odds with mere adaptation. The difference between producing mathematics and using mathematics to orient thought is exemplary: a mathematician’s patience is one thing; a philosopher’s work is to show why that patience matters for a life that refuses the domestication of youth into the world as it is. The orientation toward universality is subversive exactly because it resists the moral consensus that only the collectively useful is permissible; it is no surprise, then, that the seminars repeatedly return to “corruption of youth” as philosophy’s permanent scandal and to the need for a “realistic understanding of the situation” that does not capitulate to it.
Berankova’s concluding essay threads the volume’s title back through Spinoza and Mallarmé to identify what is most conceptually audacious in Badiou’s late work: eternity localized in time. The delicacy of her reading resides in the way she shows that adding “sometimes” to Spinoza’s sentence is not a casual qualification but a structural insistence: the eternal is experienced in the subjective present of a truth procedure, i.e., in the evental time that grounds times “event by event.” The move is not an anti-Spinozist gesture so much as an attempt to mobilize a closed ontology by inserting evental temporality into it; in this sense, Badiou’s wager marries axiomatic rigor to Mallarméan contingency, balancing a Euclidean appetite for deduction with the poetic risk of “except… perhaps.” The convergence is less decorative than methodical: concept and wager, axiom and event, are braided to show why eternity is not a metaphysical elsewhere but an experiential index of fidelity.
The clarity of this braid depends, elsewhere in the collection, on the insistence that “to be” is not “to exist.” Badiou’s philosophical labor rests on distinguishing pure multiplicity—the field of ontology, hence of set theory—from the logics by which such multiplicities appear in a world. Physics, biology, and the empirical sciences are sciences of existence; mathematics is the science of being. The distinction is neither scholastic nor optional; it is what licenses the typology of worlds, the analysis of intensities, and the claim that truths are constructed in and of worlds yet owe their universality to their mode of linkage to the infinite. The seminars consistently return to this point when pressing the consequences of category theory for appearance and of forcing for novelty, anchoring the rhetoric of “new worlds” in an articulated mathematics of worlds and morphisms rather than in vague metaphors of rupture.
One can watch the system’s scaffolding tighten around the notion of the absolute. When Badiou marks the difference between sets and classes, he is not indulging technicality for its own sake but tracking how the absolute functions as the place of theory rather than an object of theory: a limit concept inside mathematics that names what cannot be collected as a multiplicity and yet must be thought to secure the discourse’s consistency. The philosophical dividend is twofold: first, the absolute ceases to be a transcendent hypostasis and becomes the internal limit of mathematical thought; second, the route from finitude to finitude via the infinite acquires a precise content. The book’s repeated return to this limit—mathematical, logical, and conceptual—signals how its claim to “immanent absoluteness” refuses both the inflation of “Being” into theology and the deflation of truth into mere construction.
Across these pages the reader encounters a disciplined pluralism. The “plurality of logics” that Logics of Worlds codifies is neither a relativist capitulation nor an authoritarian consolidation; it is the formal condition under which resurrection, translation, and universality become thinkable without erasing difference. This is why the recurrences of Spartacus, Toussaint Louverture, and Luxemburg/Liebknecht matter: not as hagiography but as indices of how intensities of revolt can be formally “the same” across worlds without being reducible to a single invariant content. It is also why love, like art, appears alongside science and politics as a condition of philosophy rather than an object for it; in each case, a truth procedure can begin, enlist a subject, and construct a generic part that is indiscernible to the encyclopedia of the world in which it appears—even as it becomes the carrier of a universality whose test is translation into other worlds.
In this sense the book’s strongest thesis is ethical in the classical, not moralizing, register. To live as a subject is to live for truths; to live for truths is to accept that the subjective present can be the being-there of eternity; and to accept that is to refuse the comfort of worldliness in favor of an orientation toward what is absolute and free within immanence. The formulation neither despises the world nor sanctifies it; it describes how finite creatures can nonetheless be seized by an infinite task, and how this seizure can be shared without being reduced to a lifestyle. It is striking that Badiou’s most direct formulations on this point—about philosophy as the “corruption of youth,” about the necessity of a realistic grasp of a situation that one nonetheless refuses to accept as final—arise in response to questions from interlocutors attentive to the links between ontology and method. The book thereby models its own claim: orientation is collaborative, argumentative, and never separable from the courage to insist on universality where consensus prefers accommodation.
It is also a book about reading and misreading at the right level. On one side, it is hostile to the sophistical reduction of truth to opinion and of the infinite to a romantic shiver; on the other, it is hostile to the scholastic reduction of philosophical labor to commentary. The seminars cut between these temptations by presenting philosophy as a work of meta-mathematical articulation: the demonstration that ontology is mathematics, together with the exposition of how truths—unavailable to ontology—are constructed in the conditions and return to reconfigure knowledge through forcing. The image of returning “into the cave” is not an allegorical flourish here but a technical reminder that truths compel the re-evaluation of what a situation claims to know; that such return is “risky and difficult” is precisely why philosophy exists. Reinhard’s essay crystallizes this point by showing how Badiou’s system gives a content to the claim that we can live “as immortals,” and how that claim can be read as anything but mystification once the role of infinity is clarified.
Because the volume is an introduction that refuses to simplify, it yields two distinct kinds of relevance. First, historical relevance: the book situates the trilogy within the long arc from Theory of the Subject through Being and Event and Logics of Worlds to The Immanence of Truths, allowing one to see how the late emphasis on absoluteness reorganizes earlier emphases on the void, the event, and the typology of subjective forms. Second, contemporary relevance: the problems that animate these texts—the shrinking of politics into management, the dilution of science into information, the privatization of love into lifestyle, the exhaustion of art by circulation—are in no way attenuated today; if anything, they have intensified. The proposals here—truth as immanent exception, universality as translation across worlds, absoluteness without divinity—offer not slogans but a grammar for resisting the drift toward market ontology and informational phenomenology. The book helps us see why the insistence on truths is not nostalgia but the minimal condition for a non-cynical intelligence of our situations.
It is worth addressing a chronological misunderstanding that often shadows introductory materials. Sometimes, We Are Eternal itself appeared in 2019, gathering seminars and essays that directly engage The Immanence of Truths (2018) and retrospectively clarify Being and Event (1988) and Logics of Worlds (2006); nonetheless, many of the system’s public waypoints—English-language works and debates that seeded its reception—clustered around the mid-2000s. To the extent that one associates Badiou’s contemporary salience with that moment, the temptation is to misdate this volume itself. The point is conceptual rather than bibliographic: even if one were to treat the problematic crystallized here as “older,” its acuity has only sharpened with the decade, not dulled, precisely because its target—democratic materialism’s prohibition on truths and the neoliberal consolidation of finitude—has grown more aggressive, not less. The book’s relevance, therefore, is not preservative but diagnostic; its materials equip a reader to name and resist the present rather than to curate a past.
The cumulative effect of reading the collection straight through is to sense a discipline of thinking that remains inseparable from a discipline of life. A subject is not a hero or a functionary but a local configuration of a generic procedure that treats previously invisible elements as constructible in the future perfect; the work of fidelity is the work of connecting what appears to what in-exists; the courage of truth is the refusal of the encyclopedic verdict that nothing has happened. The philosophical claim is unsentimental: not everyone will want this, and nothing guarantees success; yet the structure that permits the attempt can be known, argued, and taught. In that sense the book is also a defense of philosophy’s pedagogical dignity. It refuses to flatter the reader with a frictionless “overview,” but it gives her something better: a tight account of how to think being as multiplicity, appearing as worlded intensity, and truth as an immanent construction whose universality is measured by its translatability and power of resurrection. Under the pressure of examples—mathematics and modernism, Spartacus and Toussaint, Poe and Mallarmé, love and politics—the abstraction never loses contact with reality; it elaborates what it would mean to change reality in the only way that does not betray the name of change.
One can quarrel with emphases or with premises—whether set theory must exhaust ontology, whether category theory’s phenomenology of appearing underdetermines embodiment, whether the typology of subjects is adequate to the fugitive improvisations of contemporary movements—but such quarrels are precisely what the book invites. It insists that the only interesting objection to a theory of truth is not that it is “metaphysical” but that it is false to the procedures that claim it; the only interesting defense of the new is not that it feels new but that it compels a recomposition of knowledge through forcing. On this score the collection refuses to be anodyne: it asks the reader to pick a side against indifference. It also models how to do so without dogma: the seminars leave room for counter-examples, for adjustment, for the modesty that belongs to a system that knows it stands under the judgment of the very events it celebrates.
In the end, then, the book earns its title by demonstrating what it states. Eternity is not a metaphysical place we ascend to; it is what a faithful present is when seized by the construction of a truth. That this happens “sometimes” underscores both the rarity and the universality of the experience; no one is excluded in principle, yet no one is included by default. In three days of conversation and two essays of rigorous exposition and critical pressure, Sometimes, We Are Eternal does what an introduction worthy of its subject must do: it complicates orientation in order to make orientation possible, it binds mathematics to ethics without sentimentality, and it turns the reader not into a consumer of ideas but into a candidate for a practice. The reward for accepting the book’s difficulty is not mastery but a clarified sense of why philosophy matters when it risks itself on the side of truths, and why our finite lives, under that risk, can indeed sometimes be eternal.
Simon Gros 
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