Clayton Crockett. Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013 [Book review]

Clayton Crockett’s Deleuze Beyond Badiou is the most recent critical intervention into the debate sparked by and surrounding Alain Badiou’s critique of Gilles Deleuze in The Clamour of Being (2000), which was given book-length treatment in Jon Roffe’s Badiou’s Deleuze (2012). Crockett’s is therefore a timely book, all the more so given the recent English translation of a number of Badiou’s essays from 1967 through to 2007 in The Adventure of French Philosophy (2012). The premise of Crockett’s defence is a familiar one: contra Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and Peter Hallward—to cite the most widely read—Deleuze, by himself, is neither an aristocratic aesthete nor, with Félix Guattari, an apologist for capitalism. Crockett’s book, then, will be a “counterreading of Deleuze over against and beyond Badiou’s powerful critique” which, for Crockett, is selective, distortive, and wilfully ignores the philosophical nuances and political dimensions of Deleuze’s work (6).