EMBLEMS AND CUTS: PHILOSOPHY IN AND AGAINST HISTORY Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths, University of London) Alain Badiou’s theory of the subject has consistently opposed a vision of History as meaning and totality, for the sake of an internal, subjec- tive and discontinuous grasp of the periodisation of political “se- quences.” This article examines the theoretical trajectory that leads Badiou to dislocate the historical dialectic, generating a comprehen- sion of political time which is no longer bound to an ordered matrix of expression and development; it also considers Badiou’s relation to various strands of anti-humanist anti-historicism and tackles the theo- retical tensions that inhere in his disjunction of nature and history. The article concludes by discussing the effect of Badiou’s notion of pe- riodisation on the very historicity and mutability of his own philosophi- cal apparatus, and the immanent threat posed to his thinking of the event by an ‘absolute historicism.’ In his 1997 novel, Calme bloc ici-bas, Alain Badiou tells the story of Julien Oldenay, Professor of the Philosophy of History in the imagined country of Prémontré—a country set apart from that of the reader not simply by fictive space but by its time and calendars, born of founding, constitutive events and, therefore, incommensurable with our own. The tale is one of 44 that make up approximately half of the novel, all of them beginning with classic incipits such as “C’est l’histoire de …,” “Je conte de ...,” “Ce conte est … ” and in this case a simple “Once upon a time …,” “Il était une fois … ” The irreverent portrayal of Oldenay is in- dicative of Badiou’s philosophical instincts when it comes to history, as both concept and discipline. Aside from his unkempt appearance, Olde- nay is portrayed as combining a certain degree of self-satisfaction with a “chronic intellectual hesitation,” as well as a rhetoric marked by nuance, retraction and interminable self-criticism. Lecturing on the history of Prémontré, Oldenay tentatively declares: … [T]his History, if we provisionally accept that the word “His- tory” is legitimate, which would require elaborate argumenta- tion, I would say, with all the precautions that this concept de-