I am still thinking... I think we are only hearing a distant rumbling on the horizon. Badiou is so...I don't know, he would be absolutely demented if he were not so frigging brilliant. He has later described his Manifesto for Philosophy as a sort of companion to his magnum opus Being and Event. He said that after he had written a similar companion to his second magnum opus, Logic of Worlds.
The Manifesto for Philosophy is so much more and so much less than a companion to anything. I can't believe what Badiou is saying in this book. You know, I got the impression from his Second Manifesto that he was only attacking our contemporary pop philosophers who tell people they are philosopher to sell stuff. This "first" manifesto shows that he has a lot bigger fish to fry. Badiou argues that as soon as philosophy sells out on Truth, it becomes sophistry. Those who say they are philosophers are sophists, just the kind of sophists Plato was fighting in his dialogues, thousands of years ago. And that is where we are, according to Badiou: instead of Truth, we have "language games", "deconstruction" and so on. But no Truth. We are back to square one.
The Manifesto has some themes in common with Being and Event but it is nothing like a dumbed down version of Being and Event. What Badiou introduces here is his famous four truth procedures or generic procedures, which he traces back to Plato. They are the following: "science (more precisely the matheme), art (more precisely the poem), the political (more precisey the political in its interiority, or politics of emancipation) and love (more precisely the procedure which makes truth out of the disjunction of sexuated positions)." That is what he says in one of the two essays tagged to the Manifesto, Definition of Philosophy.
Badiou's style is difficult. He sounds just like a mathematician that he is while he should be talking like a normal guy to laypeople. He is not funny. He is much more. The fun resides in the things one sees and feels when he takes us on his intellectual roller coaster ride. I am not talking of the classical roller coasters but of the new ones with vertical loops. No wonder Badiou talks of "terror" and "disaster" in his reply to sophists in his essay "The (Re)Turn of Philosophy itself", which is one of the two essays at the back.