In 1964, Sartre gave an infamous interview to Le Monde, titled in English ‘A Long, Bitter, Sweet Madness’. In a series of remarks on how contemporary writers could confront the absurdity of creating literature in a world where millions remained malnourished, the philosopher unexpectedly linked Mallarmé to the then-young novelist Alain Badiou, whose work Almagestes had recently been acclaimed in the pages of Les Temps Modernes. For Sartre, there were two possible tasks for the writer in 1964. The first was to place themselves on the side of the greatest number, even if this meant momentarily giving up their vocation to become, for instance, a teacher in a newly liberated Cameroon or Nigeria. Literature's in-built telos towards universal freedom, which Sartre had argued for in What is Literature?, could thus lead paradoxically to its self-suppression in the service of emancipation. Literature, for Sartre, was politics by other means. These means could nevertheless sometimes prove insufficient.

As for the second task, Sartre first clarifies that it is ‘only applicable to our non-revolutionary societies’ such as France. Its utopian goal, he says, is to ‘prepare for the time when everyone will read’ by ‘pos[ing] problems in the most intransigent manner’. As a successful contemporary example of this second task, Sartre refers to Badiou's Almagestes. Sartre contends that in this, his first novel, Badiou ‘puts language on trial with an intention of cleansing, catharsis’. Struck by the tension between Sartre's enthusiasm for abandoning literature in favour of politics and for pursuing the most uncompromising avant-garde experiments, the interviewer, Jacqueline Piatier, asks: ‘Is Almagestes readable by all?’ Sartre's response brings together Mallarmé and Badiou: