I would say, if you like, that the party is like an out-moded mathematics...that is to say, the mathematics of Euclid. We need to invent a non-Euclidian mathematics with respect to political discipline.

In the ordinal view, number is thought as a link in a chain, it is an element of a total order. In the cardinal view, it is rather the mark of a 'pure quantity' obtained through the abstraction of domains of objects having 'the same quantity'. The ordinal number is thought according to the schema of a sequence, the cardinal number, according to that of a measurement.

4.23..If 'thought' means: instance of the subject in a truth-procedure, then there is no thought of this thought, because it contains no knowledge.

The 'economy of number' proposed by Peano is an economy of signs whose paradigm is algebraic, whose transparency is consensual, and whose operational effectiveness is therefore not in doubt. He thus participates forcefully in that movement of thought, victorious today, that wrests mathematics from its antique philosophical pedestal and represents it to us as a grammar of signs where all that matters is the making explicit of the code.

We do not want to count; we want to think the count.