Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou French philosophy
Contemporary philosophy
Full name Alain Badiou
Born 17 January 1937 (1937-01-17) (age 72)
Rabat, Morocco
School/tradition Continental philosophy
Main interests Set Theory, Mathematics, Metapolitics, Ontology
Notable ideas Event, truths
Influenced by[show]
Plato, Marx, Cantor, Albert Lautman, Mao Zedong, Lacan, Althusser,
Paul Cohen, Sartre, Deleuze, Hegel, Stéphane Mallarmé, Samuel Beckett,
Fernando Pessoa, Sylvain Lazarus
Influenced[show]
Slavoj Žižek, Peter Hallward, Simon Critchley, Ray Brassier, Sylvain Lazarus
Alain Badiou (born 17 January 1937 in Rabat, Morocco) is a prominent
French philosopher, formerly chair of philosophy at the École Normale
Supérieure (ENS). Along with Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek, Badiou
is a prominent figure in an anti-postmodern strand of continental
philosophy. Particularly through a creative appropriation of set
theory from his early interest in mathematics, Badiou seeks to recover
the concepts of being, truth and the subject in a way that is neither
postmodern nor simply a repetition of modernity.
Contents [hide]
1 Biography
2 Key concepts
2.1 Four discourses
2.2 Inaesthetic
3 Introduction to Being and Event
3.1 Mathematics as ontology
3.2 The event and the subject
4 Works
4.1 Philosophy
4.2 Critical essays
4.3 Literature and drama
4.4 Political essays
4.5 Pamphlets and Serial Publications
4.6 English translations
4.6.1 Books
4.6.2 DVD
5 Lectures
6 Further reading
6.1 Secondary Literature on Badiou's Work in English (Books)
6.1.1 Secondary Literature on Badiou's Work in English (Essays and articles)
6.2 Secondary Literature on Badiou's Work in French (Books)
7 Notes
8 External links
[edit] Biography
Badiou was trained formally as a philosopher as a student at the École
Normale Supérieure (ENS) from 1956 to 1961, a period during which he
took courses at the Sorbonne. He had a lively and constant interest in
mathematics. He was politically active very early on, and was one of
the founding members of the Unified Socialist Party (PSU). The PSU was
particularly active in the struggle for the decolonization of Algeria.
He wrote his first novel, Almagestes, in 1964. In 1967 he joined a
study group organized by Louis Althusser and grew increasingly
influenced by Jacques Lacan.
The student uprisings of May 1968 reinforced Badiou's commitment to
the far Left, and he participated in increasingly radical communist
and Maoist groups, such as the UCFML. In 1969 he joined the faculty of
University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis), which was a bastion
of counter-cultural thought. There he engaged in fierce intellectual
debates with fellow professors Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François
Lyotard, whose philosophical works he considered unhealthy deviations
from the Althusserian program of a scientific Marxism.
In the 1980s, as both Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis
went into decline (with Lacan dead and Althusser in an asylum), Badiou
published more technical and abstract philosophical works, such as
Théorie du sujet (1982), and his magnum opus, Being and Event (1988).
Nonetheless, Badiou has never renounced Althusser or Lacan, and
sympathetic references to Marxism and psychoanalysis are not uncommon
in his more recent works.
He took up his current position at the ENS in 1999. He is also
associated with a number of other institutions, such as the Collège
International de Philosophie. He is now a member of "L'Organisation
Politique" which he founded with some comrades from the Maoist UCFML
in 1985. Badiou has also enjoyed success as a dramatist with plays
such as Ahmed le Subtil.
In the last decade, an increasing number of Badiou's works have been
translated into English, such as Ethics, Deleuze, Manifesto for
Philosophy, Metapolitics, and Being and Event. Short pieces by Badiou
have likewise appeared in American and English periodicals, such as
Lacanian Ink, New Left Review, Radical Philosophy, Cosmos and History
[1] and Parrhesia. Unusually for a contemporary European philosopher
his work is increasingly being taken up by militants in movements of
the poor in countries like India, the Democratic Republic of Congo and
South Africa where he is often read together with Frantz Fanon.
Lately Badiou got into a fierce controversy within the confines of
Parisian intellectual life. It started in 2005 with the publication of
his "Circonstances 3: Portées du mot 'juif'" - The Uses of the Word
"Jew" [2]. This book generated a strong response with calls of Badiou
being labelled Anti-Semitic. The wrangling became a cause célèbre with
articles going back and forth in the French newspaper Le Monde and in
the cultural journal "Les temps modernes." Another philosopher
Jean-Claude Milner has accused Badiou of Anti-Semitism.[1]
[edit] Key concepts
Badiou makes repeated use of several concepts throughout his
philosophy. One of the aims of his thought is to show that his
categories of truth are useful for any type of philosophical cri