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Badiou was trained formally as a [[philosopher]] as a student at the ENS from 1956 to 1961, a period during which he took courses at the [[University of Paris|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 [[United Socialist Party (France)|United Socialist Party]] (PSU), an offshoot of the [[French Communist Party]]. 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]] had a huge impact on Badiou. While [[1968]] politicized many [[intellectual]]s, it served to reinforce Badiou's commitment to the [[far left]], and he continued to organize [[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 [[leftist]] philosophy he considered an unhealthy deviation of more main-line [[Marxism]]. In [[1988]] he published what is now considered by many to be his major statement, ''L'être et l'événement''. He took up his current position at the ENS in [[1999]]. He is also associated with a number of other institutions, such as the [[European Graduate School]] and 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.