Alain Badiou

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Alain Badiou (born 1937, Rabat, Morocco) is a prominent French left-wing philosopher formerly chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS).

Biography

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 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 (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 intellectuals, 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.

Articles by Alain Badiou

Main Page: Articles by Alain Badiou

Resources

Main Page: Resources for Alain Badiou


External links

References

48, 106, 107, 108, 128-9, 135-6, 137, 144-5, 158

TICKLISH Badiou, Alain America and Roman Empire 211 anti-communitarian communitarian 172 Being and Truth-Event 128-35,237-8 beyond the Good 161 Christianity and psychoanalysis 145-51 differences with Lacan 3, 159-64 fidelity to the Truth-Event 164,166-7 ideology and the Truth-Event 141-5 influence of Althusser 128 is the gap the subject? 158-9 Master/Hysteric/University 164-5 return to the Substance 209 St Paul and psychoanalysis 153-4 subjectivity 182-4 transformation of Truth-Event into universal 157-8 undecidability of the Event 135-41

Slavoj Žižek

Further information about Alain Badiou can be found in the following reference(s):

References