Alain Badiou

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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

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.

External links

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Articles by Badiou

In English

In French

In other languages

Interviews

  • Beyond Formalisation (Badiou interviewed by Peter Hallward and Bruno Bosteels; questions in English, answers in French)
  • On Evil (Badiou interviewed by Christoph Cox and Molly Whalen)
File:Badiou being and appearance.png
Drawing from Art's Imperative lecture

Audio

Video