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

Biography

Badiou was trained formally as a mathematician as a student at the ENS (1956-1961), where he took courses at the Sorbonne. 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. Throughout the 1960s Badiou's interests broadened - he wrote his first novel in 1964 and began studying philosophy, the discipline that would eventually become his main focus. 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 merely reinforced 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 Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard, whose leftist philosophy he considered an unhealthy deviation of more main-line Marxism. In 1988 he published 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 .

External links

• Badiou Faculty profile at the European Graduate School
• Collège International de Philosophie
• Organisation politique

Articles by Badiou

In English

• Behind the Scarfed Law, There is Fear (On the French headscarf ban)

• Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art

• Highly Speculative Reasoning on the Concept of Democracy

• Number and Numbers (A partial translation of Badiou's book Le nombre et les nombres on Number Theory ( PDF))

• On the Truth-Process (Lecture and discussion)

• One Divides into Two (On Lenin)

• What is to be Thought? What is to be Done? (On the 2002 French elections; written by Badiou, Sylvain Lazarus and Natasha Michel )

• What is Love? (PDF)

In French

• L'aveu du philosophe

• Considérations philosophiques sur des événements récents (On the September 11, 2001 attacks (PDF))

• De la dialectique négative dans sa connexion à un certain bilan de Wagner (part one; part two) (Two lectures on Theodor Adorno and Richard Wagner)

• Huit thèses sur l'universel

• Notes sur Le Dernier des hommes (On the movie The Last Laugh by Murnau)

Interviews

• Being by Numbers (part one; part two; part three; part four; part five) (Badiou interviewed by Lauren Sedofsky)

• 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)