Alain Badiou b. 1937

Alain Badiou is a French philosopher, a former student of Louis Althusser, and one of the leading figures of post-Maoist French philosophy. His Being and Event grounds an austere mathematical ontology, in which mathematics is the language of being qua being and truth emerges only through the rare event that exceeds what a situation can count. Logics of Worlds extended this project to a phenomenology of appearing, while his shorter ethical and political writings, including Ethics, Saint Paul, and The Communist Hypothesis, defend a militant politics of universal truth procedures against the consensus of liberal democratic capitalism.

Alain Badiou was born at Rabat in French Morocco in January 1937, the son of Raymond Badiou, a Resistance hero and later socialist mayor of Toulouse. He entered the École Normale Supérieure on the rue d'Ulm in 1956, took the agrégation in philosophy in 1960, and after teaching at the lycées of Reims and at the experimental University of Paris VIII at Vincennes from its foundation in 1969, was appointed in 1999 to the chair of philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, retiring in 2002. The events of May 1968 turned him into a Maoist militant; he founded the Union des communistes de France marxiste-léniniste in 1969 and from 1985 has led L'Organisation politique.

His major works include Théorie du sujet (1982), Being and Event (L'être et l'événement, 1988), Manifesto for Philosophy (1989), Conditions (1992), Ethics (1993), Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (1997), Logics of Worlds (Being and Event II, 2006), The Communist Hypothesis (2009), and L'Immanence des vérités (Being and Event III, 2018), as well as essays on Beckett, Mallarmé, Wagner, and the cinema.

Badiou has insisted, against postmodern resignation, that philosophy still has the task of thinking universal truths, and that mathematics — specifically Cantorian set theory and category theory — is the true ontology, with truth irrupting in events under the four conditions of politics, art, science, and love. The militant subject is fidelity to such an event and to the truth-procedure it inaugurates.