Background
Alain Badiou was born on January 17, 1937, in Rabat, Morocco. He is the son of the mathematician Raymond Badiou (1905 - 1996), who was a working member of the Resistance in France during World War II.
1953
75006 Paris, France
In an alley in the Luxembourg garden, Paris, the six grand laureates of The Prize Of The General Contest In La Sorbonne running in line holding on to each other, from left to right, Jean-Claude Martini, Jean-Pierre Raison, Pierre Alais, Suzanne Bonnier, Alain Badiou, and Maurice Dayan. (Photo by Philippe Le Tellier)
1953
Paris,France
Jean-Claude Martini, Jean-Pierre Raison, Pierre Alais, Suzanne Bonnier, Alain Badiou, and Maurice Dayan. (Photo by Philippe Le Tellier)
1953
75006 Paris, France
In an alley in the Luxembourg garden, Paris, the six grand laureates of The Prize Of The General Contest In La Sorbonne running in line holding on to each other, from left to right, Jean-Claude Martini, Jean-Pierre Raison, Pierre Alais, Suzanne Bonnier, Alain Badiou, and Maurice Dayan. (Photo by Philippe Le Tellier)
1989
Paris, France
French philosopher and writer Alain Badiou in Paris, surrounded by bookshelves. (Photo by Sophie Bassouls)
1998
France
Portrait of Alain Badiou.
1998
Paris, France
French author Alain Badiou poses at home on the 10th of September 1998 in Paris, France. (Photo by Ulf Andersen)
1998
Paris, France
French author Alain Badiou poses at home on the 10th of September 1998 in Paris, France. (Photo by Ulf Andersen)
1998
Paris, France
French philosopher Alain Badiou poses during a portrait session held on September 10, 1998, in Paris, France. (Photo by Ulf Andersen)
1998
Paris, France
French philosopher Alain Badiou poses during a portrait session held on September 10, 1998, in Paris, France. (Photo by Ulf Andersen)
1998
Paris, France
French philosopher Alain Badiou poses during a portrait session held on September 10, 1998, in Paris, France. (Photo by Ulf Andersen)
1998
Paris, France
French philosopher Alain Badiou poses during a portrait session held on September 10, 1998, in Paris, France. (Photo by Ulf Andersen)
1998
Paris, France
French philosopher Alain Badiou poses during a portrait session held on September 10, 1998, in Paris, France. (Photo by Ulf Andersen)
1998
Paris, France
French philosopher Alain Badiou poses during a portrait session held on September 10, 1998, in Paris, France. (Photo by Ulf Andersen)
1998
Paris, France
French philosopher Alain Badiou poses during a portrait session held on September 10, 1998, in Paris, France. (Photo by Ulf Andersen)
1998
Paris, France
French philosopher Alain Badiou poses during a portrait session held on September 10, 1998, in Paris, France. (Photo by Ulf Andersen)
1998
Paris, France
French philosopher Alain Badiou poses during a portrait session held on September 10, 1998, in Paris, France. (Photo by Ulf Andersen)
1998
Paris, France
French philosopher Alain Badiou poses during a portrait session held on September 10, 1998, in Paris, France. (Photo by Ulf Andersen)
1998
France
Close-Up of writer Alain Badiou in France on April 01, 1998. (Photo by Louis Monier)
2009
Alain Badiou on the set of TV show "Vous aurez le dernier mot". (Photo by Eric Fougere
2009
Alain Badiou on the set of TV show "Vous aurez le dernier mot". (Photo by Eric Fougere
2009
Alain Badiou on the set of TV show "Vous aurez le dernier mot". (Photo by Eric Fougere
2009
Alain Badiou on the set of TV show "Vous aurez le dernier mot". (Photo by Eric Fougere
2009
Alain Badiou on the set of TV show "Ce Soir ou Jamais". (Photo by Eric Fougere)
2012
Paris, France
Philosopher Alain Badiou Photographed in Paris. (Photo by Eric Fougere)
2012
Paris, France
Philosopher Alain Badiou Photographed in Paris. (Photo by Eric Fougere)
2012
Philosopher Alain Badiou Photographed in Paris. (Photo by Eric Fougere)
2012
Paris, France
Philosopher Alain Badiou Photographed in Paris. (Photo by Eric Fougere)
2012
Paris, France
Philosopher Alain Badiou Photographed in Paris. (Photo by Eric Fougere)
2016
Athens, Greece
Alain Badiou, a famous French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII in Athens, on May 5, 2016. (Photo by Wassilis Aswestopoulos)
2016
Athens, Greece
Alain Badiou, a famous French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII in Athens, on May 5, 2016. (Photo by Wassilis Aswestopoulos)
123 Rue Saint-Jacques, 75005 Paris, France
Alain Badiou attended Lycée Louis-le-Grand.
45 Rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France
Alain Badiou attended École Normale Supérieure.
(Alain Badiou is arguably the most important and original ...)
Alain Badiou is arguably the most important and original philosopher working in France today. This volume presents for the first time in English a comprehensive overview of Badiou's ambitious system. Beginning with Badiou's controversial assertion that ontology is mathematics, this volume sets out his theory of the emergence of truths from the singular relationship between a subject and an event.
https://www.amazon.com/Alain-Badiou/dp/082646145X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
2004
(Following on from Alain Badiou’s acclaimed works Ethics a...)
Following on from Alain Badiou’s acclaimed works Ethics and Metapolitics, Polemics is a series of brilliant metapolitical reflections, demolishing established opinion and dominant propaganda, and reorienting our understanding of events from the Kosovo and Iraq wars to the Paris Commune and the Cultural Revolution.
https://www.amazon.com/Polemics-Alain-Badiou/dp/1844670899/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
2006
(Everywhere, the twentieth century has been judged and con...)
Everywhere, the twentieth century has been judged and condemned: the century of totalitarian terror, of utopian and criminal ideologies, of empty illusions, of genocides, of false avant-gardes, of democratic realism everywhere replaced by abstraction. Badiou's proposal is to reopen the dossier on the century - not from the angle of those wise and sated judges we too often claim to be, but from the standpoint of the century itself.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07D689L4P/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i5
2007
(Logics of Worlds is the long-awaited sequel to Alain Badi...)
Logics of Worlds is the long-awaited sequel to Alain Badiou's much-heralded masterpiece, Being and Event. Tackling the questions that had been left open by Being and Event, and answering many of his critics in the process, Badiou supplements his pioneering treatment of multiple being with a daring and complex theory of the worlds in which truths and subjects make their mark - what he calls a materialist dialectic.
https://www.amazon.com/Logics-Worlds-Being-Event-2/dp/0826494706/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
2008
(Conditions provides an illuminating reworking of all the ...)
Conditions provides an illuminating reworking of all the major theories in Being and Event. In so doing, Badiou not only develops the complexity of the concepts central to Being and Event but also adds new ones to his already formidable arsenal. The essays in Conditions reveal the extraordinary and systematic nature of Badiou's philosophical enterprise.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OG4E0J8/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p2_i2
2009
(Alain Badiou’s "Communist hypothesis," first stated in 20...)
Alain Badiou’s "Communist hypothesis," first stated in 2008, cut through the cant and compromises of the past twenty years to reconceptualize the Left. The hypothesis is a fresh demand for universal emancipation and a galvanizing call to arms. Anyone concerned with the future of the planet needs to reckon with the ideas outlined within this book.
https://www.amazon.com/Communist-Hypothesis-Alain-Badiou/dp/1844676005/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
2010
(In a world rife with consumerism, where online dating pro...)
In a world rife with consumerism, where online dating promises risk-free romance and love is all too often seen as a mere variant of desire and hedonism, Alain Badiou believes that love is under threat. Taking to heart Rimbaud’s famous line "love needs reinventing," In Praise of Love is the celebrated French intellectual’s passionate treatise in defense of love.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A0WE5L8/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0
2012
(Plato's Republic is one of the best-known and most widely...)
Plato's Republic is one of the best-known and most widely-discussed texts in the history of philosophy. But how might we get to the heart of this work today, 2,500 years after its original composition? Alain Badiou breathes life into Plato's landmark text and revives its universality. Rather than producing yet another critical commentary, he has instead worked closely on the original Greek and, through spectacular changes, adapted it to our times.
https://www.amazon.com/Platos-Republic-Dialogue-Sixteen-Chapters/dp/023116016X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
2012
(In the uprisings of the Arab world, Alain Badiou discerns...)
In the uprisings of the Arab world, Alain Badiou discerns echoes of the European revolutions of 1848. In both cases, the object was to overthrow despotic regimes maintained by the great powers - regimes designed to impose the will of financial oligarchies. Badiou’s book salutes this reawakening of history, weaving examples from the Arab Spring and elsewhere into a global analysis of the return of emancipatory universalism.
https://www.amazon.com/Rebirth-History-Times-Riots-Uprisings-dp-1844678792/dp/1844678792/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=
2012
(This definitive collection includes not only Badiou’s pam...)
This definitive collection includes not only Badiou’s pamphlet Rhapsody for the Theatre but also essays on Jean-Paul Sartre, on the political destiny of contemporary theatre, and on Badiou’s own work as a playwright, as the author of the Ahmed Tetralogy.
https://www.amazon.com/Rhapsody-Theatre-Alain-Badiou/dp/1781681260/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
2013
(Alain Badiou was born in 1937 in Rabat and Jean-Claude Mi...)
Alain Badiou was born in 1937 in Rabat and Jean-Claude Milner in 1941 in Paris. They were both involved in the "Red Years" at the end of the Sixties and both were Maoists, but while Badiou was focusing all his attention on China, Milner was already taking his distance from it. Over the years, that original dispute over the destiny of gauchisme was fueled by deep, new differences between them concerning the role of philosophy and politics. This extraordinary debate ultimately leads to new areas of interrogation and shows that there is no better remedy for the crushing power of media-influenced thinking than the revival of the great disputes of the mind.
https://www.amazon.com/Alain-Badiou-dp-0745682162/dp/0745682162/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=
2014
(Everything in their respective positions divides them: Al...)
Everything in their respective positions divides them: Alain Badiou is the thinker of a revitalized communism and Alain Finkielkraut the mournful observer of the loss of values. The two opponents, gathered here for their first-ever debate, have irreconcilable visions. Yet neither is a stranger to controversy, and in this debate they make explicit the grounds of their personal dispute as well as addressing, in a frank and open exchange, their ideas and theories. Guided by Aude Lancelin, the two philosophers discuss subjects as diverse as national identity, Israel and Judaism, May 1968, and renewed popularity of the idea of communism. Their passionate debate is more than just the sum total of their disagreements, however, for neither of them is satisfied with the state of our society or the direction in which its political representatives persist in taking it. They agree that there needs to be change and their confrontation in this volume shows the importance of asking difficult questions, not only of each other, but also of our political systems.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OFVBK9K/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p2_i10
2014
(Who hasn't had the frightening experience of stumbling ar...)
Who hasn't had the frightening experience of stumbling around in the pitch dark? Alain Badiou experienced that primitive terror when he, with his young friends, made up a game called "The Stroke of Midnight." The furtive discovery of the dark continent of sex in banned magazines, the beauty of black ink on paper, but also the mysteries of space and the grief of mourning: these are some of the things we encounter as the philosopher takes us on a trip through the private theater of his mind, at the whim of his memories.
https://www.amazon.com/Alain-Badiou-dp-1509512071/dp/1509512071/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=
2016
(Why bother to praise mathematics when you claim, as Alain...)
Why bother to praise mathematics when you claim, as Alain Badiou does, that philosophy is first and foremost a metaphysics of happiness, or else it’s not worth an hour of trouble? What possible relationship can there be between mathematics and happiness? That is precisely the issue at stake in this dialogue, which serves as a very accessible introduction to what mathematics is and an exploration of the crucial influence it has always exerted on the greatest philosophers.
https://www.amazon.com/Praise-Mathematics-Alain-Badiou-dp-1509512020/dp/1509512020/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=
2016
(The election of Donald Trump as president of the United S...)
The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States sent shockwaves across the globe. How was such an outcome even possible? In two lectures given at American universities in the immediate aftermath of the election, the leading French philosopher Alain Badiou helps us to make sense of this extraordinary occurrence.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07R7CYCPJ/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i1
2019
(Offering a piercing indictment of what we have let oursel...)
Offering a piercing indictment of what we have let ourselves become, this short, critical work is a damning critique of the current age and of the democratic systems that characterize it. Alain Badiou argues that any truly radical politics must begin with dismantling the obscene (or pornographic) qualities of neoliberal capitalism.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B083T88SZN/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i2
2020
Alain Badiou was born on January 17, 1937, in Rabat, Morocco. He is the son of the mathematician Raymond Badiou (1905 - 1996), who was a working member of the Resistance in France during World War II.
Alain Badiou attended the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand in Paris, France. During 1955-1960 he studied at the École Normale Supérieure, where in 1960 he wrote the diplôme d'études supérieures on Spinoza.
From 1969 (and until 1999), he taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) in the founding philosophy department with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jean-François Lyotard. In 1999 Alain Badiou became the chair of the philosophy department at the École normale supérieure. He has also taught and continues to hold seminars, at the Collège international de Philosophie in Paris.
The primary philosophical system developed by Alain Badiou is constructed in Being and Event, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, and the forthcoming Immanence of Truths: Being and Event III. Surrounding these works - as is consistent with his definition of philosophy - are numerous supplementary and tangential works. While many significant books and seminars remain untranslated into English, those which include: Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (1999), Metapolitics (2005), The Meaning of Sarkozy (2008), Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (2003), Second Manifesto for Philosophy (2011), Ethics: An Essay of the Understanding of Evil (2001), Theoretical Writings (2004), Philosophy for Militants (2012), Theory of the Subject (2009), Plato’s Republic: A Dialogue in 16 Chapters (2012), Polemics (2006), Philosophy and the Event (2013), In Praise of Love (2012), Conditions (2008), Infinite Thought (2006), The Century (2007), Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy (2011), Five Lessons of Wagner (2010), and The Adventure of French Philosophy (2012), among others. In addition to his books, Badiou has published innumerable articles that can be found among edited collections in philosophy, politics, and psychoanalysis. He is also the author of several successful novels and plays.
(Why bother to praise mathematics when you claim, as Alain...)
2016(Following on from Alain Badiou’s acclaimed works Ethics a...)
2006(This definitive collection includes not only Badiou’s pam...)
2013(Everywhere, the twentieth century has been judged and con...)
2007(Who hasn't had the frightening experience of stumbling ar...)
2016(In a world rife with consumerism, where online dating pro...)
2012(Offering a piercing indictment of what we have let oursel...)
2020(Everything in their respective positions divides them: Al...)
2014(Alain Badiou’s "Communist hypothesis," first stated in 20...)
2010(Logics of Worlds is the long-awaited sequel to Alain Badi...)
2008(Plato's Republic is one of the best-known and most widely...)
2012(In the uprisings of the Arab world, Alain Badiou discerns...)
2012(The election of Donald Trump as president of the United S...)
2019(Alain Badiou is arguably the most important and original ...)
2004(Conditions provides an illuminating reworking of all the ...)
2009(Alain Badiou was born in 1937 in Rabat and Jean-Claude Mi...)
2014Politically active since his youth, Badiou was a founding member of the Unified Socialist Party (PSU) and was active in supporting the decolonization of Algeria. Much of Badiou’s life and work have been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolts in Paris. As he writes in The Meaning of Sarkozy:
"The task facing us, after the negative experience of the socialist states, and the ambiguous lessons of the Cultural Revolution and May 1968 - and this is why our research is so complicated, so erratic, so experimental - is to bring the communist hypothesis into existence in a different modality from that of the previous sequence. The communist hypothesis remains the right hypothesis, as I have said, and I do not see any other. If this hypothesis should have to be abandoned, then it is not worth doing anything in the order of collective action. Without the perspective of communism, without this Idea, nothing in the historical and political future is of such a kind as to interest the philosopher. Each individual can pursue their private business, and we won’t mention it again."
He is a leading member of Union des jeunesses communistes de France marxistes-léninistes, and was, with Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel, a founding member of L’Organisation Politique, a formation focusing on direct intervention.
While Badiou’s political position has drawn him the most attention within academia and beyond, it is his ontology that is the center of his system. Badiou’s “system” is built upon the purity of mathematics - specifically, set and category theory. The structure - of vast complexity - stands in relation to the history of contemporary French philosophy, German Idealism, and the primary works of antiquity. It is constituted out of a series of determinate negations of the history of philosophy, but also out of the histories of what Badiou terms conditions: art, politics, science, and love - the essence of his theory of compossibility. In brief, as Alain Badiou defines it in the Introduction to Being and Event (2005), philosophy is that which “circulates between … ontology (thus, mathematics), the modern theories of the subject and its own history.” An outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as the postmodern schools of thought, his philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.
For Badiou, being qua being, according to mathematics, which "thinks ontology," is pure multiplicity, multiplicity without One. Therefore, it is beyond the reach of comprehension or understanding, which is always based on a count-as-one with the exception of thought immanent to a truth-procedure, or set theory. This exception is key. Set theory is a theory of presentation, thus ontology is the presentation of presentation. Ontology, as set theory, is Badiou’s philosophical version of "knowledge in the real." For Badiou, only set theory can write and think without One.
According to the opening Meditation of Being and Event, philosophy is buried within the false choice between being qua being, being One, or being multiple. Akin to Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Badiou in Being and Event sets out to resolve long-standing impasses in philosophy opening up to a new horizon of thought. For Badiou, the true opposition is not between the One and the multiple, but between this pair and the third position they exclude: the One is not. In fact, this false pair constitutes itself as exhaustive of the horizon of possibility by the foreclosing of the third. The details of this thesis are developed in the first six Meditations of Being and Event. The essential consequence is that there is no direct access to being as pure multiplicity, since everything from within a situation appears as one, and everything is a situation. The apparent paradox of this conclusion is Badiou’s simultaneous affirmation of Truth and truth(s).
Like his German predecessors, and Jacques Lacan, Badiou divides the nothing beyond presentation between nothing as non-being and nothing as not non-being, to which he gives the name "void," as it designates a not non-being which is anterior even to the attribution of number. Truth at the ontological level is what Badiou - borrowing again from mathematics - calls a generic multiple. In brief, this is Badiou’s ontological foundation for the world of truths he later constructs.
Perhaps more than the assertion that ontology is possible, Badiou’s doctrine is distinct in the affirmation of Truth and truth(s). The first "Truth" is, strictly speaking, philosophical; the second "truth(s)" belongs to the conditions. The relation between these two is comprehensible through the delicate distinction between religion and atheism, or more specifically, through the distinction between residual and imitative atheisms and post-theological thought, that is, philosophy. For Badiou, philosophy is inherently empty, that is, it has no privileged access to some realm of Truth beyond the reach of artistic, scientific, political, and amorous thought and creation. Therefore, philosophy is conditioned; it is conditioned by the conditions as truth-procedures and ontology. The simplest way to articulate the apparent temporal paradox between philosophy and Truth and the truths of the conditions is through Hegelian terminology: the thoughts of the conditions are particular, the constructed category of Truth is universal, and the truths of the conditions, i.e., the truth-procedures, are singular. In other words, philosophy takes the propositions of the conditions and tests them, so to speak, against ontology, and then constructs out of them the very category that will serve as their measure, Truth. The thoughts of the conditions, in so far as they pass through the category of Truth can be declared to be truths. Truth, therefore, is literally constructed out of what will have been truths - and ontology. With the relation of Truth and truths, Badiou constructs a philosophical system adequate to Kant’s summation of the Enlightenment - thought will not obey any other authority than itself (which is not the same as saying that it will not obey).
The truths of the conditions, therefore, are procedures which, taking cause from a crack in the consistency of a presentation, itself secured by representation, are thoughts which traverse the semblance of neutrality and naturalness of an established situation from a position of assuming that - ontologically speaking - the One is not. Truths, in other words, are phenomena, or phenomenal procedures, which bear fidelity to the foundations of ontology. Truth - the philosophical category - on the other hand, is the subtracted universal articulation of these singular thoughts, which Badiou names "generic procedures."
To this process stretched between an encounter with the void, as a cause, and the construction of a consistency not founded on the foreclosure of the reality of being, Badiou gives the name subject. The subject itself involves a number of elements or moments, namely, intervention, fidelity, and force. More specifically, this process - given the nature of ontological truth - involves a sequence of subtractions that are always subtractions from any and all conceptions of the One. Truth, therefore, is the subtractive process of truths.
Quotations:
"Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death."
"Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me."
"What kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed, and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be."
"We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space, and the world."
"Those who have nothing have only their discipline."
"All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself."
"There is always only one question in the ethics of truth: how will I, as some-one, continue to exceed my own being?"
"We pose only those questions whose answers are the pre-given conditions of the questions themselves."
Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan
Mao Zedong