26 Facts About Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou's "Being and Event" project considers the concepts of being, truth, event and the subject defined by a rejection of linguistic relativism seen as typical of postwar French thought.

Unlike his peers, Alain Badiou openly believes in the idea of universalism and truth.

Alain Badiou's work is notable for his widespread applications of various conceptions of indifference.

Alain Badiou has been involved in a number of political organisations, and regularly comments on political events.

Alain Badiou argues for a return of communism as a political force.

Alain Badiou is the son of the mathematician Raymond Alain Badiou, who was a working member of the Resistance in France during World War II.

Alain Badiou was a student at the Lycee Louis-Le-Grand and then the Ecole Normale Superieure.

Alain Badiou taught at the lycee in Reims from 1963 where he became a close friend of fellow playwright Francois Regnault, and published two novels before moving first to the faculty of letters of the University of Reims and then to the University of Paris VIII in 1969.

Alain Badiou was politically active very early on, and was one of the founding members of the Unified Socialist Party.

Nonetheless, Alain Badiou has never renounced Althusser or Lacan, and sympathetic references to Marxism and psychoanalysis are not uncommon in his more recent works.

Alain Badiou took up his current position at the ENS in 1999.

Alain Badiou is associated with a number of other institutions, such as the College International de Philosophie.

Alain Badiou was a member of L'Organisation Politique which, as mentioned above, he founded in 1985 with some comrades from the Maoist UCFml.

Alain Badiou has enjoyed success as a dramatist with plays such as Ahmed le Subtil.

Short pieces by Alain Badiou have likewise appeared in American and English periodicals, such as Lacanian Ink, New Left Review, Radical Philosophy, Cosmos and History and Parrhesia.

Alain Badiou makes repeated use of several concepts throughout his philosophy, which he discerns from close readings of the philosophical literature from the classical period.

Alain Badiou's work engages a detailed decrypting of texts, in line with philosophers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Balibar, Bourdieu, Derrida, Bouveresse and Engel, all of whom he studied with at the Ecole Normale Superieure.

Such a rupture is what Alain Badiou calls an event, according to a theory originally worked out in Being and Event and fleshed out in important ways in Logics of Worlds.

Alain Badiou develops these ideas with examples from the prose of Samuel Beckett and the poetry of Stephane Mallarme and Fernando Pessoa, among others.

Alain Badiou's work is, by his own admission, an attempt to break out of contemporary philosophy's fixation upon language, which he sees almost as a straitjacket.

Alain Badiou proposes as the solution to this impasse the following declaration: that the One is not.

Mathematician Alan Sokal and physicist Jean Bricmont write that Alain Badiou proposes, with seemingly "utter seriousness," a blending of psychoanalysis, politics and set theory that they contend is preposterous.

Alain Badiou employs the strategy of the mathematician Paul J Cohen, using what are called the conditions of sets.

Alain Badiou identifies four domains in which a subject can potentially witness an event: love, science, politics and art.

Alain Badiou is a founding member of the militant French political organisation L'Organisation Politique, which was active from 1985 until it disbanded in 2007.

Alain Badiou gained notoriety in 2007 with his pamphlet The Meaning of Sarkozy, which quickly sold 60,000 copies, whereas for 40 years the sales of his books had oscillated between 2,000 and 6,000 copies.