24 Facts About Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the Ecole normale superieure and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Universite de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard.

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, in line with his training at Ecole Normale Superieure in the history of philosophy, which entails, in France, a close reading of the great classics of philosophy, in their original languages such as Greek and Latin, which he handles fluently.

Alain Badiou's work engages a detailed decrypting of texts, in their original version, as evinced by philosophers as diverse as Foucault, Deleuze, Balibar, Bourdieu, Derrida, Bouveresse and Engel - all of them alumni of 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 great 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.