Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou, 2012
Born	(1937-01-17) 17 January 1937 (age 80) Rabat, French Morocco
Alma mater	École Normale Supérieure (BA/MA)
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	French philosophy
School	Continental philosophy Marxism Post-Marxism Modern Platonism
Institutions	University of Reims University of Paris VIII École normale supérieure
Main interests	Set theory, mathematics, metapolitics, ontology
Notable ideas	Événement (Event), ontologie du multiple (ontology of the multiple), ontology is mathematics, L'un n'est pas ("The One is Not"), count-as-one
Influences Plato, Marx, Cantor, Mao Zedong, Lacan, Althusser, Paul Cohen, Sartre, Deleuze, Lyotard, Hegel, Mallarmé, Beckett, Fernando Pessoa, Sylvain Lazarus, Jean Hyppolite, Georges Canguilhem
Influenced Slavoj Žižek, Peter Hallward, Simon Critchley, Ray Brassier, Sylvain Lazarus, Quentin Meillassoux, Alberto Toscano, Oliver Feltham, Justin Clemens, Nina Power, Jason Barker, Tristan Garcia

Alain Badiou (French: [alɛ̃ badju]  (listen) ; born 17 January 1937) is a 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 with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. Badiou has written about the concepts of being, truth, event and the subject in a way that, he claims, is neither postmodern nor simply a repetition of modernity. Badiou has been involved in a number of political organisations, and regularly comments on political events. Badiou argues for resurrecting the idea of communism.

Badiou is the son of mathematician and member of the Resistance in France during World War II (1905–1996). He was a student at the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand and then the École Normale Supérieure (1955–1960). In 1960, he wrote his diplôme d'études supérieures () (roughly equivalent to an MA thesis) on Spinoza for Georges Canguilhem (the topic was "Demonstrative Structures in the First Two Books of Spinoza's Ethics", "Structures démonstratives dans les deux premiers livres de l'Éthique de Spinoza"). He taught at the lycée in Reims from 1963 where he became a close friend of fellow playwright (and philosopher) François Regnault, and published a couple of novels before moving first to the faculty of letters of the University of Reims (the collège littéraire universitaire) and then to the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) in 1969. Badiou was politically active very early on, and was one of the founding members of the Unified Socialist Party (PSU). The PSU was particularly active in the struggle for the decolonization of Algeria. He wrote his first novel, Almagestes, in 1964. In 1967 he joined a study group organized by Louis Althusser, became increasingly influenced by Jacques Lacan and became a member of the editorial board of Cahiers pour l'Analyse. By then he "already had a solid grounding in mathematics and logic (along with Lacanian theory)", and his own two contributions to the pages of Cahiers "anticipate many of the distinctive concerns of his later philosophy".