Sylvain Lazarus

Sylvain Lazarus (born 1943) is a French sociologist, anthropologist and political theorist. He has also written under the pseudonym Paul Sandevince. Lazarus is a Professor at the Paris 8 University.

Sylvain Lazarus worked out a theory of the social function of political categorizations (cf. Anthropology of the Name, 1996), exploring in the anthropological field what his Lacanian friends Alain Badiou (Being and Event, 1988) and Jean-Claude Milner (The Indistinct Names, 1983) worked out, respectively, in the fields of philosophy, of linguistics and of psychoanalytic theory.

Lazarus's 1996 book 'Anthropologie du nom' (Anthropology of the Name) was translated into English in 2015. Previously, it was discussed at length by Alain Badiou in his Abrégé de Métapolitique (1998), now translated into English as Metapolitics (2005).

Following the student uprisings of May 1968 in France, Lazarus was a founding member of the (UCFml). To quote Badiou himself, the UCFml is "the Maoist organization established in late 1969 by Natacha Michel, Sylvain Lazarus, myself and a fair number of young people". Fifteen years later, Lazarus was a founding member (along with Badiou and Michel) of the militant French political organisation which called itself a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues (including immigration, labor, and housing). In addition to numerous writings and interventions since the 1980s, L'Organisation Politique has stressed the importance of developing political prescriptions concerning undocumented migrants (in France referred to as les sans papiers) and stresses that they must be conceived primarily as workers and not immigrants.

Since the 1990s, Sylvain Lazarus has focused much of his activism on the French suburbs (the banlieues). With the French anthropologist Alain Bertho, he founded, in 2008, l'Observatoire international des banlieues et des périphéries (OIBP) and which has produced studies in France, Brazil and Senegal.

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