Alain Badiou

Abstract

Alain Badiou (b. 1937) is a leading French philosopher and European intellectual. He is the former chair of philosophy and emeritus professor at the École Normale Supérieure, one of France’s most prestigious and well-known graduate schools. His thought and political commitments, which revolve around a renewed idea of communism, were shaped by the student uprisings in France in 1968. A playwright, novelist, mathematician, and political activist, he is the author of hundreds of publications, which include novels, plays, pamphlets, criticism, political writings, and works of philosophy. Much of his earlier work focuses on the implications and consequences of the uprisings, which he submits to philosophical analysis and mathematical formalization to develop a materialist theory of the subject. Badiou achieved international prominence, however, with the publication of Being and Event, in which he grounds the question of being in mathematics, specifically set theory. His use of mathematics as a way to address the main questions of ontology—combined with meditations on art, science, politics, and love— provides the backbone of his philosophy. Badiou’s project, then, can generally be understood as focused on developing a theory of being, truth, and the subject, though in hindsight it is the question of truth, or truths, that constitutes its trajectory. Like many contemporary philosophers, Badiou, rather than considering being in light of unity or the one, considers it in terms of difference and multiplicity, whose relational organization can be grasped via formal, mathematical operations. Ontology, however, mainly serves in Badiou’s thought as a vehicle for thinking the event, or what is not being qua being. An event ruptures being, introducing novelty to closed situations or worlds. Although such events are rare, they instigate the creation of subjects who, in fidelity to an event, construct unexpected, novel truths. Following on his reading of Plato, who remains a constant inspiration for his philosophy, Badiou claims that truths can be produced in four domains: art, science, politics, and love. Philosophy, in this sense, does not produce truths but, rather, thinks them and their interrelation. Art, science, politics, and love are thus the raw materials for thought or, as he refers to them, the conditions for philosophy. The following article provides an overview of the main features of Badiou’s philosophy, including main primary texts, general overviews, anthologies, and a discussion of secondary literature related to the four conditions of philosophy. The concluding section focuses on religion, as an area that has generated a lot of discussion, perhaps against Badiou’s intent.