Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou (born 1937, Rabat, Morocco) is a prominent French left-wing philosopher who is currently the chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure.
Badiou was trained formally as a mathematician as a student at the École Normale Supérieure (1956-1961), where took courses at the Sorbonne. He was politically active very early on, and was one of the founding members of the United Socialist Party (PSU), an offshoot of the French Communist Party that was articularly active in the sturggle for decolonization in Algeria. Throughout the 1960s Badiou's interests broadened - he wrote his first novel in 1964 and began studying philosophy, the discipline that would eventually become his main focus. In 1967 he joined a study group organized by Louis Althusser and grew increasingly influenced by Jacques Lacan.
The student uprisings of May 1968 had a huge impact on Badiou. While 1968 politicized many intellectuals, it merely reinforced Badiou's commitment to the far left, and continued to organize communist and Maoist groups such as the UCFML. In 1969 he joined the faculty of University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis), which was a bastion of counter-cultural thought. There he engaged in fierce intellectual debates with fellow professors Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard, whose leftist philosophy he considered an unhealthy deviation of more main-line Marxism. In 1988 he published his major statement, Etre et l'Evenement. He took up his current position at École Normale Supérieure in 1999. He is also associated with a number of institutions, such as the European Graduate School and the stub. You can help BambooWeb by .
