ABSTRACT
Alain Badiou (b. 1937) was born in Rabat, Morocco. He studied at the École normale supérieure in the 1950s where he trained as a mathematician. From 1969 to 1999, he taught at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes-Saint Denis. In 1999, he was named chair of philosophy at the École normale supérieure. Badiou also teaches at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. His work makes major contributions not only to philosophy and political theory, but also to mathematics, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics. Badiou is one of the most radical and influential philosophers of our time, a peer of Michel FOUCAULT and Jacques DERRIDA. Badiou rejects the contemporary reduction of philosophy to nothing but a matter of language, thereby setting himself against both analytic and continental modes of philosophy. Reiterating the traditional Platonic concerns of philosophy through the lens of Cantor’s set theory and the work of Jacques LACAN, Badiou has articulated a powerful systematic and interventionist philosophy with profound ethical and political consequences.
