ABSTRACT
Alain Badiou's theory of revolutionary subjectivity emerged via his engagement with Maoism in France during the 1980s. In the early 1970s many of France's Maoist organisations began to dissolve, and the hopes and fervour of 1968 gave way to a very different political and intellectual climate. For Badiou revolutionary subjectivity is defined by nothing else than the particularity of the truth procedure that it comes to define itself through. For Badiou there can be no economic battle against the economy, and thus revolutionary subjectivity today must create and engage a form of political activity that is completely heterogeneous to the demands of capital. Whilst it is true that Badiou had already registered the crisis of Marxism, it was the failure of the Chinese Cultural Revolution that, he would later accept, had brought an end to a particular sequence of political militancy. The first sequence of the communist hypothesis Badiou dates from the French Revolution up until the Paris Commune.
