ABSTRACT

This chapter summarizes the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s “Marxism” in terms of the very contradictions, heterogeneity and inconsistencies that have discredited it in the eyes of many of his contemporaries. Since the mid-1950s Badiou’s fidelity to a Marxism heavily informed by the teaching of Louis Althusser at the École normale supérieure has been sustained through his shifting party loyalties and, with the decline and eventual collapse of the socialist states, the crisis of the left. The author highlights three main consecutive phases of Badiou’s philosophy from which a particular Marxist problematic can be inferred in each case: an epistemological phase; a Maoist phase; a philosophical (meta-ontological) phase.