Badiou, Alain (1937–)
B
Badiou, Alain (1937–)
Keith Woodward
French radical philosopher, novelist, playwright,
and activist, Badiou was born in Rabat, Morocco
and studied under Jean Hyppolite and Georges
Canguilhem at the École Normale Supérieure in
the late 1950s. His philosophical project brings
speculative thought – articulated by the decision
that “mathematics = ontology” – to bear upon
four “conditions” (art, science, love, and politics)
that reveal situated-yet-universal truths for
which philosophy must account. In the context
of politics, Badiou employs philosophy as a form
of “metapolitics” that can describe situated
(rather than “historic”) processes of militant
subjectivization and political change.
Badiou was radicalized by the student/worker
revolts of May and June 1968, during which he
embraced Marxist-Leninist Maoism. Although
many among the French academic Left eventually distanced themselves from Maoist philosophy, it continued to be Badiou’s driving analytic
for nearly two decades and arguably remains a
strong influence in his recent work. In 1969, he
was invited by Michel Foucault to join the faculty
of the philosophy department at the turbulent
Experimental University of Vincennes, an
institution newly established as a concession
to the revolutionary soixante-huitards. There,
Badiou was a member of one of several Maoist
factions on campus who would frequently
protest against colleagues, such as Gilles Deleuze,
whom they considered to be politically reactionary or “anarcho-desirers.” “Once,” he recalls
in his book on Deleuze, “I even commanded
a ‘brigade’ of intervention in his course”
(Badiou 2000: 2).
During the 1960s, Badiou was associated
with the influential theory collective Cahiers
pour l’analyse and, prior to 1968, was a member
of Louis Althusser”s secretive Groupe Spinoza,
which had attempted to construct a new ideological structure for the French Communist
Party (PCF). Shortly thereafter, he turned to
nonparliamentarian forms of political organization and struggle. In response to the dissolution of the Union des jeunesse communistes
marxiste-léniniste – the Maoist branch of the
PCF that was famously ineffectual during the
events of 1968 – Badiou cofounded the Union
des communistes français marxiste-léniniste
(UCF-ml) in 1969. One of many French
“orthodox” Maoist groups to emerge in the late
1960s and early 1970s, the UCF-ml’s membership was largely anti-electoral intellectuals
who embraced Mao”s notion of “investigation”
into the conditions of the exploited and
focused on assisting “immigrant workers who
The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, First Edition. Edited by Michael Gibbons.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
0002087369.INDD 1
1/16/2014 10:42:55 PM
2
badiou, alain (1937–)
were still locked into the shantytowns known
as bidonvilles” (Fields 1988: 98).
During the 1980s, Badiou moved beyond
Maoism to embrace a broader range of situated politics. He cocreated the Organization
Politique (OP) with a small group of former
members of the recently disbanded UCF-ml.
Identifying as a “party without a party,” OP
mobilized against the political “inexistence”
experienced by marginalized groups who lack
representation in statist politics. OP also organized with immigrant laborers in France,
known as the “sans papiers,” whose lack of
identification papers leaves them politically
unrecognizable by state institutions (citizenship,
healthcare, etc.) Other areas of political erasure
recognized by OP included work – in “the
campaign for workers” compensation during
the closure of the Renault factory at Billancourt
in 1992” – and housing – in “the campaign
against the demolition of the foyers ouvriers
(workers’ hostels) in the Paris suburb of
Montreuil (1996 through 1998)” (Hallward
2003: 234). Not coincidentally, the political
shift from the more orthodox Maoism of
UCF-ml to the broad-based, localized politics
of OP closely mirrors a similar transition within
Badiou’s philosophy.
Badiou’s mature philosophical contributions
to political theory explore the relationship between ontology and politics. He insists that it is
not the job of philosophy or philosophers to
dictate politics. Rather, “philosophy depends
upon certain nonphilosophical domains” for
its development (Badiou 2012a: 2). Four
domains (science, art, love, and politics) serve
as the sites of “generic procedures” that undergo
occasional transformations – “events,” such as
the discovery of new scientific paradigms or the
emergence of new forms of militant politics –
and give rise to new truths. These constitute
new “conditions” for philosophy that its
ontology must subsequently incorporate and
address. Philosophy always comes after the
occurrence of a nonphilosophical event (and
thus, “after” politics), and addresses itself to
those new truth conditions as universal components of a changing world.
0002087369.INDD 2
From the beginning, the question of change
and its relation to politics drives Badiou’s
philosophical project. The Maoist period that
opened his career is represented by a trilogy
of books devoted to materialist “science” of
dialectics, contradiction, and ideology. This
influence remains, but by the 1980s the first
elements of a changing, “mature” philosophy
appeared with the major work, Theory of the
Subject. This text rejects one of the most
famous tropes of his early “master”: Althusser”s
espousal of “history without a subject.” Instead,
borrowing heavily upon Lacan, Badiou (2009)
argues that a certain kind of subject does exist,
though its occurence is rare. Badiou”s subject is
the product of an event and the new truths it
reveals: one becomes a subject by maintaining a
fidelity to those new truths. Thus, the subject is
both that which recognizes the event and that
which is constituted by it, through a fidelity to
its truth. As a militant subject, Badiou, for
example, remains faithful to his fellow soixante-huitards and the lessons of 1968. With the
arrival of this relation between events, truths,
and subjects, Bosteels (2005) identifies a
transition in Badiou’s politics from “serving the
people” to “serving the truth.”
By boldly declaring that “mathematics = ontology,” Badiou’s mature philosophy
offers a novel ontological system and an
alternative to the notion of the “end of philosophy” in Heideggerian poetics. In Being and
Event (2005 [1988]) and Logics of Worlds (2009
[2006]), his magnum opera, Badiou employs
the analytics of Cantorian set theory to illustrate that being is multiple (rather than one)
and that existence is subject to change through
the production of new truths. The crucial relation between being and event thus differs from
accounts by Heidegger – where being “‘gives
itself ’ as event” – and Sartre – for whom the
terms are irresistibly separated as two distinct
realms. Instead, Badiou understands the relation as “articulated through a grip or deadlock”: it is this “impasse of being” that “a
subject, in the event of truth that induces it,
retroactively enables to ‘pass’ into existence”
(Bosteels 2011: 7).
1/16/2014 10:42:55 PM
badiou, alain (1937–)
Truths “exist as exceptions to what there is”
(Badiou 2009: 4). Generic procedures carry a
universalism – truth – existing in addition to
contemporary worlds. Politically, Badiou’s
target is “democratic materialism,” where
opinion or doxa (rather than truth) reigns
amidst bodies (individual singularities) and
languages (cultural constructions). He associates democratic materialism with the liberal
ideology of the popular French philosophers
and political establishment of the 1980s and
1990s, who celebrated neoliberal capitalism and
identitarian relativism while declaring the death
of the ideas of May 1968. Truths, according
to Badiou, unify worlds and thus, “introduce,
within the play of established opinions, a sudden
change of scale” (2011: 24; emphasis original).
Whereas languages and bodies belong to a
specific world, truths belong to all worlds (they
are “indifferent” to the world) and thus “affirm”
the unity of worlds, despite the apparent fragmentariness of the view of democratic materialism. The guideline for philosophy (that is,
establishing what thought is or how to think), is
therefore to begin with the “restrictive exception
of truths and not the freedom of opinion” (2011:
25; emphasis original). Thus, Badiou considers
thought to be a kind of labor involving “process,
production, constraint, and discipline” (25):
When I speak of political truth, this does not
involve a judgement but a process…A truth is
something that exists in its active process, which
manifests this process. Truths are not prior to
political processes; there is no question of
confirming or applying them. Truths are
reality itself, as a process of production of
political novelties, political sequences, political
revolutions, and so forth. (2012b: 87)
SEE ALSO: Althusser, Louis (1918–90);
Communism; Deleuze, Gilles (1925–95); Foucault,
Michel (1925–95); Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976);
Maoism; Marxism–Leninism; Metaphysics and
Postmetaphysics; Radicalism; Revolution; State,
The; Universalism/Universalization
0002087369.INDD 3
3
References
Badiou, A. (2000) Deleuze: The Clamor of Being,
trans. L. Burchill. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Badiou, A. (2005 [1988]) Being and Event, trans.
O. Feltham. New York: Continuum.
Badiou, A. (2009 [2006]) Logics of Worlds: Being
and Event, 2, trans. A. Toscano. New York:
Continuum.
Badiou, A. (2009) Theory of the Subject, trans.
B. Bosteels. New York: Continuum.
Badiou, A. (2011) Second Manifesto for Philosophy,
trans. L. Burchill. Cambridge: Polity.
Badiou, A. (2012a) Philosophy for Militants, trans.
B. Bosteels. New York: Verso.
Badiou, A. (2012b) The Rebirth of History, trans.
G. Elliot. New York: Verso.
Bosteels, B. (2005) “Post-Maoism: Badiou and
Politics,” Positions, 13, 575–634.
Bosteels, B. (2011) Badiou and Politics. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Fields, A. B. (1988) Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory
and Practice in France and the United States.
New York: Praeger.
Hallward, P. (2003) Badiou: A Subject to Truth.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Further Reading
Badiou, A. (2001) Ethics, trans. P. Hallward. New
York: Verso.
Badiou, A. (2003) Saint Paul: The Foundation of
Universalism, trans. R. Brassier. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Badiou, A. (2005) Metapolitics, trans. J. Barker.
New York: Verso.
Badiou, A. (2006) Polemics, trans. S. Corcoran.
New York: Verso.
Badiou, A. (2008) The Meaning of Sarkozy, trans.
D. Fernbach. New York: Verso.
Badiou, A. (2010) The Communist Hypothesis,
trans. D. Macey and S. Corcoran. New York:
Verso.
Baring, E. (2011) The Young Derrida and French
Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Bosteels, B. (2011) The Actuality of Communism.
New York: Verso.
1/16/2014 10:42:56 PM
0002087369.INDD 4
1/16/2014 10:42:56 PM
Badiou, Alain (1937–)
Keith Woodward
French radical philosopher, novelist, playwright,
and activist, Badiou was born in Rabat, Morocco
and studied under Jean Hyppolite and Georges
Canguilhem at the École Normale Supérieure in
the late 1950s. His philosophical project brings
speculative thought – articulated by the decision
that “mathematics = ontology” – to bear upon
four “conditions” (art, science, love, and politics)
that reveal situated-yet-universal truths for
which philosophy must account. In the context
of politics, Badiou employs philosophy as a form
of “metapolitics” that can describe situated
(rather than “historic”) processes of militant
subjectivization and political change.
Badiou was radicalized by the student/worker
revolts of May and June 1968, during which he
embraced Marxist-Leninist Maoism. Although
many among the French academic Left eventually distanced themselves from Maoist philosophy, it continued to be Badiou’s driving analytic
for nearly two decades and arguably remains a
strong influence in his recent work. In 1969, he
was invited by Michel Foucault to join the faculty
of the philosophy department at the turbulent
Experimental University of Vincennes, an
institution newly established as a concession
to the revolutionary soixante-huitards. There,
Badiou was a member of one of several Maoist
factions on campus who would frequently
protest against colleagues, such as Gilles Deleuze,
whom they considered to be politically reactionary or “anarcho-desirers.” “Once,” he recalls
in his book on Deleuze, “I even commanded
a ‘brigade’ of intervention in his course”
(Badiou 2000: 2).
During the 1960s, Badiou was associated
with the influential theory collective Cahiers
pour l’analyse and, prior to 1968, was a member
of Louis Althusser”s secretive Groupe Spinoza,
which had attempted to construct a new ideological structure for the French Communist
Party (PCF). Shortly thereafter, he turned to
nonparliamentarian forms of political organization and struggle. In response to the dissolution of the Union des jeunesse communistes
marxiste-léniniste – the Maoist branch of the
PCF that was famously ineffectual during the
events of 1968 – Badiou cofounded the Union
des communistes français marxiste-léniniste
(UCF-ml) in 1969. One of many French
“orthodox” Maoist groups to emerge in the late
1960s and early 1970s, the UCF-ml’s membership was largely anti-electoral intellectuals
who embraced Mao”s notion of “investigation”
into the conditions of the exploited and
focused on assisting “immigrant workers who
The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, First Edition. Edited by Michael Gibbons.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
0002087369.INDD 1
1/16/2014 10:42:55 PM
2
badiou, alain (1937–)
were still locked into the shantytowns known
as bidonvilles” (Fields 1988: 98).
During the 1980s, Badiou moved beyond
Maoism to embrace a broader range of situated politics. He cocreated the Organization
Politique (OP) with a small group of former
members of the recently disbanded UCF-ml.
Identifying as a “party without a party,” OP
mobilized against the political “inexistence”
experienced by marginalized groups who lack
representation in statist politics. OP also organized with immigrant laborers in France,
known as the “sans papiers,” whose lack of
identification papers leaves them politically
unrecognizable by state institutions (citizenship,
healthcare, etc.) Other areas of political erasure
recognized by OP included work – in “the
campaign for workers” compensation during
the closure of the Renault factory at Billancourt
in 1992” – and housing – in “the campaign
against the demolition of the foyers ouvriers
(workers’ hostels) in the Paris suburb of
Montreuil (1996 through 1998)” (Hallward
2003: 234). Not coincidentally, the political
shift from the more orthodox Maoism of
UCF-ml to the broad-based, localized politics
of OP closely mirrors a similar transition within
Badiou’s philosophy.
Badiou’s mature philosophical contributions
to political theory explore the relationship between ontology and politics. He insists that it is
not the job of philosophy or philosophers to
dictate politics. Rather, “philosophy depends
upon certain nonphilosophical domains” for
its development (Badiou 2012a: 2). Four
domains (science, art, love, and politics) serve
as the sites of “generic procedures” that undergo
occasional transformations – “events,” such as
the discovery of new scientific paradigms or the
emergence of new forms of militant politics –
and give rise to new truths. These constitute
new “conditions” for philosophy that its
ontology must subsequently incorporate and
address. Philosophy always comes after the
occurrence of a nonphilosophical event (and
thus, “after” politics), and addresses itself to
those new truth conditions as universal components of a changing world.
0002087369.INDD 2
From the beginning, the question of change
and its relation to politics drives Badiou’s
philosophical project. The Maoist period that
opened his career is represented by a trilogy
of books devoted to materialist “science” of
dialectics, contradiction, and ideology. This
influence remains, but by the 1980s the first
elements of a changing, “mature” philosophy
appeared with the major work, Theory of the
Subject. This text rejects one of the most
famous tropes of his early “master”: Althusser”s
espousal of “history without a subject.” Instead,
borrowing heavily upon Lacan, Badiou (2009)
argues that a certain kind of subject does exist,
though its occurence is rare. Badiou”s subject is
the product of an event and the new truths it
reveals: one becomes a subject by maintaining a
fidelity to those new truths. Thus, the subject is
both that which recognizes the event and that
which is constituted by it, through a fidelity to
its truth. As a militant subject, Badiou, for
example, remains faithful to his fellow soixante-huitards and the lessons of 1968. With the
arrival of this relation between events, truths,
and subjects, Bosteels (2005) identifies a
transition in Badiou’s politics from “serving the
people” to “serving the truth.”
By boldly declaring that “mathematics = ontology,” Badiou’s mature philosophy
offers a novel ontological system and an
alternative to the notion of the “end of philosophy” in Heideggerian poetics. In Being and
Event (2005 [1988]) and Logics of Worlds (2009
[2006]), his magnum opera, Badiou employs
the analytics of Cantorian set theory to illustrate that being is multiple (rather than one)
and that existence is subject to change through
the production of new truths. The crucial relation between being and event thus differs from
accounts by Heidegger – where being “‘gives
itself ’ as event” – and Sartre – for whom the
terms are irresistibly separated as two distinct
realms. Instead, Badiou understands the relation as “articulated through a grip or deadlock”: it is this “impasse of being” that “a
subject, in the event of truth that induces it,
retroactively enables to ‘pass’ into existence”
(Bosteels 2011: 7).
1/16/2014 10:42:55 PM
badiou, alain (1937–)
Truths “exist as exceptions to what there is”
(Badiou 2009: 4). Generic procedures carry a
universalism – truth – existing in addition to
contemporary worlds. Politically, Badiou’s
target is “democratic materialism,” where
opinion or doxa (rather than truth) reigns
amidst bodies (individual singularities) and
languages (cultural constructions). He associates democratic materialism with the liberal
ideology of the popular French philosophers
and political establishment of the 1980s and
1990s, who celebrated neoliberal capitalism and
identitarian relativism while declaring the death
of the ideas of May 1968. Truths, according
to Badiou, unify worlds and thus, “introduce,
within the play of established opinions, a sudden
change of scale” (2011: 24; emphasis original).
Whereas languages and bodies belong to a
specific world, truths belong to all worlds (they
are “indifferent” to the world) and thus “affirm”
the unity of worlds, despite the apparent fragmentariness of the view of democratic materialism. The guideline for philosophy (that is,
establishing what thought is or how to think), is
therefore to begin with the “restrictive exception
of truths and not the freedom of opinion” (2011:
25; emphasis original). Thus, Badiou considers
thought to be a kind of labor involving “process,
production, constraint, and discipline” (25):
When I speak of political truth, this does not
involve a judgement but a process…A truth is
something that exists in its active process, which
manifests this process. Truths are not prior to
political processes; there is no question of
confirming or applying them. Truths are
reality itself, as a process of production of
political novelties, political sequences, political
revolutions, and so forth. (2012b: 87)
SEE ALSO: Althusser, Louis (1918–90);
Communism; Deleuze, Gilles (1925–95); Foucault,
Michel (1925–95); Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976);
Maoism; Marxism–Leninism; Metaphysics and
Postmetaphysics; Radicalism; Revolution; State,
The; Universalism/Universalization
0002087369.INDD 3
3
References
Badiou, A. (2000) Deleuze: The Clamor of Being,
trans. L. Burchill. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Badiou, A. (2005 [1988]) Being and Event, trans.
O. Feltham. New York: Continuum.
Badiou, A. (2009 [2006]) Logics of Worlds: Being
and Event, 2, trans. A. Toscano. New York:
Continuum.
Badiou, A. (2009) Theory of the Subject, trans.
B. Bosteels. New York: Continuum.
Badiou, A. (2011) Second Manifesto for Philosophy,
trans. L. Burchill. Cambridge: Polity.
Badiou, A. (2012a) Philosophy for Militants, trans.
B. Bosteels. New York: Verso.
Badiou, A. (2012b) The Rebirth of History, trans.
G. Elliot. New York: Verso.
Bosteels, B. (2005) “Post-Maoism: Badiou and
Politics,” Positions, 13, 575–634.
Bosteels, B. (2011) Badiou and Politics. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Fields, A. B. (1988) Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory
and Practice in France and the United States.
New York: Praeger.
Hallward, P. (2003) Badiou: A Subject to Truth.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Further Reading
Badiou, A. (2001) Ethics, trans. P. Hallward. New
York: Verso.
Badiou, A. (2003) Saint Paul: The Foundation of
Universalism, trans. R. Brassier. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Badiou, A. (2005) Metapolitics, trans. J. Barker.
New York: Verso.
Badiou, A. (2006) Polemics, trans. S. Corcoran.
New York: Verso.
Badiou, A. (2008) The Meaning of Sarkozy, trans.
D. Fernbach. New York: Verso.
Badiou, A. (2010) The Communist Hypothesis,
trans. D. Macey and S. Corcoran. New York:
Verso.
Baring, E. (2011) The Young Derrida and French
Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Bosteels, B. (2011) The Actuality of Communism.
New York: Verso.
1/16/2014 10:42:56 PM
0002087369.INDD 4
1/16/2014 10:42:56 PM