Alain Badiou

Based on Wikipedia: Alain Badiou

What if everything you thought you knew about truth was wrong? Not wrong in the sense of getting your facts mixed up, but wrong at the most fundamental level—wrong about what truth even is, how it comes into being, and whether it exists at all?

This is the question that has consumed Alain Badiou, a French philosopher born in 1937 who has spent his career arguing something almost scandalous in contemporary intellectual circles: that truth is real, universal, and eternal. In an age when most philosophers had concluded that truth is merely a cultural construction, that all claims to universal knowledge are really just power plays in disguise, Badiou stood almost alone in insisting otherwise.

But here's what makes Badiou genuinely strange: he reaches these conclusions not through traditional philosophical arguments, but through mathematics. Specifically, through set theory—the branch of mathematics that deals with collections of objects and their relationships. For Badiou, mathematics isn't just a useful tool or a pretty metaphor. Mathematics, he argues, actually is the science of being itself.

The Son of a Resistance Fighter

Badiou's biography reads like a novel of twentieth-century French intellectual life. His father, Raymond Badiou, was a mathematician who fought in the French Resistance during World War II. The young Alain attended the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, the same secondary school that had educated Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Jean-Paul Sartre, before moving on to the École Normale Supérieure—the intellectual hothouse that has produced more French philosophers, scientists, and statesmen than perhaps any other institution on earth.

At the École Normale, Badiou wrote his master's thesis on Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher who scandalized his contemporaries by arguing that God and Nature were one and the same thing. It was an appropriate choice for someone who would later develop his own highly systematic, almost geometric approach to philosophy.

After teaching at a secondary school in Reims, where he befriended the playwright François Regnault and wrote two novels, Badiou joined a study group organized by Louis Althusser. Althusser was then the most influential Marxist philosopher in France, famous for his "scientific" reading of Karl Marx that stripped away all the humanist sentiment and reduced Marxism to a rigorous analysis of social structures. Through Althusser, Badiou also encountered the work of Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalyst whose enigmatic seminars were drawing crowds of intellectuals eager to understand his radical reinterpretation of Sigmund Freud.

By the late 1960s, Badiou had already established himself as someone with an unusually strong grounding in both mathematics and the avant-garde intellectual movements of his time.

May 1968 and the Turn to Maoism

Then came May 1968. For a few weeks in the spring of that year, France seemed on the verge of revolution. Students occupied universities, workers went on strike, and the entire established order appeared to wobble. The movement ultimately failed to overthrow the government, but it transformed an entire generation of French intellectuals.

For Badiou, May 1968 reinforced his commitment to radical politics. He joined increasingly militant groups, eventually helping to found a Maoist organization called the Union of Communists of France (Marxist-Leninist), or UCFml for short. Maoism—the revolutionary ideology developed by Mao Zedong in China—attracted many French intellectuals in this period as an alternative to the Soviet-style communism that had been discredited by revelations of Stalin's crimes.

Badiou also joined the faculty of the newly created University of Paris VIII at Vincennes, a hotbed of radical thought established partly in response to the 1968 protests. There he sparred intellectually with colleagues like Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard, whose philosophical projects he considered dangerous deviations from the rigorous Marxism he had learned from Althusser.

This is worth pausing on, because it illustrates something important about Badiou. Even in his most politically radical phase, he remained committed to systematic rigor. While other post-1968 thinkers were abandoning grand theories in favor of what Lyotard called "little narratives," Badiou insisted that genuine thinking required precisely the kind of totalizing framework they were rejecting.

The Quiet Years and the Great Work

The 1980s were a difficult time for the French intellectual left. Althusser, who had mentored a generation of Marxist thinkers, was committed to a psychiatric hospital after strangling his wife in a psychotic episode. Lacan died in 1981. The entire theoretical apparatus that had sustained radical French thought seemed to collapse.

Badiou responded by going deeper into abstraction. In 1982, he published "Theory of the Subject," a dense work that began to develop his mature philosophical system. Then, in 1988, came his masterpiece: "Being and Event."

The title itself announces Badiou's ambition. He is addressing the most fundamental questions in philosophy: What does it mean for something to exist? What are the conditions under which genuinely new things can happen? And how do human beings become subjects capable of truth?

To answer these questions, Badiou turned to an unlikely source: Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, the axiomatic system that forms the foundation of modern mathematics. Named after the mathematicians Ernst Zermelo and Abraham Fraenkel, this system provides rigorous definitions for concepts like sets (collections of objects), membership (what it means for something to be in a set), and infinity (different sizes of infinite collections).

Why Mathematics?

To understand why Badiou thinks mathematics is so important, we need to consider a problem that has vexed philosophers since the ancient Greeks. When we talk about "being"—about what exists and what it means to exist—we face a paradox.

On the one hand, the things that exist are obviously multiple. Look around you: there are chairs, tables, people, ideas, numbers, feelings. The world is an irreducible plurality.

On the other hand, being itself—existence as such—seems to be singular. We talk about "Being" with a capital B as if it were one thing. The Greek philosopher Parmenides went so far as to argue that all apparent multiplicity is an illusion, that in reality there is only the One.

Badiou's radical move is to declare that "the One is not." There is no overarching unity that gathers all of existence together. Being is purely multiple, "multiples of multiples" all the way down. And the only language adequate to describing this radical multiplicity is the language of set theory, which allows us to think about collections without assuming any underlying unity.

This might sound like an obscure technical point, but its implications are profound. If being is purely multiple, then the traditional philosophical project of finding the hidden unity behind appearances is doomed from the start. There is no secret essence of reality waiting to be discovered. Reality is, at bottom, inconsistent multiplicity—what Badiou calls the "void."

The Event: When the Impossible Happens

If being is just an endless proliferation of multiplicities, how does anything genuinely new ever happen? How do we get revolutions, scientific discoveries, new art forms, transformative love affairs?

This is where Badiou's concept of the "event" comes in. An event is a rupture in the normal order of things, a moment when something that was invisible or impossible suddenly becomes visible and actual. The French Revolution was an event. So was the invention of twelve-tone music by Arnold Schoenberg. So is falling in love.

What makes an event an event, for Badiou, is that it cannot be predicted or explained by what came before. The conditions for an event may be present, but the event itself always comes as a surprise. It reveals something that was hidden in the situation—a "part" that escaped all previous accounting.

Here's the crucial point: an event, by its very nature, doesn't fit the existing categories of knowledge. It can't be fully captured by the language and frameworks that existed before it. This is why events are so often denied or suppressed by those committed to the established order. The event seems impossible, and it's always tempting to explain it away.

Truth as Fidelity

But what happens after an event? This is where Badiou's theory of truth comes in, and it's unlike any other theory of truth in the philosophical tradition.

For most philosophers, truth is something static. A statement is either true or false, and it's true if it corresponds to reality or coheres with other true statements or works successfully in practice. Badiou rejects all of these traditional approaches.

For Badiou, truth is a process. It begins when someone witnesses an event and makes a decision: they decide to remain faithful to what they have glimpsed. This fidelity—this ongoing commitment to the event—is what generates truth over time.

Consider an example. Two people fall in love. The initial encounter is an event—a rupture in their ordinary lives that reveals new possibilities. But the truth of that love is not established in a single moment. It is produced over years and decades as the lovers remain faithful to what they experienced, working out its implications, allowing it to transform their lives.

This is why Badiou says that "truth procedures proceed to infinity." You can never complete the work of being faithful to an event. There is always more to be discovered, more implications to be drawn out. Faith, in Badiou's sense, always outstrips knowledge.

The Four Conditions of Philosophy

Badiou identifies four domains in which events occur and truth procedures unfold: art, love, politics, and science. He calls these the "four conditions" of philosophy.

Each of these domains has its own internal logic and produces its own truths. Science discovers truths about the natural world. Art creates new forms of experience. Politics invents new possibilities for collective life. Love generates truths about what it means to exist as two, to construct a shared world.

Philosophy's job, according to Badiou, is not to produce truths itself. Rather, philosophy thinks about the relationship between the different truth procedures. It creates a space in which the truths produced by art, love, politics, and science can be thought together, in their "compossibility."

This leads to one of Badiou's most important warnings. Philosophy goes wrong when it "sutures" itself to just one of its conditions—when it tries to reduce everything to politics, or to science, or to art, or to love. The history of twentieth-century philosophy, Badiou argues, is largely a history of such disastrous sutures. Marxism sutured philosophy to politics. Analytic philosophy sutured itself to science. Heideggerian phenomenology sutured itself to poetry.

A healthy philosophy must keep all four conditions in play, without reducing any to the others.

Against Relativism

What sets Badiou apart from most of his contemporaries is his unflinching commitment to universalism. While postmodern thinkers argued that all truth claims are really just expressions of particular perspectives or power interests, Badiou insists that genuine truths are universal—they hold for everyone, regardless of culture, language, or social position.

This might sound like old-fashioned metaphysics, the kind of thing that poststructuralism was supposed to have demolished. But Badiou's universalism is strange. Truths are universal, yes, but they are not self-evident. They are not written in the structure of reality, waiting to be read off by any competent observer. They are produced through events and the fidelity of subjects.

In other words, Badiou combines the traditional claim that truths are eternal and unchanging with the postmodern insight that truths are constructed. How is this possible? Because, for Badiou, a truth's universality is precisely what makes it invisible under normal circumstances. Because a truth holds everywhere and always, it passes unnoticed. It takes an event—a rupture in the normal order—to make the truth discernible, even if only for a moment.

The Subject

One of Badiou's most provocative claims is that subjectivity—being a subject—is not a natural human condition. Most of the time, we are what Badiou calls "human animals": biological creatures pursuing our interests, speaking our languages, embedded in our social structures. There's nothing wrong with this, but it's not what Badiou means by being a subject.

A subject, in Badiou's technical sense, comes into being only through fidelity to an event. When you witness an event and commit yourself to working out its implications, you become a subject. The subject is not the cause of truth; rather, the subject is produced by the truth procedure it serves.

This has radical implications. It means that anyone can become a subject, regardless of their social position or cultural background. The lover, the revolutionary, the artist, the scientist—all of them become subjects through their fidelity to events. And it means that subjectivity is rare and precious, something that has to be achieved and maintained, not a default setting of human existence.

Democratic Materialism and Its Critique

Badiou has harsh words for what he calls the dominant ideology of our age: "democratic materialism." By this he means the widespread assumption that there are only "bodies and languages"—only biological creatures and the cultural systems they inhabit. In this view, there is no transcendence, no universal truth, no event that ruptures the existing order. There is only the endless management of differences and interests.

Against democratic materialism, Badiou proposes what he calls the "materialist dialectic." This view accepts that there are bodies and languages—it doesn't appeal to God or the soul or any supernatural realm. But it adds a crucial exception: "except that there are also truths."

This "except" is everything for Badiou. Without it, we are condemned to relativism and cynicism, to a world where nothing genuinely new can happen, where politics is just the management of competing interests and art is just entertainment. With it, we retain the possibility of transformation, of fidelity to events that break the grip of the established order.

Inaesthetics: A Theory of Art

Badiou's work on art deserves special attention, because it illustrates how his abstract theoretical apparatus applies to concrete human activities.

He uses a peculiar term: "inaesthetics." The prefix "in-" here doesn't mean "not" but rather indicates interiority—a thinking of art from within, rather than from outside. Traditional aesthetics treats art as an object to be analyzed. Inaesthetics recognizes that art itself produces truths that philosophy cannot produce on its own.

For Badiou, art is both "immanent" and "singular." It is immanent because its truth is given immediately in the work itself—you encounter it directly, not through a theory. It is singular because artistic truth can only be found in art, not derived from philosophy or science or any other domain.

Badiou has written extensively on the work of Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright and novelist whose spare, enigmatic works seem to reduce human existence to its bare minimum. He has also engaged deeply with the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, the nineteenth-century French symbolist who pushed language to its limits, and with Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet who wrote under multiple heteronyms, each with its own distinct style and philosophy.

About Pessoa, Badiou makes a remarkable claim: that the poet has produced a body of work that philosophy is currently incapable of fully incorporating. This is not a criticism of Pessoa but a recognition of art's power to outstrip philosophical understanding, to produce truths that philosophy must then struggle to think.

Politics Without Party

Given Badiou's background in Maoist militancy, his political philosophy deserves attention. He continues to describe himself as a communist, but his communism is unusual.

Badiou rejects both the parliamentary politics of liberal democracy and the party-state model of Soviet-style communism. Instead, he has been involved in various forms of direct political organization, most notably L'Organisation Politique, which he founded in 1985 and which operated until 2007.

For Badiou, genuine politics—politics as a truth procedure—is rare. Most of what passes for politics is simply the management of existing interests, what he calls "the state of the situation." Genuine politics occurs only when an event reveals new political possibilities and people organize in fidelity to that event.

The French Revolution, the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian Revolution in its early years, the Cultural Revolution in China (despite its catastrophic developments), May 1968—these were, for Badiou, genuine political events. Whether one agrees with his assessments, his framework provides a way of distinguishing between transformative politics and mere administration.

The Slow Reception

Badiou's work has had a curious trajectory. For years, he was relatively unknown outside France. "Being and Event" was published in 1988 but not translated into English until 2005—a full seventeen years later. In his own view, his combination of mathematical rigor with readings of poets and religious thinkers placed him awkwardly relative to his contemporaries.

But in the last two decades, his influence has grown dramatically. His works have been translated into numerous languages, and he has attracted followers not only in academic philosophy departments but among political activists in places like India, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Africa. His concept of the event has been particularly influential, providing a way of thinking about revolutionary change that doesn't rely on deterministic theories of history.

In 2002, Badiou co-founded the International Center for the Study of Contemporary French Philosophy, alongside his former student Quentin Meillassoux, who has become an important philosopher in his own right. The establishment of this center marked a kind of institutionalization of Badiou's approach, ensuring that his distinctive combination of mathematical ontology and political commitment would continue to develop.

A Philosophy for Our Time?

What are we to make of Badiou's philosophy? On the one hand, it seems almost perversely difficult, demanding that readers grapple with set theory, read across the entire history of philosophy, and maintain fidelity to a political vision that most would consider utterly unrealistic.

On the other hand, there is something bracing about his refusal to abandon the concepts of truth and universality. In an age of "alternative facts" and tribal epistemology, the insistence that truths exist—really exist, and hold for everyone—has a certain urgency.

Perhaps most importantly, Badiou offers a way of thinking about change that is neither naively optimistic nor cynically resigned. Events happen. They cannot be predicted or controlled. But when they happen, we have a choice: we can deny them and retreat into the familiar, or we can commit ourselves to working out their implications, becoming subjects in the process.

The question, for each of us, is what events we have witnessed, and whether we have the courage to remain faithful to them.