Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou is a French philosopher, mathematician, and political writer whose work links set theory, truth, events, and emancipatory politics.

Set theory: The mathematical study of collections and their relations, formalized through axioms. Badiou uses axiomatic set theory to describe being as pure multiplicity.
Fidelity (Badiou): A commitment that investigates and extends the consequences of an event. Fidelity turns an event’s rupture into a continuing truth procedure.
Communism: A political tradition seeking a classless society based on common ownership and social equality. Badiou treats the communist hypothesis as a name for emancipatory political truth.
Plato: An ancient Greek philosopher whose dialogues shaped Western metaphysics, ethics, and political thought. Badiou presents himself as a Platonist committed to mathematical truth and universal ideas.
Martin Heidegger: A German philosopher whose work centers on the meaning of Being and human existence. Badiou rejects Heidegger’s priority of Being while assigning ontology to mathematics.
Ontology: The philosophical study of being and what exists. Badiou identifies ontology with mathematics rather than with a theory of objects.
Generic set: A set constructed to meet dense conditions while avoiding any single condition that defines it. Badiou draws on genericity to model truths that exceed established knowledge.
Theatre: A performing art in which actors present action before an audience. Badiou’s plays and theatre writing make dramatic form one site of thought and politics.
Louis Althusser: A French Marxist philosopher known for structuralist readings of Marx and theories of ideology. Althusser’s Marxism shaped Badiou’s early political and philosophical work.
Poststructuralism: A set of approaches questioning stable meanings, unified subjects, and foundational structures. Badiou argues for universal truths against philosophies that emphasize their historical or linguistic contingency.

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Simon LeysCompared with: Badiou represents a later philosophical defense of Maoism that contrasts with Leys’s historical criticism.