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[Alain Badiou (born 17 January 1937 in Rabat, Morocco) is a prominent
French philosopher, formerly chair of philosophy at the =C9cole Normale
Sup=E9rieure (ENS). Along with Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek, Badiou
is a prominent figure in an anti-postmodern strand of continental
philosophy. Particularly through a creative appropriation of set
theory from his early interest in mathematics, Badiou seeks to recover
the concepts of being, truth and the subject in a way that is neither
postmodern nor simply a repetition of modernity.

 He was politically active very early on, and was one of the founding
members of the Unified Socialist Party (PSU). The PSU was particularly
active in the struggle for the decolonization of Algeria. He wrote his
first novel, Almagestes, in 1964. In 1967 he joined a study group
organized by Louis Althusser and grew increasingly influenced by
Jacques Lacan. The student uprisings of May 1968 reinforced Badiou's
commitment to the far Left, and he participated in increasingly
radical communist and Maoist groups, such as the UCFML. In 1969 he
joined the faculty of University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint
Denis), which was a bastion of counter-cultural thought. There he
engaged in fierce intellectual debates with fellow professors Gilles
Deleuze and Jean-Fran=E7ois Lyotard, whose philosophical works he
considered unhealthy deviations from the Althusserian program of a
scientific Marxism. In the 1980s, as both Althusserian Marxism and
Lacanian psychoanalysis went into decline (with Lacan dead and
Althusser in an asylum), Badiou published more technical and abstract
philosophical works, such as Th=E9orie du sujet (1982), and his magnum
opus, Being and Event (1988).]