COML 6283

Badiou: Politics and Thought

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

This seminar offers a relatively comprehensive survey of the thought and political theory of Alain Badiou, from his engagement in Althusser’s circle, to his political participation in May ’68 and its aftermath, the experience of the UCFML and its successor, L’organisation politique, and his vast body of philosophical and political writing from the 1990s onwards. In direct readings from the whole of Badiou’s body of work, we will trace key concepts such as the void, ontology as mathematics, the figure of the subject and its retrospective convocation, the event, fidelity, the suture, and more, explore the relationship of Badiou’s work to figures such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Heidegger, Deleuze, and others, along with examinations of Badiou’s longtime collaborators Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel.

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