Alain Badiou is one of the most inventive and compelling philosophers working in France today, a thinker who, in these days of cynical resignation and academic specialization, is exceptional in every sense.

Guided by disciplines ranging from mathematics to psychoanalysis, Badiou's work renews, in the most varied and spectacular terms, a decidedly ancient understanding of philosophy as a practice conditioned by truths, understood as militant processes of emancipation or transformation.

This book is the first comprehensive introduction to Badiou's thought to appear in any language. Assuming no prior knowledge of his work, it provides a thorough and searching overview of all the main components of his philosophy, from its decisive political orientation through its startling equation of ontology with mathematics to its resolute engagement with its principal competition (from Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Deleuze, among others).

The book draws on all of Badiou's published work and a wide sampling of his unpublished work in progress, along with six years of correspondence with the author.

University Of Minnesota Press, 2003.
ISBN: 9780816634613. 467 pp.
Foreword by Slavoj Žižek.
Softcover. Near fine.