I was trained formally as a philosopher at the ENS (1956-1961), where I took courses at the Sorbonne. I had/have a lively and constant interest in mathematics. I was politically active very early on, and was one of the founding members of the United Socialist Party (PSU), an offshoot of the French Communist Party. The PSU was particularly active in the struggle for the decolonization of Algeria. I wrote my first novel in 1964. In 1967 I joined a study group organized by Louis Althusser and grew increasingly influenced by Jacques Lacan.
The student uprisings of May 1968 had a huge impact on me. While 1968 politicized many intellectuals, it merely reinforced my commitment to the ultra left, and I continued to organize communist and Maoist groups such as the UCFML. In 1969 I joined the faculty of University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis), which was a bastion of counter-cultural thought. There I engaged in fierce intellectual debates with fellow professors Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard, whose leftist philosophy I considered an unhealthy deviation of more main-line Marxism. In 1988 I published my major statement, L'être et l'événement (Being and Event). I took up my current position at the ENS in 1999. I am also associated with a number of other institutions, such as the European Graduate School and the Collège International de Philosophie. I am now a member of "L'Organisation Politique" which I founded with some comrades in 1985.
Some of My Writing in English
The Adventure of French Philosophy
Behind the Scarfed Law, There is Fear (On the French headscarf ban)
The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?
Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic
Eight Theses on the Universal
An Essential Philosophical Thesis: "It Is Right to Rebel against the Reactionaries"
Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art
Further Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution
Highly Speculative Reasoning on the Concept of Democracy (from Metapolitics)
Number and Numbers (A partial translation of my book Le nombre et les nombres on Number Theory)
On the European Constitution
On the Truth-Process (Lecture and discussion)
One Divides into Two (On Lenin)
Philosophy and Politics
The Political as a Truth Procedure (from Metapolitics)
Politics: a Non-expressive Dialectics
The Scene of Two (English translation from De l'amour)
Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution
The Subject of Art (Deitch Projects, New York, April 1 2005)
The Triumphant Restoration
What Happens (On Beckett)
What is to be Thought? What is to be Done? (On the 2002 French elections; written by me, Sylvain Lazarus and Natasha Michel)
What is Love?
