Red Years
The Red Years (Les Années Rouges) features three key texts by renowned and controversial contemporary French philosopher, Alain Badiou: Theory of Contradiction, Of Ideology, and The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic. Hitherto unavailable in English, these three texts elucidate the formative role of Badiou’s Maoist ‘phase’ – an essential moment in his political and philosophical trajectory. Furthermore, these texts are vital to any understanding of radical French thought and politics in the 1970s, and in the wake of the Cultural Revolution.
The Red Years also features original essays from leading commentators Tzuchien Tho, and a concluding essay by Bruno Bosteels, which argues for the presence of Maoism in Badiou’s mature thought. Badiou has also written a wholly new preface for this edition.
Alain Badiou is a hugely influential French philosopher, and teaches at the École Normale Supérieure at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, France.
Steven Corcoran is a writer and translator living in Berlin. He has edited and/or translated several works by Jacques Rancière, including Dissensus (Continuum, 2010), two works by Alain Badiou, Polemics and Conditions, and Alienation and Freedom (Bloomsbury 2017) by Frantz Fanon.