Alain Badiou's Books, Ranked: From Being and Event to A Political Life

Alain Badiou is the last great system-builder of French philosophy. Born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1937, he studied at the École normale supérieure, was radicalized by May 1968, spent years as a Maoist militant, and went on to write one of the strangest and most ambitious bodies of work of the past half-century. Its foundation is a wager that mathematics, specifically set theory, is ontology, and that philosophy’s job is to think the rare “events” that break with the way things are: a revolution, a scientific discovery, a work of art, a love.

Badiou is now in his late eighties and still publishing. In 2025 two more of his books appeared in English, and in 2026 Polity published his political memoir. The difficulty is knowing where to start, because the major treatises are forbidding and the short books can sound like slogans without them. This ranking weighs philosophical importance, readability, and what each book adds to the system.

Where to start

Don’t open Being and Event first. Start with one of the short books, Ethics or In Praise of Love, then read Saint Paul to see what Badiou means by an “event.” Manifesto for Philosophy gives you the map, and after that you’re ready for Being and Event itself.

1. Being and Event (1988; English 2005)

The masterpiece, and the book everything else orbits. Being and Event argues that being is pure multiplicity, best described by set theory, and that the structure of any situation (what Badiou calls the “count-as-one”) never quite captures everything in it. An event is the irruption of what the situation couldn’t count, and a subject is whoever stays faithful to it. Read it slowly, with a guide if necessary. Nothing else in contemporary continental philosophy is quite this bold.

2. Logics of Worlds (2006; English 2009)

The second volume of the trilogy. Where Being and Event asked what being is, Logics of Worlds asks how things appear in a particular world, and how a truth can transform one. Badiou swaps set theory for category theory and adds a theory of bodies and of the different subjective responses to an event: faithful, reactive and obscure. Its preface sums up his position in a slogan. Contemporary common sense says there are only bodies and languages. Badiou adds: except that there are truths.

3. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (1993; English 2001)

The best way in. Ethics is short and polemical, and it attacks the “ethics” of human rights and victimhood that became liberal common sense in the 1990s. An ethics built only on what we must prevent, Badiou argues, is conservative at heart. A real ethics is an ethic of truths: fidelity to an event that has seized you. The book also gives his account of evil as simulacrum, betrayal and disaster, the three ways a truth process can go wrong.

4. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (1997; English 2003)

An atheist Marxist writes a book in praise of the apostle Paul, and it becomes one of the most influential works in the “theological turn” of radical philosophy. In Saint Paul, Paul is the militant of an event (the resurrection, which Badiou treats as a fable) who declares a truth addressed to everyone, “neither Jew nor Greek.” It’s Badiou’s most readable treatment of universality, and it set Žižek and Agamben writing their own books on Paul.

5. The Immanence of Truths (2018; English 2022)

The long-awaited final volume of the trilogy. The Immanence of Truths asks how a truth produced inside a particular world can nonetheless be absolute, and it argues through the mathematics of infinity: finitude is the form that oppression takes, while truths are made of the infinite. Read it once you’ve already been converted.

6. In Praise of Love (2009; English 2012)

A conversation with the journalist Nicolas Truong, and Badiou at his most charming. In Praise of Love attacks the dating-site promise of love without risk and argues that love is a “Scene of Two”: a truth procedure in which two people build a world from the point of view of difference rather than identity. It’s barely a hundred pages and works as an introduction to his whole philosophy disguised as a book about romance.

7. The Century (2005; English 2007)

Badiou’s lectures on the twentieth century, which he reads through its poems, manifestos and political sequences. The Century diagnoses the century’s “passion for the real,” the desire to make the new happen now, at any cost. It’s one of his most vivid books, and it pairs well with Žižek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real, which borrows the phrase.

8. Theory of the Subject (1982; English 2009)

The pre-system Badiou: a book built from his seminars of the late 1970s, steeped in Hegel, Mallarmé and Lacan. Theory of the Subject is wilder and more openly political than Being and Event, and it shows how much of the later system began as an attempt to think revolution after 1968.

9. Manifesto for Philosophy (1989; English 1999)

A short book that announces the program. Philosophy has four “conditions” (science, art, politics and love), Badiou argues, and it goes wrong whenever it “sutures” itself to just one of them. Manifesto for Philosophy is the clearest map of the system.

10. In Praise of Philosophy (English 2025)

His latest “In Praise of” book in English, and the most playful. In Praise of Philosophy is a dialogue in which a professor named Tocéras talks through democracy, freedom, universality, language and being with interlocutors from around the world. It’s a fine late introduction, though less essential than the books above.

Honorable mentions

• A Political Life: 1937–1985 (English 2026): his newest book in English, an autobiographical account that runs from his birth in Morocco through May 1968 and his Maoist years.
• Parmenides: Ontological Figure, Being 1 (English 2025): the 1985–86 seminar in which many ideas of Being and Event first take shape.
• The True Life (2016; English 2017): lectures addressed to young people on corruption and what it means to live well.
• Philosophy in the Present (with Slavoj Žižek; English 2009): a short public exchange about what philosophy is for.

Badiou and his contemporaries

Badiou’s closest ally is Slavoj Žižek, and their differences are instructive. Both are Lacanians, communists and defenders of universal truth against relativism. But where Badiou bets on the event, Žižek’s Less Than Nothing keeps returning to Hegel and to the negativity that undoes every positive project. Giorgio Agamben answered Saint Paul with The Time That Remains, which reads Paul’s messianic time rather than his universalism. Byung-Chul Han’s The Agony of Eros carries a foreword by Badiou, and the two share a hostility to love without risk. Peter Sloterdijk is the sharpest skeptic in the room. His Rage and Time treats revolutionary movements as “banks” that collect and invest rage, a deflationary account of the very political fidelity that Badiou defends.

One to watch: Rafael Gallardo

Badiou’s question is whether anything genuinely new can break into a world that has already decided what counts. Rafael Gallardo, writing at The Rhizome Times, comes at the same problem from the other side: how much of what we “recognize” was placed there in advance? In his essay on what he calls “the reality of the virtual”, he argues that algorithms and social media now work as filters that imprint meaning before we encounter anything at all, and he leaves readers with a test: “So next time you “recognize” something, ask yourself: “Did I recognize that, or was I imprinted with its meaning”” His frame is Žižek’s Lacanian theory of ideology and Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism rather than set theory, but the stakes overlap with Badiou’s. If a situation is designed, where could an event come from? His first book, Indoctrination Guide, comes out December 25, 2026, and the digital edition is available to preorder now. Follow him at The Rhizome Times.

Worth subscribing

• Cadell Last, Philosophy Portal: Last writes about Hegelian idealism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and he runs courses, including a new series that re-teaches Žižek’s Less Than Nothing from the start (An Introduction to: The Žižek Lectures). 3.2K+ subscribers on Substack.

Conclusion: a Badiou reading order

1. Ethics or In Praise of Love: the short way in.
2. Saint Paul: the event, made vivid.
3. Manifesto for Philosophy: the map.
4. Being and Event: the system itself.

Badiou can be maddening. His loyalty to what he calls “the communist hypothesis” has cost him many readers, and the mathematics defeats many more. But no living philosopher has defended the possibility of the genuinely new with more rigor or more stubbornness.

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