Alain Badiou teaches at the École Normale Supérieure and at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, France. In addition to several novels, plays and political essays, he has published a number of major philosophical works.Bruno Bosteels is Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, USA, and author of Badiou and Politics (Forthcoming, Duke University Press).

A rare achievement, a true philosophical classic, comparable to only two or three books in the twentieth century, such as Heidegger's Being and Time. The difference is that, if Being and Time left its mark on twentieth-century thought, Theory of the Subject announces the thought of the twenty-first century. It opens up the path that Badiou followed in his two later classics, Being and Event and Logics of Worlds, but it enforces this opening with a violent freshness which far surpasses its later developments. So beware, reader: when you open this book, you hold in your hands proof that philosophers of the status of Plato, Hegel and Heidegger are still walking around today!

• Translator's Introduction \ Author's Preface to the English translation \ Preface to the French edition \ 1. The Place of the Subjective \ 2. The Subject under the Signifiers of Exception \ 3. Lack and Destruction \ 4. A Materialist Reversal of Materialism \ 5. Subjectivation and Subjective Proces \ 6. Topologies of Ethics \ Thematic Index \ Name Index