The Red Years

The first translation of three 1970s works by Alain Badiou, featuring a new preface by Badiou, an interview with Tzuchien Tho and a concluding essay by Bruno Bosteels.

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.