A highly personal text, imbued with philosophical and political reflections.

In this first volume of his memoirs, Alain Badiou looks back on the years from 1937 to 1985. Sprinkled into the history of a half-century marked by great political upheavals are little slices of life that give readers the keys needed for understanding this eminent philosopher's career.
From his childhood in Morocco to his adolescence in Toulouse and his youth in Paris, we discover how the convictions of this resolutely left-wing man were forged in a context marked by the Second World War and especially the Algerian War of Independence. First a socialist, then seduced in the '70s by Maoist ideology, Badiou tells his story in an intimately conversational tone never far removed from philosophy.
The 20th century Badiou revisits sheds new light on the work of a key thinker in communism and the origins of "Leftism" à la française. In the course of these page, an entire era and a generation for which "political commitment" was a watchword come back to life, prompting us to reflect on our own relationship to politics.