In Can Politics Be Thought?-published in French in 1985 and appearing here in English for the first time-Alain Badiou offers his most forceful and systematic analysis of the crisis of Marxism. Distinguishing politics as an active mode of thinking from the political as a domain of the State, Badiou argues for the continuation of Marxist politics. In so doing, he shows why we need to recapture the emancipatory hypothesis of Marx's original gesture in order to actualize its radical potential. This volume also includes Badiou's “Of an Obscure Disaster: On the End of the Truth of the State,” in which he rebuts claims of Communism's death after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Alain Badiou is RenÉ Descartes Chair and Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School and the author of numerous books, including Being and Event; Theory of the Subject; and Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil.

Bruno Bosteels is Professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.