Alain Badiou is a writer, philosopher and an Emeritus Professor at the Ecole normale superieure, Paris.
The main function of ideology today is not to crush actual resistance - this is the job of repressive state apparatuses - but to crush hope, to immediately denounce every critical project as opening a path at the end of which is something like gulag. At this precise point, Badiou's wonderful short book intervenes: it brings hope, especially to the young whose situation is often without any prospects. Slavoj ?i?ek