With this work, Alain Badiou enters the stage of major contemporary philosophers in 1982. He explores the pressing question of a revolutionary political subject to support and make Marxist theory viable for the future. In doing so, he primarily draws on Lacan's psychoanalysis, reflecting on the events of May 1968 and the movement of French Maoism in the 1970s. Furthermore, he allows a multitude of other voices to be heard, including Mallarmé and Mao Zedong, Hölderlin and Hegel, Gödel and the voice of migrant workers. Badiou's theory of the subject addresses processes of subjectivation that are barely graspable and flash up as conditions of the new, thereby laying the first foundations for the concept of the event, which will play a significant role in his magnum opus Being and Event.