Sylvain Lazarus

Sylvain Lazarus (born 1943) is a French sociologist, anthropologist and political theorist. He has also written under the pseudonym Paul Sandevince. Lazarus is a Professor at the Paris 8 University. Sylvain Lazarus worked out a theory of the social function of political categorizations (cf. Anthropology of the Name, 1996), exploring in the anthropological field what his Lacanian friends Alain Badiou (Being and Event, 1988) and Jean-Claude Milner (The Indistinct Names, 1983) worked out, respectively, in the fields of philosophy, of linguistics and of psychoanalytic theory. Lazarus's 1996 book 'Anthropologie du nom' (Anthropology of the Name) was translated into English in 2015. Previously, it was discussed at length by Alain Badiou in his Abrégé de Métapolitique (1998), now translated into English as Metapolitics (2005).