For Alain Badiou the twentieth century was ‘haunted by the idea of changing man, of creating a new man’ (S 20/Cen 8) with communism and fascism, humanism and antihumanism each offering its vision of a transformed humanity. At the beginning of the twenty-first century Badiou offers us his own account of transformation that both remains (or so he claims) within a materialist frame and yet dusts off and reworks motifs seemingly from a bygone religious age: immortality, grace, resurrection and miracle. If, as these terms already hint, Badiou's reworking of the human is not a simple case of either accepting or rejecting a historical legacy, then neither is his relation to materialism. Along with Quentin Meillassoux, Badiou is the contemporary French thinker most commonly identified with the ‘new materialist’ tendency in contemporary thought, but as we shall see in this chapter he insists on a double understanding of materialism: Badiou introduces two very different figures of the human, and qualifies both as materialist. The well-known distinction in Logics of Worlds between the ‘democratic materialism’ (for which there are only bodies and languages) and ‘materialist dialectics’ (for which there are bodies, languages and truths) shapes Badiou's anthropology in terms of the twin figures of the ‘human animal’ and the ‘immortal’, but we shall discover that the relation between these two figures is far from straightforward.

The first half of this chapter introduces these two major figures of Badiou's anthropology, showing how they relate to the irreducibility of the inhuman in his formalised and generic account of humanity. Although Badiou does demonstrate how materialist humanity can be transformed, his account is more continuous with traditional figures of the human than is often acknowledged in the literature on his work. In the second half of the chapter the focus tightens from a discussion of the importance of the inhuman Idea in Badiou's anthropology to the question of the relation between the human animal and what Badiou calls ‘living as an immortal’. How is a human animal incorporated into a truth or an Idea, and how is that incorporation best described?