Sylvain Lazarus


Sylvain Lazarus 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.

Life and work

Sylvain Lazarus worked out a theory of the social function of political categorizations, exploring in the anthropological field what his Lacanian friends Alain Badiou and Jean-Claude Milner worked out, respectively, in the fields of philosophy, of linguistics and of psychoanalytic theory.
Lazarus's 1996 book 'Anthropologie du nom' was translated into English in 2015. Previously, it was discussed at length by Alain Badiou in his Abrégé de Métapolitique, now translated into English as Metapolitics.

L'Organisation Politique

Following the student uprisings of May 1968 in France, Lazarus was a founding member of the . To quote Badiou himself, the UCFml is "the Maoist organization established in late 1969 by Natacha Michel, Sylvain Lazarus, myself and a fair number of young people". Fifteen years later, Lazarus was a founding member of the militant French political organisation which called itself a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues. In addition to numerous writings and interventions since the 1980s, L'Organisation Politique has stressed the importance of developing political prescriptions concerning undocumented migrants and stresses that they must be conceived primarily as workers and not immigrants.

International Observatory on Suburbs and Outskirts

Since the 1990s, Sylvain Lazarus has focused much of his activism on the French suburbs. With the French anthropologist Alain Bertho, he founded, in 2008, and which has produced studies in France, Brazil and Senegal.

Using the pseudonym ''Paul Sandevince''