Alain Badiou Quotes & Sayings

Those who have nothing have only their discipline. — Alain Badiou

All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself. — Alain Badiou

What kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be. — Alain Badiou

I feel really assured by the fact that the women I have loved I have loved for always. — Alain Badiou

There is a kind of serenity in love which is almost a paradise. — Alain Badiou

It is indeed the case that we philosophers work at night, after the day of the true becoming of a new truth. Yes, we hope, we believe that one day the 'bright obvious' will rise up motionless, in the stellar coldness of its ultimate form. It will be the last stage of philosophy, the absolute Idea, the complete revelation. But this does not come to pass. — Alain Badiou

Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me. — Alain Badiou

Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death. — Alain Badiou

For a politics of emancipation, the enemy that is to be feared most is not repression at the hands of the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the unbounded cruelty that can come with its emptiness. — Alain Badiou

There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation. — Alain Badiou

A Truth is the subjective development of that which is at once both new and universal. New: that which is unforeseen by the order of creation. Universal: that which can interest, rightly, every human individual, according to his pure humanity. — Alain Badiou

Without mathematics, we are blind. — Alain Badiou

It must be said that today, at the end of its semantic evolution, the word 'terrorist' is an intrinsically propagandistic term. It has no neutral readability. It dispenses with all reasoned examination of political situations, of their causes and consequences. — Alain Badiou

I am surprised to see that today everything that does not amount to surrender pure and simple to generalized capitalism, let us call it thus, is considered to be archaic or old-fashioned, as though in a way there existed no other definition of what it means to be modern than, quite simply, to be at all times caught in the dominant forms of the moment. — Alain Badiou

The absolute contingency of the encounter with someone I didn't know finally takes on the appearance of destiny. The declaration of love marks the transition from chance to destiny, and that's why it is so perilous and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright. — Alain Badiou

Evil is the interruption of a truth by the pressure of particular or individual interests. — Alain Badiou

We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world. — Alain Badiou

In order to improve democracy, then, it's necessary to change the people, as Brecht ironically proposed. — Alain Badiou

Love is not a contract between two narcissists. — Alain Badiou

The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art. — Alain Badiou

There is always only one question in the ethics of truth: how will I, as some-one, continue to exceed my own being? — Alain Badiou

The ethic of truth is the complete opposite of an 'ethics of communication'. It is an ethic of the Real The ethic of truth is absolutely opposed to opinion, and to ethics in general. — Alain Badiou

Truth is a new word in Europe (and elsewhere). — Alain Badiou

Everybody says love is about finding the person who is right for me and then everything will be fine. But it's not like that. It involves work. An old man tells you this! — Alain Badiou

Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the malady, our age, in order to be cured of the Plato sickness, has swallowed such doses of a relativist, vaguely skeptical, lightly spiritualist and insipidly moralist medicine, that it is in the process of gently dying, in the small bed of its supposed democratic comfort. — Alain Badiou

These latter institutions [the civil service, trade unions, media of all kinds], notably of course television, but more subtly the written press, are quite spectacular powers of unreason and ignorance. — Alain Badiou

The oppressed peoples of the earth are not objects for the exquisite turmoil of European consciences. They are subjects from which to learn how to exercise political intelligence and action. Obviously, colonial arrogance is a long time dying. — Alain Badiou

Christianity grasped perfectly that there is an element in the apparent contingency of love that can't be reduced to that contingency. But it immediately raised it to the level of transcendence, and that is the root of the problem. This universal element I too recognize in love as immanent. But Christianity has somehow managed to elevate it and refocus it onto a transcendent power. It's an ideal that was already partly present in Plato, through the idea of the Good. It is a brilliant first manipulation of the power of love and one we must now bring back to earth. I mean we must demonstrate that love really does have universal power, but that it is simply the opportunity we are given to enjoy a positive, creative, affirmative experience of difference. The Other, no doubt, but without the "Almighty-Other", without the "Great Other" of transcendence. — Alain Badiou

Love and politics are the two great figures of social engagement. Politics is enthusiasm with a collective; with love, two people. So love is the minimal form of communism. — Alain Badiou

We must point out that in what concerns its material the event is not a miracle. What I mean is that what composes an event is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language that is connected to it, etc. In fact, so as not to succumb to an obscurantist theory of creation ex nihilo, we must accept that an event is nothing but a part of a given situation, nothing but a fragment of being. — Alain Badiou

It is now an easy matter to spell out the ethic of a truth: 'Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds you perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you. — Alain Badiou

I would say, if you like, that the party is like an out-moded mathematics ... that is to say, the mathematics of Euclid. We need to invent a non-Euclidian mathematics with respect to political discipline. — Alain Badiou

In my view, only those who have had the courage to work through Lacan's anti-philosophy without faltering deserve to be called 'contemporary philosophers'. — Alain Badiou

Love can only consist in failure ... on the fallacious assumption that it is a relationship. But it is not. It is a production of truth. — Alain Badiou

Emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible. — Alain Badiou

In love, fidelity signifies this extended victory: the randomness of an encounter defeated day after day through the invention of what will endure. — Alain Badiou

To believe that the intolerable crime is to burn a few cars and rob some shops, whereas to kill a young man is trivial, is typically in keeping with what Marx regarded as the principal alienation of capitalism: the primacy of things over existence, of commodities over life and machines over workers — Alain Badiou

Liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism. — Alain Badiou

It is thus quite simply false that whereof one cannot speak (in the sense of 'there is nothing to say about it that specifies it and grants it separating properties'), thereof one must be silent. It must on the contrary be named. — Alain Badiou

Love what you will never believe twice. — Alain Badiou

Art attests to what is inhuman in man. — Alain Badiou

We know that communism is the right hypothesis. All those who abandon this hypothesis immediately resign themselves to the market economy, to parliamentary democracy-the form of state suited to capitalism-and to the inevitable and 'natural' character of the most monstrous inequalities. — Alain Badiou

We pose only those questions whose answers are the pre-given conditions of the questions themselves. — Alain Badiou

If you limit yourself to sexual pleasure it's narcissistic. You don't connect with the other, you take what pleasure you want from them. — Alain Badiou

Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history. The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity. The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection. — Alain Badiou

We have the riots we deserve. — Alain Badiou