Best 41 quotes of Alain Badiou on MyQuotes

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

Art attests to what is inhuman in man.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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'.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Love is not a contract between two narcissists.

Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.

The absolute contingency of the encounter 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

We have the riots we deserve.

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.

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.

4.19. Dedekind's approach is a singular combination of Descartes' Cogito and the idea of the idea in Spinoza. The starting point is the very space of the Cogito, as 'closed' configuration of all possible thoughts, existential point of pure thought. It is claimed (but only the Cogito assures us of this) that something like the set of all my possible thoughts exists. From Spinoza's causal 'serialism' (regardless of whether or not he figured in Dedekind's historical sources) are taken both the existence of a parallelism' which allows us to identify simple ideas by way of their object (Spinoza says: through the body of which the idea is an idea), and the existence of a reflexive redoubling, which secures the existence of 'complex' ideas, whose object is no longer a body, but another idea. For Spinoza, as for Dedekind, this process of reflexive redoubling must go to infinity. An idea of an idea (or the thought of a thought of an object) is an idea. So there exists an idea of the idea of a body, and so on.

4.23..If 'thought' means: instance of the subject in a truth-procedure, then there is no thought of this thought, because it contains no knowledge.

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

In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other. The other helps you to discover the reality of pleasure. In love, on the contrary, the mediation of the other is enough in itself.

I think… that love encompasses the experience of the possible transition from the pure randomness of chance to a state that has universal value. Starting out from something that is simply an encounter, a trifle, you learn that you can experience the world on the basis of difference and not only in terms of identity. And you can even be tested and suffer in the process. In today’s world, it is generally thought that individuals only pursue their own self-interest. Love is an antidote to that. Provided it isn’t conceived only as an exchange of mutual favours, or isn’t calculated way in advance as a profitable investment, love really is a unique trust placed in chance. It takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can experience the world from the perspective of difference. In this respect it has universal implications: it is an individual experience of potential universality, and is thus central to philosophy, as Plato was the first to intuit.

It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.

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.

Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.

So love remains powerful, subjectively powerful: one of those rare experiences where, on the basis of chance inscribed in a moment, you attempt a declaration of eternity.

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.

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