Top 39 Alain Badiou Quotes
#1. There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.
Alain Badiou
#2. 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
#3. There is a kind of serenity in love which is almost a paradise.
Alain Badiou
#4. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Evil is the interruption of a truth by the pressure of particular or individual interests.
Alain Badiou
#11. All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself.
Alain Badiou
#12. I feel really assured by the fact that the women I have loved I have loved for always.
Alain Badiou
#13. Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.
Alain Badiou
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.
Alain Badiou
#19. Love is not a contract between two narcissists.
Alain Badiou
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Those who have nothing have only their discipline.
Alain Badiou
#23. Emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible.
Alain Badiou
#24. 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
#25. Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.
Alain Badiou
#26. 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
#28. 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
#29. Truth is a new word in Europe (and elsewhere).
Alain Badiou
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. In order to improve democracy, then, it's necessary to change the people, as Brecht ironically proposed.
Alain Badiou
#36. Liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism.
Alain Badiou
#37. We pose only those questions whose answers are the pre-given conditions of the questions themselves.
Alain Badiou
#38. 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
#39. 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
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