27 Quotes by Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou is a French philosopher who has made significant contributions to contemporary philosophy, particularly in the fields of ontology, ethics, and politics. He is known for his work on the concept of the event and the idea of truth as a process of fidelity to an event. Badiou's philosophical framework emphasizes the importance of ruptures and discontinuities in history and the need to create new possibilities for change. He has been a vocal critic of liberal democracy and capitalism, advocating for a radical transformation of society based on the principles of equality and collective action. (Bio)
Alain Badiou Quotes
Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.
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.
Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.
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.
Those who have nothing have only their discipline.
Liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism.
All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself.
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.
There is a kind of serenity in love which is almost a paradise.
Evil is the interruption of a truth by the pressure of particular or individual interests.
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.
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
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.
In order to improve democracy, then, it's necessary to change the people, as Brecht ironically proposed.
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. (Meaning)
There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.
We have the riots we deserve.
Art attests to what is inhuman in man.
Without mathematics, we are blind.
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.
Love is not a contract between two narcissists.
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.
I feel really assured by the fact that the women I have loved I have loved for always.
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. (Meaning)
The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.
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.
Truth is a new word in Europe (and elsewhere).
― Alain Badiou Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
