Alain Badiou > Quotes

“Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.”
― Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love

“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, In Praise of Love

“Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.”
― Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

“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 Praise of Love

“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, Metapolitics

“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.”
― Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love

“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, Conditions

“إن إعلان الحب هو الانتقال من الصدفة إلى القدر، ولهذا هو محفوف بالخطر ومشحون بنوع من رهبة خشبة المسرح المرعب.”
― Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love

“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, Cinema

“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, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

“We live in a contradiction, a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian – where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone – is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we’re lucky that we don’t live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it’s better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it’s not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don’t make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don’t cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc..”
― 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, The Concept of Model: An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics

“We pose only those questions whose answers are the pre-given conditions of the questions themselves.”
― Alain Badiou, The Concept of Model: An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics

“Love what you will never believe twice.”
― 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, In Praise of Love

“Mieux vaut un désastre qu'un désêtre.”
― Alain Badiou, Conditions

“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, The Communist Hypothesis

“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, In Praise of Love

“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.”
― Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love

“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.”
― Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love

“A truth is not something that is constructed in a garden of roses.”
― Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love

“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 Meaning of Sarkozy

“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, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

“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.”
― 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

“the fact that she and I are now incorporated into this unique subject, the subject of love that views the panorama of the world through the prism of our difference”
― Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love

“The world is full of new developments and love must also be something that innovates. Risk and adventure must be re-invented against safety and comfort.”
― Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love

“To love is to struggle, beyond solitude, with everything in the world that can animate existence. This world where I see for myself the fount of happiness my being with someone else brings. "I love you" becomes: in this world where there is the fount you are for my life. In the water from this fount, I see our bliss, yours first.”
― Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love

“Zero deaths” war, “zero risks” love, nothing random, no chance encounters. Backed as it is, with all the resources of a wide-scale advertising campaign, I see it as the first threat to love, what I would call the safety threat. After all, it’s not so very different to an arranged marriage. Not done in the name of family order and hierarchy by despotic parents, but in the name of safety for the individuals involved, through advance agreements that avoid randomness, chance encounters and in the end any existential poetry, due to the categorical absence of risks.”
― Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love