Alain Badiou Quotes

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 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.

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

We have the riots we deserve.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Those who have nothing have only their discipline.

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.

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.

Love is not a contract between two narcissists.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Without mathematics, we are blind.

Art attests to what is inhuman in man.