Alain Badiou Quotes

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• 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

  Love Is, Two, People

  "Alain Badiou: a life in writing". Interview with Stuart Jeffries, www.theguardian.com. May 18, 2012.

  42 Copy quote

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

  Alain Badiou

  War, Risk, Impossibility

  60 Copy quote

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

  Alain Badiou

  Evil, Moments, Being True

  53 Copy quote

• 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

  Believe, Views, Two

  Alain Badiou, Nicolas Truong (2012). “In Praise Of Love”, p.22, Profile Books

  56 Copy quote

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

  Alain Badiou

  Serenity, Paradise, Kind

  "Alain Badiou: a life in writing". Interview with Stuart Jeffries, www.theguardian.com. May 18, 2012.

  35 Copy quote

• We have the riots we deserve.

  Alain Badiou

  Riot, Deserve

  Alain Badiou (2006). “Polemics”, New Left Books

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

  Alain Badiou

  Rupture, Resistance, Oneself

  Alain Badiou (2005). “Metapolitics”, p.7, Verso

  36 Copy quote

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

  Alain Badiou

  Evil, Pressure, Individual

  35 Copy quote

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

  Alain Badiou

  Humanity, Nihilism, Savages

  39 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Real, Reflection

  34 Copy quote

• 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

  Giving Up, Real, Adventure

  Alain Badiou, Nicolas Truong (2012). “In Praise Of Love”, p.32, Profile Books

  39 Copy quote

• Those who have nothing have only their discipline.

  Alain Badiou

  Discipline

  41 Copy quote

• 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

  Assumption, Productions

  36 Copy quote

• 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

  Character, Democracy, Communism

  27 Copy quote

• Love is not a contract between two narcissists.

  Alain Badiou

  Love Is, Two, Narcissist

  "Alain Badiou: a life in writing". Interview with Stuart Jeffries, www.theguardian.com. May 18, 2012.

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Hands, Order, Enemy

  26 Copy quote

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

  Alain Badiou

  Order, People, Democracy

  "Alain Badiou: a life in writing". Interview with Stuart Jeffries, www.theguardian.com. May 18, 2012.

  23 Copy quote

• 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

  Victory, Encounters, Defeated

  Alain Badiou, Nicolas Truong (2012). “In Praise Of Love”, p.45, Profile Books

  25 Copy quote

• 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

  Order, Humanity, Development

  20 Copy quote

• 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

  Narcissistic, Want, Limits

  "Alain Badiou: a life in writing". Interview with Stuart Jeffries, www.theguardian.com. May 18, 2012.

  24 Copy quote

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

  Alain Badiou

  Impossible, Situation, Seems

  Alain Badiou (2002). “Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil”, p.121, Verso

  26 Copy quote

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

  Alain Badiou

  Facts, Feels, Assured

  Alain Badiou, Nicolas Truong (2012). “In Praise Of Love”, p.47, Profile Books

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• 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

  Political, Causes, Examination

  Alain Badiou (2005). “Infinite Thought”, p.109, A&C Black

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• 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

  Believe, Men, Car

  Alain Badiou, Gregory Elliott (2012). “The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings”, p.20, Verso Books

  25 Copy quote

• Art attests to what is inhuman in man.

  Alain Badiou

  Art, Men, Inhuman

  "Le siècle". Book by Alain Badiou, 2005.

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