Alain Badiou QUOTES

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " 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

7 " 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

8 " Those who have nothing have only their discipline. "

― Alain Badiou

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " We do not want to count; we want to think the count. "

― Alain Badiou

12 " 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

13 " 4.23..If 'thought' means: instance of the subject in a truth-procedure, then there is no thought of this thought, because it contains no knowledge. "

― Alain Badiou , Number and Numbers

14 " 4.19. Dedekind's approach is a singular combination of Descartes' Cogito and the idea of the idea in Spinoza. The starting point is the very space of the Cogito, as 'closed' configuration of all possible thoughts, existential point of pure thought. It is claimed (but only the Cogito assures us of this) that something like the set of all my possible thoughts exists. From Spinoza's causal 'serialism' (regardless of whether or not he figured in Dedekind's historical sources) are taken both the existence of a parallelism' which allows us to identify simple ideas by way of their object (Spinoza says: through the body of which the idea is an idea), and the existence of a reflexive redoubling, which secures the existence of 'complex' ideas, whose object is no longer a body, but another idea. For Spinoza, as for Dedekind, this process of reflexive redoubling must go to infinity. An idea of an idea (or the thought of a thought of an object) is an idea. So there exists an idea of the idea of a body, and so on. "

― Alain Badiou , Number and Numbers

15 " Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death. "

― Alain Badiou , In Praise of Love

16 " 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

17 " 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

18 " 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

19 " 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

20 " 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

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