Alain Badiou Famous Quotes and Saying

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

order hands enemy

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.

Alain Badiou

communication real opposites

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

car men believe

There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.

Alain Badiou

possibility ethics process

Art attests to what is inhuman in man.

Alain Badiou

inhuman men art

Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the malady, our age, in order to be cured of the Plato sickness, has swallowed such doses of a relativist, vaguely skeptical, lightly spiritualist and insipidly moralist medicine, that it is in the process of gently dying, in the small bed of its supposed democratic comfort.

Alain Badiou

philosophical plato order

I am surprised to see that today everything that does not amount to surrender pure and simple to generalized capitalism, let us call it thus, is considered to be archaic or old-fashioned, as though in a way there existed no other definition of what it means to be modern than, quite simply, to be at all times caught in the dominant forms of the moment.

Alain Badiou

simple today mean

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.

Alain Badiou

encounters transition destiny

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.

Alain Badiou

silent grants speak

We must point out that in what concerns its material the event is not a miracle. What I mean is that what composes an event is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language that is connected to it, etc. In fact, so as not to succumb to an obscurantist theory of creation ex nihilo, we must accept that an event is nothing but a part of a given situation, nothing but a fragment of being.

Alain Badiou

events miracle mean

Love is not a contract between two narcissists.

Alain Badiou

narcissist love-is two

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

discipline political party

The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.

Alain Badiou

cinema art

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

Alain Badiou

assured feels facts

In my view, only those who have had the courage to work through Lacan's anti-philosophy without faltering deserve to be called 'contemporary philosophers'.

Alain Badiou

philosopher views philosophy

Without mathematics, we are blind.

Alain Badiou

mathematics blind

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

media ignorance television

Truth is a new word in Europe (and elsewhere).

Alain Badiou

truth-is elsewhere europe

Everybody says love is about finding the person who is right for me and then everything will be fine. But it's not like that. It involves work. An old man tells you this!

Alain Badiou

me man work love

Alain Badiou

Professions :

Born :

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.

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.

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

There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.

Art attests to what is inhuman in man.

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.

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.

The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.

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

In my view, only those who have had the courage to work through Lacan's anti-philosophy without faltering deserve to be called 'contemporary philosophers'.

Without mathematics, we are blind.

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).

Everybody says love is about finding the person who is right for me and then everything will be fine. But it's not like that. It involves work. An old man tells you this!

F. H. Bradley

Irving Copi

Ivan Ilyin

Ivan Illich

Bion of Borysthenes

Bonaventure