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

Alain Badiou

Categorized in : People Order Democracy

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.

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

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.

possibility ethics process

Art attests to what is inhuman in man. by Alain Badiou

Art attests to what is inhuman in man.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

events miracle mean

Love is not a contract between two narcissists. by Alain Badiou

Love is not a contract between two narcissists.

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.

discipline political party

The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art a... by Alain Badiou

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

cinema art

I feel really assured by the fact that the women I have loved I h... by Alain Badiou

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

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'.

philosopher views philosophy

Without mathematics, we are blind. by Alain Badiou

Without mathematics, we are blind.

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.

media ignorance television

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

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

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!

me man work love