Quotes by Alain Badiou

About Alain Badiou:

Alain Badiou is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. Badiou has written about the concepts of being, truth and the subject in a way that, he claims, is neither postmodern nor simply a repetition of modernity. Politically, Badiou is committed to the far left, and to the communist tradition.
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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 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

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

Alain Badiou

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

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

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

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

Alain Badiou

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 e...

Alain Badiou

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

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

Alain Badiou

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

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

Alain Badiou

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

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

Alain Badiou

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 i...

Alain Badiou

Those who have nothing have only their discipline.

Alain Badiou

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

Alain Badiou

Author Bio

  • NameAlain Badiou
  • DescriptionFrench writer and philosopher
  • BornJanuary 17, 1937
  • CountryFrance
  • ProfessionPhilosopher; Novelist; Playwright