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

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Alain Badiou
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: January 17
Editor
Mathematician
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Sociologist
University Teacher
New Sallee
Enemy
Unbounded
Politics
Nihilism
Order
Emancipation
Hands
Repression
Come
Feared
Emptiness
Established
Cruelty
Interiority

More quotes by Alain Badiou

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Without mathematics, we are blind.
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Art attests to what is inhuman in man.
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The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.
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Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.
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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.
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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
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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
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Evil is the interruption of a truth by the pressure of particular or individual interests.
Alain Badiou
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Emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible.
Alain Badiou
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Love is not a contract between two narcissists.
Alain Badiou
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There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.
Alain Badiou
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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