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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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Alain Badiou
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: January 17
Editor
Mathematician
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Sociologist
University Teacher
New Sallee
Chance
Transition
Contingency
Kind
Absolutes
Perilous
Absolute
Burdened
Love
Appearance
Fright
Mark
Marks
Destiny
Encounter
Stage
Declaration
Takes
Encounters
Horrifying

More quotes by 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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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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We know that communism is the right hypothesis. All those who abandon this hypothesis immediately resign themselves to the market economy, to parliamentary democracy-the form of state suited to capitalism-and to the inevitable and 'natural' character of the most monstrous inequalities.
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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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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
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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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All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself.
Alain Badiou
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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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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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Truth is a new word in Europe (and elsewhere).
Alain Badiou
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We have the riots we deserve.
Alain Badiou
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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.
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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Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.
Alain Badiou
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Without mathematics, we are blind.
Alain Badiou
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Love is not a contract between two narcissists.
Alain Badiou
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The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.
Alain Badiou
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In order to improve democracy, then, it's necessary to change the people, as Brecht ironically proposed.
Alain Badiou
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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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Love and politics are the two great figures of social engagement. Politics is enthusiasm with a collective with love, two people. So love is the minimal form of communism.
Alain Badiou