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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
Destiny
Encounter
Stage
Declaration
Takes
Encounters
Horrifying
Chance
Transition
Contingency
Kind
Absolutes
Perilous
Love
Absolute
Burdened
Appearance
Fright
Mark
Marks

More quotes by 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 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
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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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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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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.
Alain Badiou
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Art attests to what is inhuman in man.
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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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
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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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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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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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Without mathematics, we are blind.
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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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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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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We have the riots we deserve.
Alain Badiou
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Liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism.
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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I feel really assured by the fact that the women I have loved I have loved for always.
Alain Badiou