Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Alain Badiou

Image
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
Image
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
Image
There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.
Alain Badiou
Image
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
Image
Evil is the interruption of a truth by the pressure of particular or individual interests.
Alain Badiou
Image
Love is not a contract between two narcissists.
Alain Badiou
Image
In order to improve democracy, then, it's necessary to change the people, as Brecht ironically proposed.
Alain Badiou
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I feel really assured by the fact that the women I have loved I have loved for always.
Alain Badiou
Image
All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself.
Alain Badiou
Image
We have the riots we deserve.
Alain Badiou
Image
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
Image
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
Image
There is a kind of serenity in love which is almost a paradise.
Alain Badiou
Image
The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.
Alain Badiou
Image
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
Image
Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.
Alain Badiou
Image
Emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible.
Alain Badiou
Image
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