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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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Alain Badiou
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: January 17
Editor
Mathematician
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Sociologist
University Teacher
New Sallee
Form
Engagement
Great
Collective
Love
Communism
People
Enthusiasm
Figures
Politics
Social
Minimal
Two
Collectives

More quotes by 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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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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Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.
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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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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There is a kind of serenity in love which is almost a paradise.
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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Love is not a contract between two narcissists.
Alain Badiou
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Truth is a new word in Europe (and elsewhere).
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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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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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 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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Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.
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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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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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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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
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Without mathematics, we are blind.
Alain Badiou