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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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Alain Badiou
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: January 17
Editor
Mathematician
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Sociologist
University Teacher
New Sallee
Simply
Separating
Quite
Named
Speak
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Sense
False
Cannot
Contrary
Nothing
Thus
Whereof
Must
Silent
Thereof
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Properties

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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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Emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible.
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Those who have nothing have only their discipline.
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There is a kind of serenity in love which is almost a paradise.
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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.
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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.
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Without mathematics, we are blind.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.
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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.
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Love is not a contract between two narcissists.
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Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.
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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.
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Art attests to what is inhuman in man.
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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
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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.
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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'.
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