Quote

Emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible.

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
Impossible
Situation
Possible
Politics
Within
Declared
Making
Precisely
Seems
Consists
Always
Seem

More quotes by Alain Badiou

Image
In order to improve democracy, then, it's necessary to change the people, as Brecht ironically proposed.
Alain Badiou
Image
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
Image
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
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
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
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
The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.
Alain Badiou
Image
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
Image
Love is not a contract between two narcissists.
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
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
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
Image
Those who have nothing have only their discipline.
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
Evil is the interruption of a truth by the pressure of particular or individual interests.
Alain Badiou
Image
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
Image
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
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
Image
Art attests to what is inhuman in man.
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