Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou ; born 17 January 1937) is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieureand founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. Badiou has written about the concepts of being, truth, event and the subject in a way that, he claims, is neither postmodern nor simply a repetition of modernity. Badiou has been involved in a number of political organisations, and regularly comments...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth17 January 1937
CountryFrance
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.
Those who have nothing have only their discipline.
We have the riots we deserve.
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.
Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the malady, our age, in order to be cured of the Plato sickness, has swallowed such doses of a relativist, vaguely skeptical, lightly spiritualist and insipidly moralist medicine, that it is in the process of gently dying, in the small bed of its supposed democratic comfort.
There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.
All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself.
Evil is the interruption of a truth by the pressure of particular or individual interests.
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.
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.
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.
Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.
Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.
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.