Quotes from Alain Badiou

The world is full of new developments and love must also be something that innovates. Risk and adventure must be re-invented against safety and comfort.

Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.

It is indeed the case that we philosophers work at night, after the day of the true becoming of a new truth. Yes, we hope, we believe that one day the 'bright obvious' will rise up motionless, in the stellar coldness of its ultimate form. It will be the last stage of philosophy, the absolute Idea, the complete revelation. But this does not come to pass.

The audacity of thought is not to repeat 'to the limit' that which is already entirely retained within the situation which the limit limits; the audacity of thought consists in crossing a space where nothing is given. We must learn once more how to succeed.

While desire focuses on the other, always in a somewhat fetishist manner, on a particular object, like breasts, buttocks and cock...love focuses on the very being of the other, on the other as it has erupted, fully armed with its being, into my life thus disrupted and re-fashioned

It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.

Our miniscule action may seem equivalent to inaction. But the courage to held steady in this equivalence enables us to the be the political subject of this new era

We do not want to count; we want to think the count.

We need to kill Aristotle!

Lacan savait que le théâtre est un réservoir capital quand il s'agit de comprendre le mécanisme qui transforme le réel en représentation et le désir en images.

Courage is the name of the topological burning up of places and of interests, inasmuch as it is subordinated to the gesture of opening oneself up to becoming 'the most exposed', which is what allows one to 'sustain oneself'. ... This is because courage, the burnt precipitation (one has 'fired one's last rounds') in the excess over the place, promptly recomposes - beyond the destruction that it is - the subjective process of justice.

In the ordinal view, number is thought as a link in a chain, it is an element of a total order. In the cardinal view, it is rather the mark of a 'pure quantity' obtained through the abstraction of domains of objects having 'the same quantity'. The ordinal number is thought according to the schema of a sequence, the cardinal number, according to that of a measurement.

4.23..If 'thought' means: instance of the subject in a truth-procedure, then there is no thought of this thought, because it contains no knowledge.

The 'economy of number' proposed by Peano is an economy of signs whose paradigm is algebraic, whose transparency is consensual, and whose operational effectiveness is therefore not in doubt. He thus participates forcefully in that movement of thought, victorious today, that wrests mathematics from its antique philosophical pedestal and represents it to us as a grammar of signs where all that matters is the making explicit of the code.

When one abdicates universality, one obtains universal horror.

The sophist is basically philosophy's fascist, which is why, with him, there can only be war.

Le bonheur amoureux est la preuve que le temps peut accueillir l'éternité.

Just as Plato wrote the Gorgias and Protagoras for the major sophists, we should write the Nietzsche and the Wittgenstein. And, for the minor sophists , the Vattimo and the Rorty. Neither more nor less polemical, neither more nor less respectful.

Communisme', c'est l'affirmation que ce qui est commun à tous les hommes doit être l'objet incessant de la pensée, de l'action, de l'organisation.

This is a very difficult, almost metaphysical problem: how can what is pure chance at the outset become the fulcrum for a construction of truth? How can something that was basically unpredictable and seemed tied to the unpredictable vagaries of existence nevertheless become the entire meaning of two lives that have met, paired off, that will engage in the extended experience of the constant (re)-birth of the world via the mediation of the difference in their gazes?

Si somos capaces de ser más fuertes que la muerte, no es en la fiesta de la vida, sino dominando el infinito mismo por medio del pensamiento.

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.

Liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism.

Everybody says love is about finding the person who is right for me and then everything will be fine. But it's not like that. It involves work. An old man tells you this!