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Alain Badiou Biography

Alain Badiou (French: [alɛ̃ badju] (listen) (help·info); born 17 January 1937) is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and 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 on political events. Badiou argues for resurrecting the practice of communism.

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Alain Badiou Quotes

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.

Assumption, Fallacious, Love, Productions, Relationship, Truth

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.

Adventure, Adventurous, Giving Up, Real, Tenacity, Triumphs

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

Consists, Declared, Emancipatory, Impossible, Seems, Situation

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.

Come, Enemy, Hands, Nihilism, Order, Unbounded

Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history. The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity. The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection.

Art, Effect, Imaginary, Real, Reflection, Supposed

We have the riots we deserve.

Deserve, Riot, Riots

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'.

Contemporary, Deserve, Philosopher, Philosophy, View, Views

I feel really assured by the fact that the women I have loved I have loved for always.

Assured, Fact, Facts, Feels, Loved

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.

Connect, Limit, Limits, Narcissistic, Take, Want

There is a kind of serenity in love which is almost a paradise.

Kind, Love, Paradise, Serenity

In order to improve democracy, then, it's necessary to change the people, as Brecht ironically proposed.

Democracy, Ironically, Necessary, Order, People

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.

Discipline, Party, Political

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

Believe, Car, Cars, Men, Workers, Young

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.

Ignorance, Kinds, Media, Powers, Television, Unreason

Truth is a new word in Europe (and elsewhere).

Elsewhere, Europe, Truth, Truth Is

Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.

Death, Impossibility, Risk, War

We must point out that in what concerns its material the event is not a miracle. What I mean is that what composes an event is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language that is connected to it, etc. In fact, so as not to succumb to an obscurantist theory of creation ex nihilo, we must accept that an event is nothing but a part of a given situation, nothing but a fragment of being.

Creation, Etc, Fact, Mean, Miracle, Theory

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.

Contrary, Grants, Quite, Say, Silent, Speak

Evil is the interruption of a truth by the pressure of particular or individual interests.

Evil, Individual, Particular, Pressure

Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.

Being True, Compels, Evil, Moments, True

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