Quotes from Alain Badiou

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.

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

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.

Those who have nothing have only their discipline.

All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself.

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.

The oppressed peoples of the earth are not objects for the exquisite turmoil of European consciences. They are subjects from which to learn how to exercise political intelligence and action. Obviously, colonial arrogance is a long time dying.

There is always only one question in the ethics of truth: how will I, as some-one, continue to exceed my own being?

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.

We pose only those questions whose answers are the pre-given conditions of the questions themselves.

Love what you will never believe twice.

The absolute contingency of the encounter with someone I didn't know finally 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.

Mieux vaut un désastre qu'un désêtre.

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.

So love remains powerful, subjectively powerful: one of those rare experiences where, on the basis of chance inscribed in a moment, you attempt a declaration of eternity.

In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other. The other helps you to discover the reality of pleasure. In love, on the contrary, the mediation of the other is enough in itself.

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.

A truth is not something that is constructed in a garden of roses.

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.

It is now an easy matter to spell out the ethic of a truth: 'Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds you perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you.

To love is to struggle, beyond solitude, with everything in the world that can animate existence. This world where I see for myself the fount of happiness my being with someone else brings. "I love you" becomes: in this world where there is the fount you are for my life. In the water from this fount, I see our bliss, yours first.

In political practice, we must be both 'the arrow and the bull's eye', because the old worldview is also still present within us.

the fact that she and I are now incorporated into this unique subject, the subject of love that views the panorama of the world through the prism of our difference