Quotes by Alain Badiou

“Our democracy is not perfect. But its better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But its not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we dont make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we dont cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc.”

“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.”

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

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

“It is necessary to examine, in a detailed way, the contemporary theory of Evil, the ideology of human rights, the concept of democracy. It is necessary to show that nothing there leads in the direction of the real emancipation of humanity. It is necessary to reconstruct rights, in everyday life as in politics, of Truth and of the Good. Our ability to once again have real ideas and real projects depends on it.”

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

“The ethics of Truth always returns, in precise circumstances, to fighting for the True against the four fundamentals forms of Evil: obscurantism, commercial academicism, the politics of profit and inequality, and sexual barbarism.”

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

Christianity grasped perfectly that there is an element in the apparent contingency of love that can’t be reduced to that contingency. But it immediately raised it to the level of transcendence, and that is the root of the problem. This universal element I too recognize in love as immanent. But Christianity has somehow managed to elevate it and refocus it onto a transcendent power. It’s an ideal that was already partly present in Plato, through the idea of the Good. It is a brilliant first manipulation of the power of love and one we must now bring back to earth. I mean we must demonstrate that love really does have universal power, but that it is simply the opportunity we are given to enjoy a positive, creative, affirmative experience of difference. The Other, no doubt, but without the “Almighty-Other”, without the “Great Other” of transcendence.

I think… that love encompasses the experience of the possible transition from the pure randomness of chance to a state that has universal value. Starting out from something that is simply anencounter, a trifle, you learn that you can experience the world on the basis of difference and not only in terms of identity. And you can even be tested and suffer in the process. In today’s world, it is generally thought that individuals only pursue their own self-interest. Love is an antidote to that. Provided it isn’t conceived only as an exchange of mutual favours, or isn’t calculated way in advance as a profitable investment, love really is a unique trust placed in chance. It takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can experience the world from the perspective of difference. In this respect it has universal implications: it is an individual experience of potential universality, and is thus central to philosophy, as Plato was the first to intuit.

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.

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.

Those who have nothing have only their discipline.