Badiou Quotes

“Those who have nothing have only their discipline.”

“Those who have nothing have only their discipline.”

“Alain Badiou was once seated amongst the public in a room where I was delivering a talk, when his cellphone (which, to add insult to injury, was mine -- I had lent it to him) all of a sudden started to ring. Instead of turning it off, he gently interrupted me and asked me if I could talk more softly, so that he could hear his interlocutor more clearly . . . If this was not an act of true friendship, I do not know what friendship is. So, this book is dedicated to Alain Badiou.”

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

“We do not get to vote on who owns what, or on relations in factory and so on, for all this is deemed beyond the sphere of the political, and it is illusory to expect that one can actually change things by "extending" democracy to ple's control. Radical changes in this domain should be made outside the sphere of legal "rights", etcetera: no matter how radical our anti-capitalism, unless this is understood, the solution sought will involve applying democratic mechanisms (which, of course, can have a positive role to play)- mechanisms, one should never forget, which are themselves part of the apparatus of the "bourgeois" state that guarantees the undisturbed functioning of capitalist reproduction. In this precise sense, Badiou hit the mark with his apparently wired claim that "Today, the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It's called Democracy." it is the "democratic illusion" the acceptance of democratic procedures as the sole framework for any possible change, that blocks any radical transformation of capitalist relations.”

“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?”

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

“Typically, images or paintings are designated as anamorphic when, in order for the image to appear, a particular line of sight must be adopted. The image only shows up when approached from the angle dictated to the viewer by the image's own set of conditions. In this sense, the viewer must 're-form' their perspective to match the perspective demanded by the image. We are not free to approach the image as we wish; the image is free to assign us a perspective proper to itself... Anamorphosis, then, describes the freedom of the phenomenon to give itself as it wishes and it measures the extent to which this freedom turns the tables on the one to whom it appears. To receive a phenomenon as it wishes to give itself is to yield control and suspend our own timetables and preconditions in order to be faithful to the conditions set by what gives itself.”