Alain Badiou quotes

Alain Badiou is a French philosopher, novelist, and playwright, known for his work in contemporary philosophy and political theory. His writings explore topics such as being, truth, and the nature of events, often drawing on mathematics and set theory. He continues to influence current debates about politics, ethics, and ontology. Here are 37 of his quotes:

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

Alain Badiou

Without mathematics, we are blind.

Alain Badiou

Art attests to what is inhuman in man.

Alain Badiou

The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.

Alain Badiou

Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the malady, our age, in order to be cured of the Plato sickness, has swallowed such doses of a relativist, vaguely skeptical, lightly spiritualist and insipidly moralist medicine, that it is in the process of gently dying, in the small bed of its supposed democratic comfort.

Alain Badiou

I am surprised to see that today everything that does not amount to surrender pure and simple to generalized capitalism, let us call it thus, is considered to be archaic or old-fashioned, as though in a way there existed no other definition of what it means to be modern than, quite simply, to be at all times caught in the dominant forms of the moment.

Alain Badiou

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'.

Alain Badiou

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

Alain Badiou

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.

Alain Badiou

If the establishment of the thesis 'mathematics is ontology' is the basis of this book, it is in no way its goal.

Alain Badiou

Since its Parmenidean organization, ontology has built the portico of its ruined temple out of the following experience: what presents itself is essentially multiple; what presents itself is essentially one. The reciprocity of the one and being is certainly the inaugural axiom of philosophy - Leibniz formulation is excellent; 'What is not a being is not a being' - yet it is also its impasse; an impasse in which the revolving doors of Plato's Parmenides introduce us to the singular joy of never seeing the moment of conclusion arrive. For if being is one, then one must posit that what is not one, the multiple, is not . But this is unacceptable for thought because what is presented is multiple and one cannot see how there could be an access to being outside all presentation. If presentation is not, does it still make sense to designate what presents (itself) as being? On the other hand, if presentation is, then the multiple necessarily is.

Alain Badiou

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

Alain Badiou

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

Alain Badiou

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

Alain Badiou

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

Alain Badiou

Those who have nothing have only their discipline.

Alain Badiou

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.

Alain Badiou

This book founds a doctrine which is effectively post-Cartesian, or even post-Lacanian, a doctrine of what, for thought, both un-binds the Heidegerean connection between being and truth and institutes the subject, not as support or origin, but as fragment of the process of a truth.

Alain Badiou

If there exists one unique great imperial power which is always convinced that its most brutal interests coincide with the Good; if it is true that every year the USA spends more on their military budget than Russia, China, France, England and Germany put together; and if that Nation-State, devoted to military excess, has no public idol other than wealth, no allies other than servants, and no view of other peoples apart from an indifferent, commercial and cynical one; then the basic freedom of States, peoples and individuals consists in doing everything and thinking everything in order to escape, as much as possible, from the commandments, interventions and interference of that imperial power.

Alain Badiou

We find ourselves on the brink of a decision, a decision to break with the arcana of the one and the multiple in which philosophy is born and buried, phoenix of its own sophistic consumption.

Alain Badiou

Everything turns on mastering the gap between the presupposition (that must be rejected) of a being of the one and the thesis of its 'there is.

Alain Badiou

According to the way it is generally used today, the term 'ethics' relates above all to the domain of human rights, 'the rights of man'- or, by derivation, the rights of living beings. We are supposed to assume the existence of a universally recognizable human subject possessing 'rights' that are in some sense natural: the right to live, to avoid abusive, to enjoy 'fundamental' liberties (of opinion, of expression, of democratic choice in the election of governments, etc.) These rights are held to be self-evident, and the result of a wide consensus. 'Ethics' is a matter of busying ourselves with these rights, of making sure that they are respected.

Alain Badiou