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.
ALAIN BADIOUIt must be said that today, at the end of its semantic evolution, the word ‘terrorist’ is an intrinsically propagandistic term. It has no neutral readability. It dispenses with all reasoned examination of political situations, of their causes and consequences.
More Alain Badiou Quotes
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We must point out that in what concerns its material the event is not a miracle.
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The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity.
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The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection.
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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.
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Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.
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The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.
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It must on the contrary be named.
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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.
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All those who abandon this hypothesis immediately resign themselves to the market economy, to parliamentary democracy-the form of state suited to capitalism-and to the inevitable and ‘natural’ character of the most monstrous inequalities.
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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.
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Emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible.
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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 -
It must be said that today, at the end of its semantic evolution, the word ‘terrorist’ is an intrinsically propagandistic term. It has no neutral readability. It dispenses with all reasoned examination of political situations, of their causes and consequences.
ALAIN BADIOU -
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.
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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
ALAIN BADIOU