Alain Badiou Quotes

Without mathematics, we are blind.

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.

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.

The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection.

The absolute contingency of the encounter takes on the appearance of destiny.

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

In love, fidelity signifies this extended victory: the randomness of an encounter defeated day after day through the invention of what will endure.

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.

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.

Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the malady, our age.