Alain Badiou Quotes

From Le siècle. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005. .

Original French: Il est donc tout simplement faux que ce dont on ne peut parler (au sens ou il n'y a rien à en dire qui le spécifie, qui lui accorde des propriétés séparatrices), il faille le taire. Il faut au contraire le nommer...

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

Art attests to what is inhuman in man.

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

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.

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.

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.

… necessitating the unilateral choice of one of three orientations […] I would summarize the disjointed temporal multiple which organizes our site in the following manner:

Original French: L'art atteste ce qu'il y a d'inhumain dans l'humain.

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.

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.

Original French: La vérité est un mot neuf en Europe (et ailleurs).

In the political domain, deprived of any collective politcal landmark, stripped of any notion of the 'meaning of History’; and no longer able to hope for or expect a social revolution, many intellectuals, along with much of public opinion, have been won over to the logic of a capitalist economy and a parliamentary democracy.

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'.