Alain Badiou Quotes

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

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.

From L'être et l'événement. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988. .

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

The heart of the question concerns the presumption of a universal human Subject, capable of reducing ethical issues to matters of human rights and humanitarian actions. We have seen that ethics subordinates the identification of this subject to the universal recognition of the evil that is done to him. Ethics defines man as a victim. It will be objected: 'No! You are forgetting the active subject, the one that intervenes against barbarism!' So let us be precise: man is the being who is capable of recognizing himself as a victim.''

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'.

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

We live in a contradiction, a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian – where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone – is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we’re lucky that we don’t live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it’s better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it’s not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don’t make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don’t cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc.

Original French: Hors les mathématiques, nous sommes aveugles.

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...

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'.

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

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.

From Court traité d'ontologie transitoire. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998. .

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