Top 35 Alain Badiou Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Love and politics are the two great figures of social engagement. Politics is enthusiasm with a collective; with love, two people. So love is the minimal form of communism.”

— Alain Badiou

2. “Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.”

— Alain Badiou

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

— Alain Badiou

4. “Without mathematics, we are blind.”

— Alain Badiou

5. “Love is not a contract between two narcissists.”

— Alain Badiou

6. “Emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible.”

— Alain Badiou

7. “Those who have nothing have only their discipline.”

— Alain Badiou

8. “We have the riots we deserve.”

— Alain Badiou

9. “There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.”

— Alain Badiou

10. “What kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? 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.”

— Alain Badiou

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

— Alain Badiou

12. “The absolute contingency of the encounter takes on the appearance of destiny. 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.”

— Alain Badiou

13. “We know that communism is the right hypothesis. 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.”

— Alain Badiou

14. “If you limit yourself to sexual pleasure it’s narcissistic. You don’t connect with the other, you take what pleasure you want from them.”

— Alain Badiou

15. “Art attests to what is inhuman in man.”

— Alain Badiou

16. “I feel really assured by the fact that the women I have loved I have loved for always.”

— Alain Badiou

17. “Evil is the interruption of a truth by the pressure of particular or individual interests.”

— Alain Badiou

18. “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.”

— Alain Badiou

19. “Love what you will never believe twice.”

— Alain Badiou

20. “To love is to struggle, beyond solitude, with everything in the world that can animate existence. This world where I see for myself the fount of happiness my being with someone else brings. “I love you” becomes: in this world where there is the fount you are for my life. In the water from this fount, I see our bliss, yours first.”

— Alain Badiou

21. “In order to improve democracy, then, it’s necessary to change the people, as Brecht ironically proposed.”

— Alain Badiou

22. “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

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

— Alain Badiou

24. “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

25. “In the ordinal view, number is thought as a link in a chain, it is an element of a total order. In the cardinal view, it is rather the mark of a ‘pure quantity’ obtained through the abstraction of domains of objects having ‘the same quantity’. The ordinal number is thought according to the schema of a sequence, the cardinal number, according to that of a measurement.”

— Alain Badiou

26. “It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.”

— Alain Badiou

27. “Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history. The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity. The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection.”

— Alain Badiou

28. “In political practice, we must be both ‘the arrow and the bull’s eye’, because the old worldview is also still present within us.”

— Alain Badiou

29. “A truth is not something that is constructed in a garden of roses.”

— Alain Badiou

30. “Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.”

— Alain Badiou

31. “There is always only one question in the ethics of truth: how will I, as some-one, continue to exceed my own being?”

— Alain Badiou

32. “It is indeed the case that we philosophers work at night, after the day of the true becoming of a new truth. Yes, we hope, we believe that one day the ‘bright obvious’ will rise up motionless, in the stellar coldness of its ultimate form. It will be the last stage of philosophy, the absolute Idea, the complete revelation. But this does not come to pass.”

— Alain Badiou

33. “Our miniscule action may seem equivalent to inaction. But the courage to held steady in this equivalence enables us to the be the political subject of this new era.”

— Alain Badiou

34. “The audacity of thought is not to repeat ‘to the limit’ that which is already entirely retained within the situation which the limit limits; the audacity of thought consists in crossing a space where nothing is given. We must learn once more how to succeed.”

— Alain Badiou

35. “The world is full of new developments and love must also be something that innovates. Risk and adventure must be re-invented against safety and comfort.”

— Alain Badiou

36. “While desire focuses on the other, always in a somewhat fetishist manner, on a particular object, like breasts, buttocks and cock... love focuses on the very being of the other, on the other as it has erupted, fully armed with its being, into my life thus disrupted and re-fashioned.”

— Alain Badiou