Alain Badiou Quotes

Alain Badiou on Knowledge

• “Meditation One: The One and the Multiple: a priori conditions of any possible ontology”

  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 im

• “We find ourselves on the brink of a decision, a decision to break with the arcana of the one and the multiple in which philosophy is born and buried, phoenix of its own sophistic consumption.”

  Meditation One: The One and the Multiple: a priori conditions of any possible ontology

• “Meditation One: The One and the Multiple: a priori conditions of any possible ontology”

  We find ourselves on the brink of a decision, a decision to break with the arcana of the one and the multiple in which philosophy is born and buried, phoenix of its own sophistic consumption.

• “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'.”

  Meditation One: The One and the Multiple: a priori conditions of any possible ontology

• “Meditation One: The One and the Multiple: a priori conditions of any possible ontology”

  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'.

• “Chapter One, "Does Man Exist?”

  According to the way it is generally used today, the term 'ethics' relates above all to the domain of human rights, 'the rights of man'- or, by derivation, the rights of living beings. We are supposed to assume the existence of a universally recognizable human subject possessing 'rights' that are in some sense natural: the right to live, to avoid abusive, to enjoy 'fundamental' liberties (of opini

• “Chapter One, "Does Man Exist?”

  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.

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Alain Badiou on Mind

• “This book founds a doctrine which is effectively post-Cartesian, or even post-Lacanian, a doctrine of what, for thought, both un-binds the Heidegerean connection between being and truth and institutes the subject, not as support or origin, but as fragment of the process of a truth.”

  Introduction

• “If one category had to be designated as an emblem of my thought, it would be neither Cantor's pure multiple, nor Godel's constructible, nor the void, by which being is named, nor even the event, in which the supplement of what-is-not-being-qua-being originates. It would be the generic .”

  Introduction

Alain Badiou on Politics

• Attributed to Alain Badiou:

  “The communist hypothesis is the only one worth defending.”

• “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.”

  Chapter One, "Does Man Exist?

Alain Badiou on Truth

• “Mathematics is ontology.”

  Introduction

• Attributed to Alain Badiou:

  “Truth is what punches a hole in knowledge.”

• Attributed to Alain Badiou:

  “Be faithful to the event that has touched you.”

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Alain Badiou on Virtue

• Attributed to Alain Badiou:

  “There is no ethics in general, only the ethics of singular truth procedures.”