Alain Badiou Quotes

France, Philosopher
January 17, 1937

Alain Badiou (French: [alɛ̃ badju] About this sound (listen) (help·info); born 17 January 1937) is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. Badiou has written about the concepts of being, truth, event and the subject in a way that, he claims, is neither postmodern nor simply a repetition of modernity. Badiou has been involved in a number of political organisations, and regularly comments on political events. Badiou argues for resurrecting the practice of communism.

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.

Alain Badiou
- Today
- Simple
Art attests to what is inhuman in man.

Alain Badiou
- Art

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'.

Alain Badiou
- Work
- Courage
The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.

Alain Badiou
- Art
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
- Today
- Political
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.

Alain Badiou
- Age
- Small
- Dying
Truth is a new word in Europe (and elsewhere).

Alain Badiou
- Truth
Without mathematics, we are blind.

Alain Badiou

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.

Alain Badiou