Alain Badiou Quotes

Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.

Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.

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.

Those who have nothing have only their discipline.

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

Alain Badiou was once seated amongst the public in a room where I was delivering a talk, when his cellphone (which, to add insult to injury, was mine -- I had lent it to him) all of a sudden started to ring. Instead of turning it off, he gently interrupted me and asked me if I could talk more softly, so that he could hear his interlocutor more clearly . . . If this was not an act of true friendship, I do not know what friendship is. So, this book is dedicated to Alain Badiou.

We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.

Love can only consist in failure...on the fallacious assumption that it is a relationship. But it is not. It is a production of truth.

إن إعلان الحب هو الانتقال من الصدفة إلى القدر، ولهذا هو محفوف بالخطر ومشحون بنوع من رهبة خشبة المسرح المرعب.

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

I would say, if you like, that the party is like an out-moded mathematics...that is to say, the mathematics of Euclid. We need to invent a non-Euclidian mathematics with respect to political discipline.

We pose only those questions whose answers are the pre-given conditions of the questions themselves.

Love what you will never believe twice.

The oppressed peoples of the earth are not objects for the exquisite turmoil of European consciences. They are subjects from which to learn how to exercise political intelligence and action. Obviously, colonial arrogance is a long time dying.

Mieux vaut un désastre qu'un désêtre.

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.

So love remains powerful, subjectively powerful: one of those rare experiences where, on the basis of chance inscribed in a moment, you attempt a declaration of eternity.

The absolute contingency of the encounter with someone I didn’t know finally 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.

In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other. The other helps you to discover the reality of pleasure. In love, on the contrary, the mediation of the other is enough in itself.

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

If you’ve ever read the French philosopher Alain Badiou, you’ll know that he defines jokes as a type of rupture that opens up truths.

These latter institutions [the civil service, trade unions, media of all kinds], notably of course television, but more subtly the written press, are quite spectacular powers of unreason and ignorance.

It is now an easy matter to spell out the ethic of a truth: 'Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds you perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you.

I think… that love encompasses the experience of the possible transition from the pure randomness of chance to a state that has universal value. Starting out from something that is simply an encounter, a trifle, you learn that you can experience the world on the basis of difference and not only in terms of identity. And you can even be tested and suffer in the process. In today’s world, it is generally thought that individuals only pursue their own self-interest. Love is an antidote to that. Provided it isn’t conceived only as an exchange of mutual favours, or isn’t calculated way in advance as a profitable investment, love really is a unique trust placed in chance. It takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can experience the world from the perspective of difference. In this respect it has universal implications: it is an individual experience of potential universality, and is thus central to philosophy, as Plato was the first to intuit.

the fact that she and I are now incorporated into this unique subject, the subject of love that views the panorama of the world through the prism of our difference

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.

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

Christianity grasped perfectly that there is an element in the apparent contingency of love that can’t be reduced to that contingency. But it immediately raised it to the level of transcendence, and that is the root of the problem. This universal element I too recognize in love as immanent. But Christianity has somehow managed to elevate it and refocus it onto a transcendent power. It’s an ideal that was already partly present in Plato, through the idea of the Good. It is a brilliant first manipulation of the power of love and one we must now bring back to earth. I mean we must demonstrate that love really does have universal power, but that it is simply the opportunity we are given to enjoy a positive, creative, affirmative experience of difference. The Other, no doubt, but without the “Almighty-Other”, without the “Great Other” of transcendence.

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.

وحده الفن يستعيد بُعد المعاني للقاء، للثورة، للتمرد. إن الفن في كل أشكاله هو تأمل عظيم للحدث كما هو. إن اللوحة العظيمة هي القبض على شيء ما لا يمكن اختصاره إلى ماتعرضه بأسلوبها.

Philosophy is an operation that of itself produces nothing; it operates on the basis of truths subtracted from the event.

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.

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.

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..

We need to kill Aristotle!

could imagine Akira Anno and Alain Badiou together, talking into the small hours. I’m sure it would have been a barrel of laughs.

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.

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.

When one abdicates universality, one obtains universal horror.

We do not want to count; we want to think the count.

El amor es siempre la posibilidad de presenciar el nacimiento de un mundo.

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.

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

Zero deaths” war, “zero risks” love, nothing random, no chance encounters. Backed as it is, with all the resources of a wide-scale advertising campaign, I see it as the first threat to love, what I would call the safety threat. After all, it’s not so very different to an arranged marriage. Not done in the name of family order and hierarchy by despotic parents, but in the name of safety for the individuals involved, through advance agreements that avoid randomness, chance encounters and in the end any existential poetry, due to the categorical absence of risks.

What remains of the labours of the ‘new philosophers’ who have been enlightening us – or, in other words, deadening our minds – for 30 years now? What really remains of the great ideological machinery of freedom, human rights, the West and its values? It all comes down to a simple negative statement that is as bald as it is flat and as naked as the day it was born: socialisms, which were the communist Idea’s only concrete forms, failed completely in the twentieth century. Even they have had to revert to capitalism and non-egalitarian dogma. That failure of the Idea leaves us with no choice, given the complex of the capitalist organization of production and the state parliamentary system. Like it or not, we have to consent to it for lack of choice. And that is why we now have to save the banks rather than confiscate them, hand out billions to the rich and give nothing to the poor, set nationals against workers of foreign origin whenever possible, and, in a word, keep tight controls on all forms of poverty in order to ensure the survival of the powerful. No choice, I tell you! As our ideologues admit, it is not as though relying on the greed of a few crooks and unbridled private property to run the state and the economy was the absolute Good. But it is the only possible way forward. In his anarchist vision, Stirner described man, or the personal agent of History, as ‘the Ego and his own’. Nowadays, it is ‘Property as ego’. Which

Ink was black, in inkwells and bottles, in the past. It would get all over your fingers because it would run and flow relentlessly. This inevitable messiness was the flip side of writing. I always felt caught between two kinds of black: that of the dirty and dirtying substance and that of the signs that miraculously emerged from it through the magic of wayward fountain pens, which, when dipped too deep in the inkwell, had a strong tendency to cover the paper with what used to be called “inkblots.” Oh, the miracle of a clear and possibly elegant sentence emerging from the sticky ink and wending its way between the blots! It is the black of meaning wrung from the black of matter. (…) Isn’t the most profound education the one that was afforded me at my childhood elementary school, the one that divides the ink sharply between thought become Letter and drive turned into splotches and blots? How will those who begin with the darkish gray on the palish gray of computer screens manage? Without the slightest inkblot? Won’t they think that thought is just another variation of formlessness, that the intellect is just a thin additional coat of gray over the gray of drive, and drive a mere stripping of the gray of the intellect? Everything in the world is the result of a creative and careful dosing of black as it is projected onto the formidable invariability of white. Anyone who hasn’t experienced this, and sooner rather than later, will never learn anything.

Ik vind het grootmoedig van Butler dat ze de diffuse 'commodificatie van identiteit' aanmerkt als het probleem. Ik zou, minder grootmoedig, willen zeggen dat het simpele feit dat ze lesbisch is voor sommige mensen al het overige naar de achtergrond dringt, dat ongeacht welke woorden van de lippen van de 'lesbienne' rollen, welke ideeën aan haar geest ontspruiten, bepaalde luisteraars maar één ding horen, 'lesbisch, lesbisch, lesbisch'. En dan is het maar een kleine stap naar het niet serieus nemen van de lesbienne als 'identitair' - niet alleen de lesbienne, overigens, maar eigenlijk iedereen die weigert zich stilletjes te voegen naar een 'postraciale' toekomst die maar al te zeer lijkt op het raciale heden en verleden - terwijl het in feite de luisteraar is die zich niet kan losmaken van de identiteit die hij de spreker heeft toegedicht. De spreker 'identitair' noemen fungeert dan als doeltreffend excuus om niet naar haar te luisteren, in welk geval de luisteraar zijn rol als spreker weer kan oppakken. En vervolgens kunnen we snel doorgaan naar het zoveelste congres met een keynotespeech van Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou of Slavoj Žižek [...] en dat alles in aanbidding van de zoveelste geweldige blanke man die op het podium staat te oreren, precies zoals we dat al eeuwen en eeuwen hebben gedaan.

Love cannot be reduced to the first encounter, because it is a construction. The enigma in thinking about love is the duration of time necessary for it to flourish. In fact, it isn’t the ecstasy of those beginnings that is remarkable. The latter are clearly ecstatic, but love is above all a construction that lasts. We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first serious disagreement, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.

will respond by reciprocating this desire. The difference between romance and love is that the former never leaves the terrain of desire. The subject seeking romance sees in the other the possibility of the realization of its desire and thereby reduces the love object to an object of desire. This is why romance inevitably produces disappointment. Love, though it disturbs the subject, does not disappoint. In love, one can find satisfaction with the love object. But love also removes the subject from the terrain of desire. Though love necessarily begins with desire, it doesn’t end there. When one falls in love, one falls for the other’s way of enjoying itself, for the other’s satisfaction with its own form of failure, its satisfaction with the absence of the object that would realize desire. Love targets the point at which the subject exceeds itself and is not self-identical. According to Joan Copjec, “when one loves something, one loves something in it that is more than itself, its nonidentity to itself.” 5 We seek love to escape the constraints of our symbolic identity and to enjoy our nonidentity. In the act of love, one abandons oneself. When one falls in love, one loses all sense of oneself and one’s symbolic coordinates. Love is never a good investment for the subject, and this separates it definitively from romance. This is why capitalism necessitates the transformation of love into romance. This transformation allows us to love on the cheap. Many theorists of love, like Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou, have remarked on love’s inherent disruptiveness. But this is apparent as early as Plato’s approach to the question of love.

In Being and Event and elsewhere throughout his philosophy, Alain Badiou grants love an evental status, locating it among what he calls the four truth procedures. This inclusion of love seems anomalous. In comparison with the other three truth procedures, love doesn’t fit in. When one reads Being and Event for the first time, one can’t help but feel that the conception of the love event represents a philosophical misstep on Badiou’s part, a case where he allowed his own private emotions to have an undue impact on his philosophy. Though Badiou may like the feeling of being in love, this hardly justifies its status as a truth procedure. Unlike politics, art, and science, love seems to be an isolated phenomenon. A love event—the relationship of Jill and Dave, for instance—doesn’t have the same world-historical impact as the French Revolution or the invention of twelve-tone music (examples of the political and artistic event from Badiou). Even a love event that garners great attention, like the affair between Héloïse d’Argenteuil and Peter Abélard, fails to produces the type of substantive changes accomplished by the storming of the Bastille. But Badiou classifies love alongside the other truth procedures for its disruptiveness of everyday life and—which is in some sense to say the same thing—for its ability to arouse the subject’s passion. Love may be an anomalous truth procedure, but perhaps this is because it is the paradigmatic truth procedure. Love’s disruption of our everyday life is much more palpable than that of politics, art, or science. The subject in love feels as if it can’t exist without the beloved, while even Galileo himself didn’t feel this strongly about the scientific event in which he participated. It is much easier to imagine subjects dying for the sake of love than for the sake of the twelve-tone system of modern music. This is because love has a disruptiveness that transcends the other truth procedures. The cynical approach to love fails to register this disruptiveness. According to Badiou, the cynic contends that “love is only a variant of generalized hedonism,” and this cynicism enables one to avoid “every profound and authentic experience of otherness from which love is woven.” Dismissing the reality of love—seeing it as just a capitalist plot—is a way of avoiding the transformation that it demands, but it also leaves one’s existence bereft of significance. The passion that love arouses impels subjects to continue to go on.

It is in this context, clearly dominated by a classist propaganda, chauvinist and persecutory, that the accusation of anti-Semitism and hidden negationism – despite being completely unfounded – tetanizes the majority of its victims. How should we explain this strange phenomenon? A first reason lies in the brutality of the accusation, very unusual in a society bathed in a polite consensus – at least among well-behaved people. Suddenly, in a procedure reminiscent of the logic of fascism in which insult overshadows argument, we are dealing with a genuine provocation: an accusation so serious and so incongruous that we can well imagine it leaves some people speechless. And then, it’s very difficult to defend yourself against such an accusation: ‘No, I’m not anti-Semitic’ being a double negation (‘I’m not one of those people who don’t like Jews’) with the fragility this implies. How, indeed, can one prove that one is not something? Say that one has Jewish friends? That’s the worst of all. (‘Ah! He’s got his good Jews.’) Remind people, in certain cases, that one is Jewish oneself? We have seen how that is an aggravating factor. Launch a legal action? Lost in advance, as the accusers are clever enough to use terms that shelter them from prosecution for defamation, which has its precise rules. They will never say that you’re anti-Semitic; they’ll even say that ‘of course, you’re not’, letting their argument, their tone, their comparisons and their historic references do the slandering work while they remain protected.

It may appear that one cannot act today, that all we can really do is just state things. But in a situation like today's, to state waht is can be much stronger than calls to action, which are as a rule just so many excuses not to do anything. Let me quote Alain Badiou's provocative thesis: 'It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visiblt that which Empire already recognizes as existent.' Better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly (acts like providing space for the multitude of new subjectivities, etc.). The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to 'be active,' to 'participate' to maks the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, 'do something,' while academics participate in meaningless 'debates,' and son on, and the truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw from all this. Those in power often prefer even a 'critical' participation, an exchange of whatever kind, to silence--just in order to engage us in a 'dialogue,' to make sure our ominous passivity is broken.

La masa de datos e informaciones, que crece sin límites, aleja hoy la ciencia de la teoría, del pensamiento.

A pesar del manifiesto miedo a la pandemia gripal, actualmente no vivimos en la época viral. La hemos dejado atrás gracias a la técnica inmunológica. El comienzo del siglo XXI, desde un punto de vista patológico, no sería ni bacterial ni viral, sino neuronal.

El país de Jauja, de Brueghel, muestra una sobresaturada sociedad de la positividad, un infierno de lo igual. Los hombres yacen con apatía aquí y allá con sus cuerpos repletos, agotados por la saciedad. Incluso el cactus no tiene ninguna espina. Es de pan. Aquí todo es positivo siempre que pueda comerse y disfrutarse.

«el amor es una escena del Dos», y por esa razón una especie de matriz política básica.

El régimen neoliberal esconde su estructura coactiva tras la aparente libertad del individuo, que ya no se entiende como sujeto sometido (subject to), sino como desarrollo de un proyecto.

The sophist is basically philosophy’s fascist, which is why, with him, there can only be war.

«El capitalismo intensifica el progreso de lo pornográfico en la sociedad, en cuanto lo expone todo como mercancía y lo exhibe. No conoce ningún otro uso de la sexualidad. Profana a Eros para hacer pornografía». Solo el amor consigue que lo erótico, el sexo, no sea exposición, sino ritualización, por cuyo medio se mantiene, en la desnudez misma, el misterio del otro, que la exposición contemporánea convierte en banalidad consumible.

Radicals are, on the contrary, possessed by what Alain Badiou called the 'passion of the Real': if you say A - equality, human rights and freedoms - you should not shirk from its consequences but muster the courage to say B - the terror needed to really defend and assert the A.

In his Le siecle, Alain Badiou argues that the shift from 'humanism AND terror' that occurred towards the end of the twentieth century was a sign of political regression. In 1946, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote Humanism and Terror, his defence of Soviet Communism as involving a kind of Pascalean wager that announces the topic of what Bernard Williams later developed as the notion of 'moral luck': the present terror will be retroactively justified if the society that emerges from it proves to be truly human; today, such a conjunction of terror and humanism is properly unthinkable, the predominant liberal view replaces AND with OR: either humanism or terror.

libre. Domina una economía de la supervivencia en la que cada uno es su propio empresario. El neoliberalismo, con sus desinhibidos impulsos narcisistas del yo y del rendimiento, es el infierno de lo igual, una sociedad de la depresión y el cansancio compuesta por sujetos aislados.

Communisme’, c’est l’affirmation que ce qui est commun à tous les hommes doit être l’objet incessant de la pensée, de l’action, de l’organisation.

This is a very difficult, almost metaphysical problem: how can what is pure chance at the outset become the fulcrum for a construction of truth? How can something that was basically unpredictable and seemed tied to the unpredictable vagaries of existence nevertheless become the entire meaning of two lives that have met, paired off, that will engage in the extended experience of the constant (re)-birth of the world via the mediation of the difference in their gazes?

Al pensamiento calculador le falta la negatividad de la atopía.

Martin Heidegger, en una carta a su mujer, escribía: Es difícil expresar lo otro que, junto con el amor a ti, es inseparable de mi pensamiento, aunque sea de modo diferente. Lo llamo el Eros,

Alain Badiou.

Según Hegel, la «vida del espíritu» no es la mera vida «que teme la muerte y se mantiene intacta frente a la devastación», sino la vida que «la soporta y se conserva en ella».

Modern sophists are those who, in the footsteps of the great Wittgenstein, maintain that thought is held to the following alternative: either effects of discourse, language games , or the silent indication, the pure "showing" of that which is subtracted from the clutches of language. Sophists are those for whom the fundamental opposition is not between 'truth and error, or errancy, but between speech and silence, that is , between what can be said and what is impossible to say. Or again: between propositions endowed with sense and others devoid of it.

Just as Plato wrote the Gorgias and Protagoras for the major sophists, we should write the Nietzsche and the Wittgenstein. And, for the minor sophists , the Vattimo and the Rorty. Neither more nor less polemical, neither more nor less respectful.

(…) Lacan savait que le théâtre est un réservoir capital quand il s'agit de comprendre le mécanisme qui transforme le réel en représentation et le désir en images.

La verdadera vida, de Alain Badiou, se abre con la provocativa afirmación de que, de Sócrates en adelante, la función de la filosofía consiste en corromper a la juventud, en alienarla (o mejor dicho, en «extrañarla» en el sentido de verfremden de Brecht) del orden ideológico-político imperante, a fin de sembrar dudas radicales y permitirle pensar de manera autónoma. Los jóvenes se someten al proceso educativo con la finalidades de quedar integrados en el orden social hegemónico, motivo por el cual la educación juega un papel fundamental en la reproducción de una ideología dominante. No es de extrañar que Sócrates, el «primer filósofo», fuera también su primera víctima y tuviera que ingerir veneno de su propia mano por orden del tribunal democrático de Atenas. ¿Y acaso esta incitación a pensar no es sinónimo del mal, entendiendo por mal la alteración del modo de vida establecido?

Le bonheur amoureux est la preuve que le temps peut accueillir l'éternité.

Courage is the name of the topological burning up of places and of interests, inasmuch as it is subordinated to the gesture of opening oneself up to becoming 'the most exposed', which is what allows one to 'sustain oneself'. ... This is because courage, the burnt precipitation (one has 'fired one's last rounds') in the excess over the place, promptly recomposes - beyond the destruction that it is - the subjective process of justice.

For with the vessel, and with the dissipation into smoke of the treasure it contains, it is he, the subject, the anonymous bearer, the herald, who is equally shattered.

Or let us posit that it is incumbent upon us to found a materialism of grace through the strong, simple idea that every existence can one day be seized by what happens to it and subsequently devote itself to that which is valid for all, or as Paul magnificently puts it, 'become all things to all men'.

Just as love is the general power of self-love turned toward everyone as the construction of living thought, similarly, hope weaves the subjectivity of salvation, of the unity of thought and power, as a universality that is present in each ordeal, each victory. Each victory won, however localized, is universal.

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.

4.13. The most striking aspect of Dedekind's definition is that it determines infinity positively, and subordinates the finite negatively. This is its especially modern accent, such as is almost always found in Dedekind. An infinite system has a property of an existential nature: there exists a biunivocal correspondence between it and one of its proper parts. The finite is that for which such a property does not obtain. The finite is simply that which is not infinite, and all the positive simplicity of thought hinges on the infinite.

4.19. Dedekind's approach is a singular combination of Descartes' Cogito and the idea of the idea in Spinoza. The starting point is the very space of the Cogito, as 'closed' configuration of all possible thoughts, existential point of pure thought. It is claimed (but only the Cogito assures us of this) that something like the set of all my possible thoughts exists. From Spinoza's causal 'serialism' (regardless of whether or not he figured in Dedekind's historical sources) are taken both the existence of a parallelism' which allows us to identify simple ideas by way of their object (Spinoza says: through the body of which the idea is an idea), and the existence of a reflexive redoubling, which secures the existence of 'complex' ideas, whose object is no longer a body, but another idea. For Spinoza, as for Dedekind, this process of reflexive redoubling must go to infinity. An idea of an idea (or the thought of a thought of an object) is an idea. So there exists an idea of the idea of a body, and so on.

4.23..If 'thought' means: instance of the subject in a truth-procedure, then there is no thought of this thought, because it contains no knowledge.

The 'economy of number' proposed by Peano is an economy of signs whose paradigm is algebraic, whose transparency is consensual, and whose operational effectiveness is therefore not in doubt. He thus participates forcefully in that movement of thought, victorious today, that wrests mathematics from its antique philosophical pedestal and represents it to us as a grammar of signs where all that matters is the making explicit of the code.

To the question ‘Would you envisage living with a Jewish partner?’, 8 per cent of the total questioned replied ‘No, I couldn’t envisage this for myself’, and Brenner notes that this response was given by 24 per cent of those of Maghrebian origin (a difference of 16 points). The figure for those individuals classified as ‘right-wing’ was 16 per cent (a difference of 8 points). If this does indeed confirm a more pronounced anti-Jewish prejudice among young people who class themselves as ‘right-wing’, for the question on the media the difference is less significant on the basis of our own ideological reading. Furthermore, the advantage here is more distinctly in favour of Brenner’s ethno-cultural hypothesis, which is not relativized by a high degree of equality on other questions (as above for the areas of politics and economics). This is why Brenner remarks that ‘the cleavage is most clearly marked by the question dealing with the personal sphere’, though we now have to correct this by making clear that only the personal sphere seems to mark such a ‘cleavage’, at least so far as validating his explanatory hypothesis is concerned. But the correction does not stop here. This would in fact mean forgetting that these figures do not offer any enlightenment at all as to the origin of this negative response on the part of young people of Maghrebian origin – at least, until we know how many of them would respond negatively to the broader question ‘Would you envisage living with anyone who is not Muslim (or not Maghrebian)?’ For it is only in so far as the percentage of young people of Maghrebian origin who would not envisage living with any non-Muslim (or non-Maghrebian) is clearly lower than the percentage of the same young people who would not envisage living with a Jewish person that the difference is significant. In other words, if 24 per cent of these same young people of Maghrebian origin would no more envisage living with any non-Maghrebian or non-Muslim, then the ‘cleavage’ would not be a sign of anti-Jewish prejudice, but simply the assertion of a Muslim or Maghrebian identity. Since this question was not asked, it is impossible to draw any conclusion.

Je vous propose alors une idée militante. Il serait très juste d’organiser une vaste manifestation pour une alliance des jeunes et des vieux, à vrai dire dirigée contre les adultes d’aujourd’hui. Les plus rebelles des moins de trente ans et les plus coriaces des plus de soixante contre les quadras et les quinquas bien installés. Les jeunes diraient qu’ils en ont assez d’être errants, désorientés, et interminablement dépourvus de toute marque de leur existence positive. Ils diraient aussi qu’il n’est pas bon que les adultes fassent semblant d’être éternellement jeunes. Les vieux diraient qu’ils en ont assez de payer leur dévalorisation, leur sortie de l’image traditionnelle du vieux sage, par une mise à la casse, une déportation dans des mouroirs médicalisés, et leur totale absence de visibilité sociale. Ce serait très nouveau, très important, cette manifestation mixte ! J’ai du reste vu, durant mes nombreux voyages dans le monde entier, pas mal de conférences, pas mal de situations où le public se composait d’un noyau de vieux briscards, de vieux rescapés, comme moi, des grands combats des sixties et des seventies, et puis d’une masse de jeunes qui venaient voir si le philosophe avait quelque chose à dire concernant l’orientation de leur existence et la possibilité d’une vraie vie. J’ai donc vu, partout dans le monde, l’esquisse de l’alliance dont je vous parle. Comme à saute-mouton, la jeunesse semble devoir sauter aujourd’hui par-dessus l’âge dominant, celui qui va en gros de trente-cinq à soixante-cinq ans, pour constituer avec le petit noyau des vieux révoltés, des non-résignés, l’alliance des jeunes désorientés et des vieux baroudeurs de l’existence. Ensemble, nous imposerions que soit ouvert le chemin de la vraie vie.

Alain Badiou has identified the contradictory imperatives behind the recent anti-headscarf laws in France as an example of this logic: Grandiose causes need new-style arguments. For example: hijab must be banned; it is a sign of male power (the father or eldest brother) over young girls or women. So, we’ll banish the women who obstinately wear it. Basically put: these girls or women are oppressed. Hence, they shall be punished. It’s a little like saying: ‘This woman has been raped: throw her in jail.’… Or, contrariwise: it is they who freely want to wear that damned headscarf, those rebels, those brats! Hence, they shall be punished.

Si somos capaces de ser más fuertes que la muerte, no es en la fiesta de la vida, sino dominando el infinito mismo por medio del pensamiento.

When consulted on one of the earliest texts by Alain Badiou, an article on Althusser, Derrida’s reply was both frank and open-minded: I’ve just read Badiou’s text. Like you yourself and Barthes, I find it at least irritating in its tone, the author’s pomposity, the ‘marks’ he hands out to everyone as if it were prize-giving or the Last Judgment. I still think that it’s important. [. . .] I don’t think there’s any doubt of this, and am all the more prepared to grant it this importance because I am far from feeling ‘philosophically’ ready to follow him in his arguments or his conclusions.5

Alain Badiou skriver: «En maksime som er svært populær blant politiske parlamentarikere, særlig de fra ’venstresiden’, er den som sier at ’Politikk er det muliges kunst’. For min egen del postulerer jeg helt eksplisitt at politikk er det umuliges kunst.»6 Slavoj Žižek utdyper Badious poeng ved å si at politikk dreier seg om å endre selve forestillingen om hva som er mulig i en gitt situasjon. En genuint politisk handling innebærer å gjøre mulig det som like før framsto fullstendig umulig. Som eksempel nevner Žižek kapitalismens fall. Per i dag framstår noe slikt utenkelig. Men det skyldes utelukkende at det ikke har skjedd noen sann politisk intervensjon. Så snart det skjer, vil forestillingene om hva som er mulig endre seg fullstendig.7 De folka som til enhver tid mener å vite at «ingenting kan endres», som forteller alle og enhver at de «bare kan gi opp med en gang», som forutsetter at menneskenes hjerter for alltid er dømt til å gå de samme helvetes veiene (brolagt med gode forsetter), de er ikke «nøytrale analytikere», men innbitte forsvarere av det bestående, og konsekvente motstandere av endring.

López Obrador es también conservador. Trabajo, Familia, Patria, la “trilogía reaccionaria” —según la denomina Alain Badiou— es enteramente suya. Obreros y campesinos trabajan. Las mujeres procrean a la familia. Los soldados defienden a la patria.

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

Struggle exposes us to the simple form of failure (the assault did not succeed), while victory exposes us to its most redoubtable form: we notice that we have won in vain, and that our victory paves the way for repetition and restoration. That, for the state, a revolution is never anything more than an intervening period. Hence the sacrificial temptations of nothingness. 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. 4

Bazı felsefeciler sonsuzluğun an olduğunu ileri sürmüşlerdi. Daha Yunan düşüncesinde bile bu anlayışa rastlanır. Sonsuzluğun tek zamansal boyutu andır onlara göre.... Elbette, mucizevi karşılaşma anı aşkın sonsuzluğunu vaat eder. Ama ben daha az mucizevi, daha çok emek isteyen bir sonsuzluk anlayışı, demek ki nokta nokta, inatla oluşturulan zamansal sonsuzluğu, İki'nin deneyimini ileri sürmek istiyorum. Karşılaşma mucizesi diye bir şeyin var olduğunu kabul ediyorum, ama onun tek başına ele alınırsa, nokta nokta yaratılacak bir gerçekliğin, emek isteyen bir oluşuma yönlendirilmezse, gerçeküstücü bir şiirden kaynaklandığını düşünüyorum. "Emek isteyen" sözü burada olumlu anlamda anlaşılmalı. Bir aşk çalışması vardır, yalnızca mucize değil. Habire uğraşmak, uyanık olmak, hem kendiyle hem de ötekiyle birleşmek gerekir. Düşünmek, hareket etmek, değiştirmek gerekir. O halde, evet, emeğin içkin ödülü mutluluk olur.

The mechanism of democratic representation is not really neutral. As Alain Badiou writes, “If democracy is a representation, it first of all represents the general system which sustains its form. In other words, the electoral democracy is only representative insofar as it is first the consensual representation of capitalism, which is today renamed ‘market economy.