Alain Badiou

“Everybody says love is about finding the person who is right for me and then everything will be fine. But it's not like that. It involves work. An old man tells you this!”

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

“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 anencounter, 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.”

“A Truth is the subjective development of that which is at once both new and universal. New: that which is unforeseen by the order of creation. Universal: that which can interest, rightly, every human individual, according to his pure humanity.”

“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.”

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

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

“Liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism.”

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

“There is a kind of serenity in love which is almost a paradise.”

“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.”