69 Quotes by Alain Badiou

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.

Those who have nothing have only their discipline.

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.

4.23..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.

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

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

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.

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.