Badiou
@beingandevent
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Alain Badiou Twitter museum
The Void
Joined December 2020
Alain Badiou explains the difference between œuvres and déchet from Immanence of Truths. A work is the product of a truth-procedure which can exist beyond its finite conditions of creation while a waste-product merely exists for the market place.
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“fascist logic is always identitarian; the generic is its fundamental enemy.”
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“Marxism is neither a branch of economics (theory of the relations of production), nor a branch of sociology (objective description of 'social reality'), nor a philosophy (a dialectical conceptualization of contradictions).”
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“Ideally, politics should organize the 'withering away of the State'; it is, therefore, completely in relation with the State but in such a way that it aims at its abolition. Similarly, love should ideally organize the withering away of the family.”
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Today Alain Badiou turns 86 years old. “My philosophy desires affirmation.”
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“Deleuze forcefully maintained – against, it must be said, all the joyous, 'anarcho-desiring' and spontaneist interpretations of his philosophy – that thinking is never a matter of voluntary decision or natural inclination. We are always, he declared, forced to think.”
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“I use "fascism" as the name for a popular subjectivity generated by capitalism which mixes into an identitarian, nationalist discourse.”. Corrupting the Youth: A Conversation with Alain Badiou | Verso Books
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“While we’re about it, we can also say that love is communist in that sense, if one accepts, as I do, that the real subject of a love is the becoming of the couple and not the mere satisfaction of the individuals that are its component parts.”
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“Materialist is whoever recognizes the primacy of being over thinking (being does not need my thinking in order to be). Idealist, whoever posits the opposite.”
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“It is, let us reiterate, the organized knowledge of the.political means required to undo existing society and .finally realize an egalitarian, rational figure of collective organization for which the name is 'communism'.”.—The Rebirth of History.
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“When it comes to figures like…Guevara… it is vital not to give any ground in the context of criminalization and hair-raising anecdotes in which the forces of reaction have always tried to wall them up and invalidate them.”. Badiou’s letter to Žižek is a masterclass
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“I have a son who adores rap and who's very knowledgeable about its successive stages. I keep myself up to date, as a result!”.
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“For me, an event is something that brings to light a possibility that was invisible or even unthinkable.”
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“For example, during an international conference on the idea of communism, Antonio Negri - I was (and remain) very pleased he participated - publicly took me as an example of those who claim to be communists without even being Marxists.”
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“I haven’t voted since June 1968, and at my age I don’t think I’ll be giving in… It would be pointless.”. Corrupting the Youth: A Conversation with Alain Badiou | Verso Books
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“As Nietzsche perfectly established, and as Foucault further developed it, genealogical thought, or genealogical philosophy, is what could be called vitalist historicism.”
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“There's no universally acceptable or legitimate theory today of what a political organization dedicated to the emancipation of humanity, or to be more precise, guided by the communist Idea, is.”
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“The difficulty of the contemporary world is that it continually sets out false contradictions as if they were major antagonistic contradictions.”
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“At the end of his life, Mao went so far as to ask the question: let us assume that the factories have been nationalized; but does this mean our factories are really different from the capitalist factories?”
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“As Spinoza said, everything true is as difficult as it is rare.”.
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“Do you want a simple rule for when anxiety is eating away at you? Look for the courageous act before which you show reluctance, the real that you believe to be impossible, and which is real for this very reason.”
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Badiou on Online Dating.from In Praise of Love (2009). “I believe this hype reflects a safety-first concept of “love”. It is love comprehensively insured against all risks”
Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd says the future of dating is having your AI date other people's AI and recommend the best matches for you to meet
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“May 1968 breaks my life in two parts. And it is why it’s, for me, the model of what is an Event.”.—Badiou(2018).
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“Communism is the name of the historical process of the destruction of the old society. Thus to change is not to obtain a result. The result lies in the change itself.”
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“But these artists – David.Lynch, for example – are interesting precisely because they have the ambition to take what is worst in the contemporary world as their material and to show how, even with such material, an artistic synthesis of great purity can be created.”
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“Deleuze put it perfectly: capitalist deterritorializa-tion requires a constant reterritorialization.”.
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“Humanity can be attested if and only if there is (emancipatory) politics, (conceptual) science, (creative) art and love (not reduced to a mix of sentimentality and sexuality).”
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“Marx doesn’t think that communism is the programme of a new society or an abstract idea of justice. Communism is the name of the historical process of the destruction of the old society. Thus to change is not to obtain a result. The result lies in the change itself.”.—Happiness.
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“The Palestinians are the ones who have had to flee, abandon their lands, witness the destruction of their homes, be shut up in ghettos and camps, spend hours to go from one village to another and get across walls.”
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“Mao is, for the time being, the proper name associated with the last great historical experiment, the one that attempted to gear the situation in a revolutionary way toward communism, by means of mass action within the socialist state.”
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“To give up on communism, or on any possible name for emancipatory exceptions, is to give up on the very form of true political desire.”.
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“When I am in a hostel populated by workers from Mali, Morocco or the Ivory Coast, and I discuss the paths of their liberation with and among this international, nomadic proletariat, then I am doing politics.”
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Alain Badiou: “The alleged power of capitalism, its false “dynamism” — it actually goes through long periods of crisis and stagnation — today is merely a reflection of the weakness of its opponents.”
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“It is necessary to examine, in a detailed way, the contemporary theory of evil, the ideology of human rights, the concept of democracy. It is necessary to show that nothing there leads in the direction of the real emancipation of humanity.”.
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“In general, what do you take to be the decisive difference between your position and Žižek’s?”.… .“That is, in my opinion, why Žižek is not exactly in the field of philosophy”
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“There is nothing apart from situations. Ontology, if it exists, is a situation.”.—Being and Event
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“For Mallarmé, poetry should express neither the poet nor the world.”
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“Like all the philosophers of vital continuity, Deleuze cannot maintain the gap between sense, the transcendental law of appearing, and truths as exceptions. At times, he even seems to equate the two terms. He once wrote to me that he ‘had no need’ for the category of truth.”
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“For Hegel, consciousness is, on the one hand, a being; it is in itself, and, on the other hand, it is a reflection; it is for itself. This is obviously the classic theme of the scissiparity of consciousness insofar as it can be apprehended as something that exists in itself,”
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“I fully recognize that there can be homosexual love.”.—Philosophy and the Event.
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“As in Lacan's superb expression, anxiety is nothing but the lack of lack.”.
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“I think there are only three crucial philosophers: Plato, Descartes and Hegel. Note that these are precisely the three philosophers whom Deleuze is unable to love.”.—Logics of Worlds
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“If philosophy serves any purpose, it is to take away the chalice of sad passions and to teach us that pity is not a loyal affect, that our plaints do not mean that we are right, and that victimhood is not the starting point for thought.”
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“The main event in Kierkegaard’s life was basically the fact that the event did not happen.”.—The Immanence of Truths
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“Today, it is also quite clear that if we allow ourselves to be intimidated, philosophy will be nothing more than a scholastic quarrel between liberal grammarians and pious phenomenologists.”.—Logics of Worlds
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“I used to love what we said before to keep our distance from these "movements" so celebrated by public opinion: "Not everything that moves is red" (Tout ce qui bouge n'est pas rouge).”
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“'To be prepared for an event' means being subjectively disposed to recognizing new possibilities.”
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“Let us assume that politics is what I think it is, which can be summed up in the following definition: organized collective action, following certain principles, and aiming to develop in reality the consequences of a new possibility repressed by the dominant state of affairs.”
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“But I need neither God nor the divine. I believe that it is here and now that we rouse or resurrect ourselves as Immortals.”
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“This is proof that in order to think anything at all, something no matter what, it must be split in two.”.—Theory of the Subject
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“I think that assigning the family as love's obligatory fnality creates considerable difficulties for love. In the same way, making the takeover of State power the inevitable objective of politics creates considerable difficulties for politics.”.
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“Communist-type politics is an immanent activity, an activity under the sign of a shared Idea, not an activity determined by external constraints such as the economy or the legal formalism of the state.”
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Philosophy Between.Mathematics and Poetry.from Badiou by Badiou. “Poetry for me is the possibility of thinking what happens: the pure event. An event by force is what happens and subsequently disappears.”
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“Sartre once said that if humanity proved to be incapable of achieving communism – this was back when that word was used innocently, so to speak – then, after humanity died out, it could be said that it had been of no more interest than ants. It’s easy to see what he meant.”
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🚨Thirteen theses and some comments on politics today, by Alain Badiou 9/2/2022 . This is definitively Badiou’s politics. 1/16
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“For what is the broadest definition of fascism? We might say that fascism is a dogged antimodernist vision of the world, nostalgic for the era of nations, religions, and conservatism, but that it remains violently articulated with capitalism itself.”.
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“This society is horribly unequal. It creates no genuine future, no inspiring future. It despises universality, it has no relationship with truths of any sort, it is completely given over to the market and financial speculation, and so on.”.—The Immanence of Truths.
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from A New Dawn for Politics, ‘Science, Ideology, and the Middle Class’:. “the middle class is keen not to be confused with the great masses of the very poor.”
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“Nothing is more facile, nothing is more abstract, nothing is more useless than the critique of capitalism reduced to itself.”.—The Pornographic Age
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The death of ideologies means: “Enjoy (if you can), live without an Idea. Enjoyment is a sufficient norm. Stand before the great planetary market, buy something if you can, it’ll be great, otherwise don’t embarrass our spirit with your ideas.”
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“It is one of Mao's strengths to have insisted that the revolutionary Marxist is the lookout for the vanishing term, emblem of the new within the old. He or she is the active guardian of the future of the cause.”.—Theory of the Subject
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2016: “So, progressively — and that is the most important consequence concerning the election of Trump — progressively, all the political oligarchy, all the political class, becomes the same group, at the level of the world itself.”
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“We will not take Deleuze and Guattari to be illiterate. We will thus take them to be crooks.”.
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“To believe that the intolerable crime is to burn a few cars and rob some shops, whereas to kill a young man is trivial, is typically in keeping with what Marx regarded as the principal alienation of capitalism: the primacy of things over existence, of commodities over life”
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“The public debate today is between two disastrous positions: on the one side, free-market consensus and universal commercialism and, on the other, the retreat into identities, which is a reactionary and, moreover, totally ineffective defense against that globalization.”
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“Today, for example, all egalitarian politics are rendered impossible and declared absurd in the name of a necessity of the liberal economy without measure or concept.”
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“A capitalism on the eve of its metamorphosis into communism. Such, roughly but accurately, is Negri's position.”
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“The point that psychoanalysis and philosophy have in common is that they both hold truth and error to be absolutely entwined.”.
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“…what the sophist professes to show, ancient and modern alike, is precisely that there is no truth, and that its concept is useless and uncertain, because conventions, rules, genres of discourse and language games are all that exist.”
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“Within the psychoanalytic lineage, Lacan had deciphered philosophical systematization as akin to paranoia.”
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“As Brecht puts it, as soon as we are dealing with a political truth, “‘never’ becomes ‘today’.” Tomorrow must be here. Activating the present in such a way that tomorrow is always-already-here has nothing to do with prophesy.”.—The Immanence of Truths
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“I would thus propose to say that Foucault is neither a philosopher nor a historian nor a bastardized combination of the two. Foucault proposes a linguistic or discursive anthropology.”
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“This was a revolution that opened out into the foundation of a new modernity.”. Alain Badiou on the Russian Revolution of October 1917 | Verso Books
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“When Sartre said that 'an anti- communist is a dog', he was simply recognizing the necessity of political reality. In 1950, it was quite true that an anti-communist had simply abdicated his responsibility and chosen servitude and oppression, both for himself and for others.”
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“We can do something. And we must do, because if we do nothing at all, we are only in the fascination, the stupidity of fascination, by the depressive success of Trump.”. Alain Badiou: Reflections on the Recent Election | Verso Books
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“Truth to tell, Deleuze constructed a very unusual history of 'interesting' doctrines ('interesting' was a word he liked) that was meant only for himself: the Stoics and Lucretius, Duns Scotus, Spinoza and Leibniz, Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead…”
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“These capitalist states that domesticate the middle class are called 'democracies'.”.—A New Dawn For Politics
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“When politics strays into identities, it is lost. It sets the ground for nothing other than wars, civil wars and horrors.”.—Philosophy and the Event
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“More generally, we must affirm that a subject exists at the point where it is impossible to distinguish between discipline and freedom.”.
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“This diagram is based on the fundamental hypothesis that the subjective effects of the contemporary world situation, which has lasted since the 1980s, cannot be understood on the basis of any single contradiction.”
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“2000 Palestinian deaths, including 450 children. So this is civilised? Just because it was airplanes that killed, shredded, crushed, and burned people, and not young idiots who opened fire into the crowd before killing themselves?”.—Our Wound is Not So Recent (2016).
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“Only those who do something other than wait for a miracle are deserving of it.”
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“Philosophy is a construction of thinking wherein the fact that there are truths is proclaimed.against sophistry. But this central proclamation supposes a strictly philosophical category, the Truth.”
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“The name “Mao” is that of the political thought immanent to this revolution without precedent in history. It connotes not the personal leadership of the movement but the keenness of a thought put to the test of that movement.”.—The Immanence of Truths
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