Badiou, A. (2012c). In praise of love. New York: The New Press. “Love really is a unique trust place 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” (p. 17).

“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” (p. 66).

“Sex separates, doesn’t unite. The fact you are naked and pressing against the other is an image, an imaginary representation. What is real is that pleasure takes you a long way away, very far from the other. What is real is narcissistic, what binds is imaginary. So there is no such thing as a sexual relationship, concludes Lacan” (p. 18).

“Love doesn’t take me ‘above’ or indeed ‘below’. It is an existential project: to construct a world from a decentered point of view other than that of mere impulse to survive or re-affirm my own identity” (p. 25).

“love involves a separation or disjuncture based on the simple difference between two people and their infinite subjectivities” (p. 27).

“What is universal is that all love suggests a new experience of truth about what is to be two and not one. That we can encounter and experience the world other than through a solitary consciousness: any love whatsoever gives us new evidence of this” (p. 39).

“There is also a striking similarity between politics and love” (p. 52).

“The process of love isn’t always peaceful. It can bring violent argument, genuine anguish and separations we may or may not overcome….At its own level, love is not necessarily any more peaceful than revolutionary politics…. The difference is that in politics we really have to engage with our enemies, whereas in love it is all about dramas, immanent, internal dramas that don’t really define any enemies, though they do sometimes place the drive for identity // into conflict with difference. Dramas in love are the sharpest experience of the conflict between identity and difference” (pp. 61-62).

“what I want to suggest is a concept of love that is less miraculous and more hard work, namely a construction of eternity within time, of the experience of the Two, point by point” (p. 80).

“When the logic of identity wins the day, love is under threat” (p. 98).

Badiou, A. (2012) A philosophy for militants. New York: Verso. “Even in the classical conception, political struggles, insurrections or revolutions are not

structural effects – they are moments, and we have to seize the moment, name the circumstances and so on. But the moment, the political struggle, expresses and concentrates social contradictions. This is why an insurrection can be purely // singular and at the same time universal: purely singular, because it is a moment, the pure moment; and universal, because finally this moment is the expression of general and fundamental contradictions” (pp. 61-62).

“Revolutionary vision is not at all situated on the side of pure desire, because the contents of revolutionary desire are the realization of generic humanity, which in fact represents the end of the separate relation between law and desire. In this case, the goal is something like the fusion of law and desire, so as to arrive at something that would be like the creative affirmation of humanity as such. We could say that this kind of vision presents a law of life” (p. 73).

“Against the idea of normal desires we must sustain the militant idea of a desire that permanently affirms the existence of that which has no name. To the extent that it is the common part of our historical existence, we must affirm the existence of that which has no name as the generic part of this historical existence: that is probably the revolutionary conception of our time, with the possibility that this kind of transformation would be local and not necessarily general or total” (p. 76).

Badiou, A. (2012a). Ethics: An essay on the understanding of evil. New York: Verso.

“Ethics is the principle that judges the practice of a subject, be it individual or collective” (p. 2).

“Rather than link the word to abstract categories (Man or Human, Right or Law, the Other…), it should be referred back to particular situations. Rather than reduce it to an aspect of pity for victims, it should become the enduring maxim of singular processes…. it should concern the destiny of truths, in the plural” (p. 3).

Thesis 2: It is from our positive capability for Good, and thus from our boundary-breaking treatment of possibilities and our refusal of conservatism, including the conservation of being, that we are ready to identify Evil – not vice versa.

“The dialectic of the Same and the Other, conceived ‘ontologically’ under the dominance of self-identity ensures the absence of the Other in effective thought, // suppresses all genuine experience of the Other, and bars the way to an ethical opening to alterity” (pp. 18-19).

“The problem is that the ‘respect for differences’ and the ethics of human rights do seem to define an identity! And that as a result, the respect for differences applies only to those differences that are reasonably consistent with this identity (which, after all, is nothing other than the identity of a wealthy – albeit visibly declining – ‘West’)” (p. 24).

“The truth is that, in the context of a system of thought that is both a-religious and genuinely contemporary with the truths of our time, the whole ethical predication based upon recognition of the other should be purely and simply abandoned. For the real question – and it is an extraordinarily difficult one – is much more that of recognizing the Same” (p. 25).

“Infinite alterity is quite simply what there is. Any experience at all is the infinite deployment of infinite differences” (p. 25).

“Ethics does not exists. There is only the ethic-of (of politics, of love, of science, of art). There is not, in fact, one single Subject, but as many subjects as there are truths, and as many subjective types as there are procedures of truths” (p. 28).

“A philosophy sets out to construct a space of thought in which the different subjective types, expressed by the singular truths of its time, coexist. But this coexistence is not a unification – that is why it is impossible to speak of one Ethics” (p. 28).

“The ‘ethic of a truth’ is the principle that enables the continuation of a truth-process – or, to be more precise and complex, that which lends consistency to the presence of some-one in the composition of the subject induced by the process of this truth” (p. 44).

“Opinion is beneath the true and the false, precisely because its sole office is to be communicable. What arises from a truth-process, by contrast, cannot be communicated. Communication is suited only to opinions (and again, we are unable to manage without them). In all that concerns truths, there must be an encounter. The Immortal that I am capable of being cannot be spurred in me by the effects of communicative sociality, it must be directly seized by fidelity” (p. 51).

Three major dimensions of a truth process:“The event, which brings to pass ‘something other’ than the situation, opinions, instituted knowledges; the event is a hazardous, unpredictable supplement, which vanishes as soon as it appears; the fidelity, which is the name of the process: it amounts to a sustained investigation of the situation, under the imperative of the event itself; it is an immanent and continuing break;the truth as such, that is, the multiple, internal to the // situation, that the fidelity constructs, bit by bit; it is what the fidelity gathers together and produces” (pp. 67-68).

“A truth punches a ‘hole’ in knowledges, it is heterogeneous to them, but it is also the sole known source of new knowledges. We shall say that the truth forces knowledges” (p. 70).

“If a truth is never communicable as such, it nevertheless implies, at a distance from itself, powerful reshapings of the forms and referents of communication” (p. 70).

“Since the event is to disappear, being a kind of flashing supplement that happens to the situation, so what is retained of it in the situation, and what serves to guide the fidelity, must be something like a trace, or a name, that refers back to the vanished event” (p. 72).

“When a radical break in a situation, under names borrowed from real truth-processes, convokes not the void but the ‘full’ particularity or presumed substance of that situation, we are dealing with a simulacrum of truth” (p. 73).

“But even in this respect, we have to recognize that this process mimics an actual truth-process. Every fidelity to an authentic event names the adversaries of its perseverance. Contrary to consensual ethics, which tries to avoid divisions, the ethic of truths is always more or less militant, combative” (p. 75).

“But the simulacrum’s subversion of the true event continues with these namings. For the enemy of a true subjective fidelity is precisely the closed set, the substance of the situation, the community. The values of truth, of its hazardous course and its universal address, are to be erected against these forms of inertia” (p. 76).

“A truth transforms the codes of communication and changes the regime of opinions – such is its effect of ‘return’. Not that these opinions become ‘true’ (or false)” (p. 80).

“We must admit, then, that in addition to the language of the objective situation, which enables the communication of opinions, there exists a subject-language which enables the inscription of a truth” (p. 82).

“That truth does not have total power means, in the last analysis, that the subject-language, the production of a truth-process, does not have the power to name all the elements of the situation. At least one real element must exist, one multiple existing in the situation, and is exclusively reserved to opinion, to the language of the situation. At least one point that the truth cannot force” (p. 85).

“I shall call this element the unnameable of a truth…. The unnameable is unnameable for the subject-language. Let us say that this term is not susceptible of being made eternal, or not accessible to the Immortal. In this sense, it is the symbol of the pure real of the situation, of its life without truth” (p. 86).

“The community and the collective are the unnameables of political truth: every attempt ‘politically’ to name a community induces a disastrous Evil” (p. 86).

Badiou, A. (2013). Philosophy and the Event. Malden, MA: Polity.

“Politics is, then, all the processes by means of which human collectivity becomes active or proves capable of new possibilities as regards its own destiny” (p. 5).

“An event is something that brings to light a possibility that was invisible or even unthinkable. An event is not by itself the creation of a reality; it is the creation of a possibility, it opens up a possibility. It indicates to us that a possibility exists that has been ignored” (p. 9).

“Everything will depend on the way in which the possibility proposed by the event is grasped, elaborated, incorporated and set out in the world. This what I name a ‘truth procedure’” (p. 10).

“A political event today, whatever its scale, is a local opening up of political possibilities” (p. 10).

“The political subject is, then, the interval between the past event and the coming event” (p. 13).

“An Idea is associated with an event because the event is the creation of a possibility and the Idea is the general name of this new possibility” (p. 14).

“When politics strays into identities, it is lost. It sets the ground for nothing other than wars, civil wars and horrors” (p. 27).

“It’s not the problem of difference that is constitutive. Difference is what there is. People, as well as nations, are necessarily different. The problem is to know how to produce sameness. This is a very important point. We’ve come out of a period of the cult of difference that what, ultimately fairly negative. A truly great politics aims, rather, at producing a unity with a differentiated material” (p. 41).

“Politics goes, then, from diversity to the same, whereas love consists, on the contrary, in constructing a difference that is accepted as a unique path. Politics goes from difference to the same, love introduces difference to the same” (p. 41).

“This is why love is creative. It constructs a singular experience of difference. This is a unique, radical, intense and vital experience, to the point that the difficulties it encounters, the threats of its interruption, are dramatic” (p. 44).

“The encounter has to leave a trace. One can also say that the trace is revealed through the encounter: the disjunction is indeed a disjunction but there is a point of intersection, a point of tangency. If not, it’s not clear what ‘encounter’ means” (p. 46).

“One of the possible ways of defining love is as an obstinate struggle against separation. Every love stems from separation, with this thereby haunting, constantly and in spite of everything, the process” (p. 47).

“An individual effectively interiorizes the necessity of the other when both individuals co-belong to the same subject, to the same subject of truth. Love is the first experience of this type. There is real sharing, real communication, between the individuals incorporated within the amorous procedure, even if communication in this instance must not be understood as something rational or easy. It is itself part of the labor of love” (p. 58).

“The positions ‘man’ and ‘woman’, viewed from within love, are then generic: they have nothing to do with the empirical sex of the people engaged in the love relation…. In the amourous procedure, the positions are potentially open to chage; they are not irreversibly assigned to one or the other party…. But it remains possible to formally define each person’s positon” (p. 61).

“Love recalls incessantly the existence of that against which it struggles” (p. 62).

“By stating that love is heterosexual, I want to underline that two distinct positions are always to be found within love itself, and this is the case regardless of the empirical sex of the partners” (p. 63).

“Individuals are incorporated within this truth by mutations in their way of relating to this art. These mutations affect the way the work is defined and how it is seen or heard” (p. 74).

“The new formalism that will, then, be introduced on a large scale in this third volume will be paraconsistent negation, which explicitly contradicts the principle of non-contradiction. This makes it possible, in the case of a truth, for contradictory perceptions to co-exist without disrupting this truth’s unity. This interests me all the more since a problem of this type is found at the core of love if you accept, which is my position, that in order to fully understand love you have to start from the coexistence of a feminine position and a masculine positon – two positions that are, in some respects, completely separate” (p. 118).

Badiou, A. (2013). Theory of the Subject. New York: Bloomsbury.

“Ethics is on the agenda whenever the subjective tension obtains universality only in the particular forsaking of any will slowly to investigate the complete state of affairs” (p. 311).