Alain Badiou

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

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

Those who have nothing have only their discipline.

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.

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.

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

Christianity grasped perfectly that there is an element in the apparent contingency of love that can__ 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__ 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 __lmighty-Other_, without the __reat Other_ of transcendence.

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__ world, it is generally thought that individuals only pursue their own self-interest. Love is an antidote to that. Provided it isn__ conceived only as an exchange of mutual favours, or isn__ 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.