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, doesnt 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 doesnt 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 isnt 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 dont 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 boundarybreaking 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 selfidentity 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 simulacrums 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).

Its 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. Weve 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, its 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
persons 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 noncontradiction. This makes it possible, in the case of a truth, for contradictory perceptions
to co-exist without disrupting this truths 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).