Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.
Interpretation
True love requires vulnerability and the willingness to face potential heartbreak, just as war entails inherent risks.
This quote by Alain Badiou emphasizes that genuine love is intertwined with risk; without the possibility of pain or loss, love cannot be fully realized. Just as war involves the unavoidable reality of death, love embraces the inherent uncertainties and vulnerabilities that come with emotional commitment and connection.
In practice
During a wedding toast, reflecting on the importance of taking risks in love.
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.
All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself.
If you limit yourself to sexual pleasure it's narcissistic. You don't connect with the other, you take what pleasure you want from them.
The ethic of truth is the complete opposite of an 'ethics of communication'. It is an ethic of the Real The ethic of truth is absolutely opposed to opinion, and to ethics in general.
What kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be.
Love is not a contract between two narcissists.
I think that if we can't go back, then we should try even harder to go forward. And I do want to go forward, to a place where loving someone because they have a gentle smile and a friendly hello is as easy as it once was.
The fullness of our heart is expressed in our eyes, in our touch, in what we write, in what we say, in the way we walk, the way we receive, the way we serve.
Like you and your woman ain't gettin' along and you're in love. You can't sleep at nights. Your mind is on her - on whatever. You know, that's the blues. You can't hug that money at night. You can't kiss it.
Nothing is more true, more real, than the primeval magnetic disturbances that two souls may communicate to one another, through the tiny sparks of a moment's glance.
If you ask people what attracted them to the person they love, they never tell you of some perfect feature that focused them on sheer surfaces but rather an imperfection that allowed them to see into their uncharted depths.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.) The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.