All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that any form of resistance stems from a disconnection with reality, which is ultimately rooted in an internal conflict within oneself.
Alain Badiou's quote reflects on the nature of resistance and change, positing that the roots of opposition to the status quo lie in an individual's struggle with their own identity and beliefs. It implies that to resist external circumstances, one must first confront and resolve their internal conflicts, highlighting the interplay between personal introspection and social change. This philosophical perspective encourages individuals to look within before seeking to alter the world around them.
In practice
In a discussion about personal growth, one might quote Badiou to emphasize the importance of self-reflection.
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.
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.
We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.
According to my parents, I was supposed to have been a nice, churchgoing Swiss housewife. Instead I ended up an opinionated psychiatrist, author and lecturer in the American Southwest, who communicates with spirits from a world that I believe is far more loving and glorious than our own.
I saw a man clothed with rags . . . a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back.
Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.
Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possessions is a disease in them.
It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities.
I think it's funny. There was a time when men were afraid that somebody would reveal some secret of theirs that was unknown to their fellows. Nowadays, they're afraid that somebody will name what everybody knows. Have you practical people ever thought that that's all it would take to blast your whole, big, complex structure, with all your laws and guns - just somebody naming the exact nature of what you're doing?
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