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 want you to find the poor here, right in your own home first. And begin love there. Be that good news to your own people.
Our soulmate is the one who makes life come to life.
Until I lose my soul and lie Blind to the beauty of the earth, Deaf though shouting wind goes by, Dumb in a storm of mirth; Until my heart is quenched at length And I have left the land of men, Oh, let me love with all my strength Careless if I am loved again.
The journey from teaching about love to allowing myself to be loved proved much longer than I realised.
Love that is not jealous is neither true nor pure.
I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit. I have none of the selfless love of my mother. I have none of the plodding, practical love. . . . . I am, to be blunt and concise, in love only with myself, my puny being with its small inadequate breasts and meager, thin talents. I am capable of affection for those who reflect my own world.
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