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  THE INCIDENT AT ANTIOCH

  L’INCIDENT D’ANTIOCHE

  INSURRECTIONS: CRITICAL STUDIES IN RELIGION, POLITICS, AND CULTURE

  INSURRECTIONS: CRITICAL STUDIES

  IN RELIGION, POLITICS, AND CULTURE

  Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey W. Robbins, Editors

  The intersection of religion, politics, and culture is one of the most discussed areas in theory today. It also has the deepest and most wide-ranging impact on the world. Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture will bring the tools of philosophy and critical theory to the political implications of the religious turn. The series will address a range of religious traditions and political viewpoints in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world. Without advocating any specific religious or theological stance, the series aims nonetheless to be faithful to the radical emancipatory potential of religion.

  After the Death of God, John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, edited by Jeffrey W. Robbins

  The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures, Ananda Abeysekara

  Nietzsche and Levinas: “After the Death of a Certain God,” edited by Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo

  Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe, Mary-Jane Rubenstein

  Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation, Arvind Mandair

  Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, Catherine Malabou

  Anatheism: Returning to God After God, Richard Kearney

  Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, Peter Sloterdijk

  Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism, Clayton Crockett

  Radical Democracy and Political Theology, Jeffrey W. Robbins

  Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic, edited by Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis

  What Does a Jew Want? On Binationalism and Other Specters, Udi Aloni

  A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul, Stanislas Breton, edited by Ward Blanton, translated by Joseph N. Ballan

  Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala

  Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event, Clayton Crockett

  Self and Emotional Life: Merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience, Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou

  Alain Badiou

  THE INCIDENT AT ANTIOCH

  L’INCIDENT D’ANTIOCHE

  A Tragedy in Three Acts / Tragédie en trois actes

  Introduction by Kenneth Reinhard

  Translated by Susan Spitzer

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  NEW YORK

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-52773-6

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Badiou, Alain.

  The incident at Antioch : a tragedy in three acts = L’incident d’antioche : tragédie en trois actes / Alain Badiou; introduction by Kenneth Reinhard; translated by Susan Spitzer.—First worldwide edition.

  pages cm.—(Insurrections: critical studies in religion, politics, and culture)

  In English and French.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-231-15774-2 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-15775-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-52773-6 (ebook)

  I. Spitzer, Susan, translator. II. Badiou, Alain. Incident d’antioche. English. III. Badiou, Alain. Incident d’antioche. IV. Title. V. Title: Incident at Antioch.

  PQ2662.A323I5313 2013

  842’.914–dc23

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  Cover image: Caravaggio, Conversion on the Way to Damascus, 1601.

  Cerasei Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome.

  Cover design: Noah Arlow

  Book design: Lisa Hamm

  References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Translator’s Preface

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction by Kenneth Reinhard

  L’INCIDENT D’ANTIOCHE

  THE INCIDENT AT ANTIOCH

  Notes

  A Discussion of and Around

  The Incident at Antioch

  Bibliography

  Index

  PREFACE TO THE FIRST WORLDWIDE EDITION OF THE INCIDENT AT ANTIOCH

  I began writing the first version of this play—a tragedy—during the summer of 1982, in the atmosphere of solitude that surrounded me and my activist friends at the time owing to our firm opposition, right from the start, to the government of François Mitterrand (elected in 1981), to which everyone around us had eagerly rallied. Between 1972 and 1977, I had already written a long play entitled L’Écharpe rouge (The Red Scarf). I had called it a “romanopéra” (“novelopera”) because, in terms of both its length and its texture, it was more like a novel than a play, and because it was divided into “arias,” “recitatives,” “ariosos,” “choruses,” and so on. It was, moreover, as an opera that, after its publication by the illustrious Éditions Maspero in 1979, it was given its first performance at the Opéra de Lyon in 1984 and performed again, at the Festival d’Avignon, and ultimately in Paris, at the Théâtre National de Chaillot. Georges Aperghis wrote the music for it and Antoine Vitez directed.

  I reworked The Incident at Antioch during the summer of 1984 at the same time as I was writing my first comedy, Ahmed le subtil (Ahmed the Subtle). I felt that the plot needed to be streamlined and especially that the chorus, which was very large in the first version, with many different voices, should be scaled down to more reasonable proportions.

  Finally, between 1987 and 1989, I wrote a third version, the one that is being published here. This time around, the aim was to cut out all the too explicit references to the French political situation, to reduce the use of Marxist jargon, and to push the play toward a new form of universality, even if it were at the price of greater obscurity, or a more highly charged lyricism.

  As can be seen, for about fifteen years—when I was between 35 and 50, say, and involved day and night in revolutionary politics—theater had nonetheless never been far from my thoughts.

  After the staging of L’Écharpe rouge I thought that Vitez, the brilliant man of the theater, would someday or other be interested in the other two plays. And, sure enough, he gave two memorable readings of them, one (Ahmed) at Chaillot and the other (The Incident) at the Théâtre National Populaire in Villeurbanne. A few months after that second reading, he died suddenly, leaving all of us deeply bereaved. I put my plays away in a drawer and didn’t even attempt to get them published. Theater disappeared from my writing and my concerns. It wasn’t until 1993 that my interest in it revived, when Christian Schiaretti, the director of the Théâtre de Reims at that time, discovered the text of Ahmed le subtil and decided to stage it. It was thanks to him that I found my way back to the Festival d’Avignon and rediscovered my taste for writing for the theater again. Between 1994 and 1997—I was approaching 60 at the time—I wrote three new plays, all centering around the character of Ahmed: Ahmed philosophe (Ahmed the Philosopher), Ahmed se fâche (Ahmed Gets Angry), an
d Les Citrouilles (The Pumpkins). All these plays were published. They were also all performed, in several different productions, and are still being performed.

  I take great pleasure in saying here that Ahmed philosophe, in a superb English translation by Joseph Litvak of Tufts University, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press and that we can look forward to seeing the whole collection of “philosophical comedies” published sometime soon and, who knows, maybe even performed for English-speaking audiences.

  The fate of The Incident at Antioch is a different story altogether. Neither published nor performed, this tragedy completely disappeared, in a way, for almost twenty years. The only visible trace of its existence is a short film, based mainly on the beginning of Act III, which was directed by Élisabeth Boyer in 1989 under the title of En partage.

  The play was in fact rediscovered by several British, American, and German scholars in 2005. A key role was played in all this by my friend Ken Reinhard of the University of California at Los Angeles and by Susan Spitzer, who promptly embarked upon the all-consuming adventure of translating it into English.

  Among the signs of a keen interest in the play elsewhere than in France it is worth mentioning in particular two conferences, one that was organized in 2009 by Ward Blanton at the University of Glasgow, where several scenes from it were performed, and another, devoted more generally to my theater, that was held in Berlin in 2011 on the initiative of Ken Reinhard, Martin Treml, and Sigrid Weigel of the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung. There too conference-goers could attend a performance of a few scenes from the play (combined with scenes from Ahmed philosophe).

  To date, I have had the opportunity to hear fragments of The Incident in English and German, but never in French.

  Why this belated, roundabout discovery? Why has there been such keen interest on the part of English-speaking philosophers and theologians in this long-forgotten play? And finally, and above all, why is there now this en face bilingual edition, the English side of which is a real, unexpected tour de force? To understand the reasons, we need to go into the details a little.

  Of the six works for the theater that I have produced, four were written using famous classic plays as models. Ahmed le subtil reprised the plot of one of Molière’s best-known comedies, Les Fourberies de Scapin (The Tricks of Scapin); L’Écharpe rouge follows the episodes of the first three “days” of Claudel’s great play Le Soulier de satin (The Satin Slipper); Les Citrouilles follows the action of Aristophanes’s The Frogs; and finally, The Incident at Antioch is modeled on another of Claudel’s plays, La Ville (The City). I thus reprised one of the great traditions of classical theater: rewriting famous plays of antiquity. On one theme alone, Amphitryon, a Latin play by Plautus, there exists a play by Molière, one by Kleist, and one by Giraudoux.

  What The City, a complex play of which there are several, ultimately very different versions, deals with is the fate of modern societies considered in the light of three different ideologies: one, an ideology inspiring socialist and communist revolutionaries (Claudel had the Paris Commune in mind); a second, a positivist ideology that ends up in the nihilism of pure technique; and a third that seeks to construct a new society based on religious law (Catholicism, for Claudel). As is always the case with this writer, it is a female character, Lâla, as she is called, who moves between these different orientations: she is their challenge, their irony, their stumbling block. She says she is “the promise that cannot be kept.”

  My intention was to take the same problem and present it in a somewhat different way. The same three orientations are all there again. First, there is the exhausted conservatism of our “democratic” societies, represented by two politicians, one on the Left and the other on the Right (the Maury brothers). Then there is contemporary nihilism, contemplating, with an eye at once amused and melancholic, the end of our world and the gradual advent of disaster. This is Villembray, formerly a dynamic, popular head of government but who, by the time the play begins, has very nearly become a derelict. And finally there is radical communist revolutionarism, represented by Cephas, a leader as lucid and efficient as he is ruthless.

  The basic plot, the story line, akin to that of The City, recounts, to begin with, the refusal of Villembray, who has been approached by the Maury brothers to come be a savior, a sort of new De Gaulle, to stave off the collapse of the parliamentary regime; then, the revolutionaries’ decision to take power by force, beginning with the execution of Villembray; and, finally, the destruction of the whole country by civil war, the revolutionaries’ ambiguous victory, and the departure of Cephas, who believes that his task was to destroy rather than to build, and that it has therefore been accomplished.

  What is significantly different from Claudel is the female role. Paula, the heroine of my play, in fact follows a path that is the opposite, as it were, of Claudel’s Lâla’s. Rather than being the irony of all the different doctrines, she is the rebellious voice of emancipatory truth. Although she is Villembray’s sister, she has remained completely untouched by his nihilism. Quite on the contrary, inasmuch as she is linked to the people, to the workers, she will in a way be converted to the communist, revolutionary perspective. Having become an important leader, she opposes Cephas, because she thinks that the outbreak of civil war in the prevailing circumstances is doomed to end in terror. She attempts to save her brother, whom her comrades have decided to kill, but he accepts his death as a proof of the meaninglessness of all things. She has had a child, David, with a militant worker, Mokhtar. And then she vanishes. She reappears only much later. The revolutionaries are now in control, through terror, of a devastated country, and Cephas has abandoned power. David, Paula’s son, has taken over the leadership of the Party. In a crucial scene, Paula attempts to convince him that power should be given up; that the revolutionaries should remain among the people and never be separated from them in the inevitably terrorist guise of the State of exception. Then she takes off again, leaving David and his supporters undecided as to which path to take.

  Truth be told, my play superimposes on Claudel’s story another source, which is quite simply my interpretation of the life and writings of the Apostle Paul. Paula’s “conversion” to the revolutionary worldview is clearly akin to Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. Afterward, Paula opposes the proponents of the violent law of revolutions; she opposes the idea that the only important issue for the revolutionaries is that of State power. Essentially, she opposes the communist law of the Party-State the way Paul opposed Jewish law as embodied in Peter (whose real name was Cephas). As is well known, the confrontation between Paul and Peter was a very violent one, especially in Antioch, when Peter refused to eat with non-Jews. Whence the title of my play. As is also well known, Paul said that political power should be left its prerogatives, because the true kingdom was not of this world. In the same way, Paula vehemently confronts Cephas, who wants the Party to have a monopoly on politics, just as Peter wanted the true religion to be the Jewish community’s monopoly. And she attempts to convince David that true politics consists in the general organization of working-class and popular thought and determination rather than the terroristic wielding of State power.

  What the English-speaking philosophers and progressive theologians, Jewish and Christian alike, have discovered in my Incident at Antioch is that contemporary political thought can provide a new reading and interpretation of the Apostle Paul by leaving aside the twin oppositions of Christianity versus Judaism and the religious spirit versus atheism. Now that Paul has become Paula, he has functioned for them as a reference they can all share, because what is involved is the revival of the theme of a politics of emancipation that avoids right-wing opportunism (caving in to Western “democracy”), communist dogmatism (being oriented toward State terror), and leftist impotence (beautiful movements followed by endless reactionary restorations).

  To bring all of this to the stage, what was needed, I thought, was a bold new language that would be neither acad
emic (right-wing) nor Brechtian (classical Communist) nor avant-gardist (experimental leftism). Here too I followed Claudel, who invented a powerful, metaphorical language, accepting that there be obscurity in the service of his faith, in a complete break with the languages of the theater of his time, whether conventional (the bourgeois theater, also known as boulevard theater) or esoteric (the Symbolist avant-garde). In his wake, I created a sort of unknown language, because it is the language that must convey the message of a politics that is only just emerging.

  I am, need I say, astonished, delighted, even overjoyed, that the first publication of this play—my favorite of my six plays—is occurring in the United States, in a bilingual version. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all my English-speaking friends who have devoted themselves to this feat. I have said enough about the French in which my play is conveyed for everyone to understand that transposing that language into today’s English, not to mention its American variety, was well nigh impossible. For that impossibility, which constitutes the real of every true translation, may Susan Spitzer and everyone who assisted her be thanked, infinitely.

  TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

  Differences, like instrumental tones, provide us with the recognizable univocity that makes up the melody of the True.

  —Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism

  If the strategic decision made by Céphas and his followers lies at the tragic heart of L’Incident d’Antioche, the translation of the play into English, on an obviously less exalted plane, also demanded decisions at every turn regarding the style, register, and tone of the play’s language as well as its overall cultural context. To enter the universe of The Incident at Antioch as a translator is to be confronted by a dizzying array of choices, for language itself, when all is said and done, might be considered the play’s true subject. On the micro-level, the characters’ search for a language, the necessity for naming, or formalization, underlies much of the action and provides an interpretative key, while on the macro-level the search for a new dramatic language in which to convey the play’s political and philosophical concerns constitutes one of Badiou’s self-confessed aims in rewriting Paul Claudel’s play La Ville. The central issue of the latter work—the becoming-Subject of the individual, the struggle to accept a new, life-changing possibility opened to him or her—is also the crucial issue in The Incident, as it is in all of Badiou’s philosophical work. Yet the challenge for the playwright, he remarked in an interview in Glasgow in 2009, included in this edition, was how to write something “that’s really a play, that’s really a piece of writing, not a proof, not an abstract text.” In Claudel he found someone who had invented “truly a new language in French, a language with new images, and with an immanent relationship between abstraction and images, something like a new metaphorical way to examine the most important problem of human life.”