The Incident at Antioch Read online

  DAVID: So how do we begin calming things down that way?

  MOKHTAR: By having people return to the cities. Having a legitimate government. Re-establishing the legality of the courts. Overseeing purge commissions. Disarming the local militias. Unifying the police, under our exclusive authority. Granting amnesty for minor crimes. Restructuring trade and the currency. Getting the school system back up and running. Devising a plan for industry. Rehabilitating the engineers, perhaps.

  (Silence.)

  RENÉ: What’ll be left of our enterprise, then? Won’t the world just come back the way it was before, with all its stability and security? Then what about the abolition of the State? And what’ll become of forcible equality?

  CAMILLE: The crooks and profiteers will come rushing back out of their hiding places. Special favors, wheeler-dealers, bureaucrats of every stripe, kick-backs, and big black cars. The younger generation will waste away in nihilism.

  (Silence.)

  RENÉ: So what’s your feeling about it, David?

  MOKHTAR: Do you have anything other to suggest?

  DAVID: No, nothing. What else would there be for those in charge to do, once at the peak of the devastation, except ensure the gradual rebirth of civil society and the State that corresponds to the demand

  For productive activity? (Silence.) Mokhtar! Is that the whole extent of the lesson you’ve learned from these wild and crazy years? And from the entire century? What were we hoping to achieve with our stubborn persistence in putting

  More than our very lives at stake?

  What?! Still the same old idea of rebuilding a State? The people’s demand for life and livelihood

  Still caught in the trap of economic capacity and the laws regulating it? Better the deadly suspense we were held in by Cephas!

  Because law and order can’t be the aim of the masses once they’ve become the subjects of the politics they’re in the process of becoming.

  CAMILLE: You’re right. The aim is absolute disorder.

  DAVID: No, not any more so. René, Camille! Do you really think that, over the long term,

  Death can be maintained as the standard of equality among people?

  And with what terror lacking the sanctity of history do you intend to force a weary people to consent to turn the absence of all law into a cruel law?

  To what dictator will you assign the task

  Of imposing tyranny and fear throughout the land so that this country, under the jackboot, will draw from itself the means to embrace an all-consuming power?

  But here’s where I just don’t know. The State is hateful, but anarchy is even more so. Politics goes around in circles, because neither order, which governs it, nor disorder, which corrupts it, can be its aim.

  SCENE 4: In the place of foundations.

  Dawn, very gray. RENÉ is getting up. DAVID, MOKHTAR, and CAMILLE suddenly rush in.

  CAMILLE: Careful, someone’s coming. Some weird chick.

  (ENTER an almost unrecognizable PAULA, beautifully dressed in elegant clothes, made up, and looking scarcely any older than she was before.)

  PAULA: David!

  DAVID: That’s my name.

  PAULA: There you are in all your dignity, child of separation.

  DAVID: I’m a soldier, aren’t I? No one should casually refer to me as a “child.”

  PAULA: Your birth wasn’t something that melds two into one. Since, through you, Mokhtar and I were relieved of what we had in common, we went our separate ways.

  DAVID: Oh, so you’re my mother, Paula, ironically nicknamed “The Saint” around here!

  PAULA: The Saint! I thought you’d burned the old calendars of religious superstition.

  MOKHTAR: Around here, the name Paula, even though she’s a saint, isn’t meant for the ashes of the churches.

  No woman can compare with her, whom we came upon like a torch burning on high at a bend in the road,

  And who parted from us the way she’d come, snuffing out her own flame with a single breath.

  Visitation of the pure Idea! Sterility of the comet, when the sky is set ablaze and desecrates the night!

  RENÉ: Tell us why you went away, Paula, and what reason made you refuse to share in our victory.

  PAULA: Let’s leave that aside. A murder unexpectedly tore me apart. It’s nothing to be proud of. A world given over to corruption and gone to the dogs collapsed: Cephas was right, that day at Antioch. What I was suggesting would only have slowed you down. And what right did I have anyway? No one can refute the principle “All that comes into being deserves to perish.”4

  I was dreaming of a different form of death. One devised by us. Taking up the challenge of the horror.

  As far as hatred and destruction are concerned, you plunged headlong into the classic art. Nothing I could have told you would have been a match for the knowledgeable certainty of the commander.

  So I kept quiet. I accepted that, for one last time, the ritual of revolution should be performed. I mean: classical revolution, at the height of its style.5

  MOKHTAR: Woman of the old love! Where did you spend all this time?

  PAULA: I disappeared. Into learning, into listening carefully. I participated anonymously. In each little bit of rubble of your victory. I’ve come to re-establish certainty where it’s lacking.

  CAMILLE: So tell me, what’s with the fancy get-up?

  PAULA: I’m naked. I’m naked among women.6

  RENÉ: Naked and poor, no doubt? So do designer clothes make the woman?7

  DAVID: Let her explain.

  CAMILLE: Weeds are invading upper-class living rooms, toadstools are sprouting on the desks of the companies trashed by our rage. The executives’ wives are hauling the manure for sowing potatoes.

  Yet here you are looking every bit as though you’d just rummaged through the wardrobe of a cavalcade of fashion icons!

  PAULA: Who ever said that looking ugly, wearing your hair pulled back, hiding your femininity under military fatigues or wearing a shapeless dress were required for our politics to be one of hope and joy? Do fluorescent and neon colors

  Get your goat?

  Listen to me instead, based on the heart failure my consciously calculated good looks are giving you.

  MOKHTAR: Be careful, O my beloved, not to promise us happiness. We need the solidity of the present. The chief virtue of these ruins is that they’re made up of real stones. It’s by picking them up one by one, recording each one’s weight, that we’ll make it over to the other shore.

  PAULA: Mokhtar! Unforgotten Mokhtar! Don’t be as stubborn in peace and all its red tape as you were in the heat of the uprising.

  The sun’s coming up and you’d get nowhere crossing swords with its impassive rays.

  Let me say something true. The cold is giving way even as we speak. I’ve got to seize hold of your astonishment.

  Look at the cleansed and darkened earth all around you. All things are revealed. The world’s bones have been laid bare.

  What good would you be if you had to announce a truce and a peace treaty? So accustomed to war have you become that you could do nothing but put an officer of the declared peace

  Behind every man, woman, and child. The war wouldn’t be over, not by a long shot. It would be frozen in society as a whole, forever.

  It’s impossible for you to order your power to disappear. Your only loyalty, and that’s only fair, is to terror. I can’t blame you for that. In the circumstances that made heroes of you, terror is the easy way, the clear measure of life’s worth. Could you stand going backwards, restoration? After all you’ve been though? No, better to kill.

  Yet the need for firing squads and concentration camps forever precludes you from regarding yourselves as liberators. It’s doomed from the start. There’s not a single voice that matters anymore in this country, except for mine.

  CAMILLE: What ridiculous conceit! What great things have you accomplished that entitle you to speak with such authority?

  PAULA: Camille! Already
words only matter for you if they come from someone with the right to say them.

  What I’m saying to all of you is this: Give up power! Let things run their course without you. The bandits the situation calls for will spring up all by themselves, soon enough, from this ravaged earth. Start your group over on the basis of that renunciation. Scatter among the people, whose hatred is already pursuing what you yourselves were going to attack. Take one more step toward State coercion and History will remember you as no more than a bloody national struggle reduced, where justice is concerned, to mediocrity or even worse.

  CAMILLE: You see us as crows, ready to drop the prey for the shadow.8

  PAULA: And what may I ask would that shadow be, Camille, if not the one you’re going to cast on your cause itself?

  The error you’ve fallen into is a very old one, and that’s what makes it possible to identify it: crime.

  The first time around, it was merely the sum of the demands of the moment. The second time—but let it pass—the error persisted, your intention was shielded by your ideology. The third time, though, it’s unforgivable.

  Our generation knows the secret blackness in the red. It’s up to us, by making an unprecedented decision, not to let that knowledge go to waste.

  RENÉ: We won’t betray Cephas and the decision we made at Antioch, against you.

  PAULA: Cephas knew what I’m talking about. I understand him better than all the rest of you. He was trying to take you beyond repetition. As he couldn’t put a stop to it, he at least kept on trying to amplify it. Cephas stood for revolution in its purest form. Today, however, when every classical revolution leads only to Empire, there’s no neo-classical purity save death. Cephas’s greatness is to have stepped down when death was about to be embodied in the State. Since he couldn’t find a way of stopping everyone else, he stopped himself. It all ends in the absence of a single person.

  CAMILLE: So you’d say that just when victory is achieved everything has to be started all over again from square one?

  PAULA: “Square one,” is that what you call it? Isn’t that the paltry number that, with typical military condescension, you’re assigning to the thought of millions of people? But isn’t it precisely from there that we ought to start over? Politics has got to be reinvented through what war presents it with, not the other way around.9

  CAMILLE: You won’t get anywhere trying to unnerve me. As someone who for the past fifteen years has seen death no further than a breath away and has outlived a world that collapsed,

  I possess a triumphant spirit, and I won’t back down on governing the present.

  RENÉ: We won’t give the land back to the people from the grain agencies.

  MOKHTAR: Or the machines either, whatever’s left of them.

  DAVID: I won’t be someone who takes up the burden only to lay it back down. No, Mother, there’s something unclear and discouraging in what you’re saying. I won’t allow that sort of surrender to spread any further.

  PAULA: I want to see you alone.

  SCENE 5: In the place of foundations.

  It is 10 A.M. A tent of sorts has been pitched on the outskirts of the ruins. There is a pale sun in the sky. PAULA and DAVID are finishing their breakfast.

  PAULA: What was this place called?

  DAVID: It was a sort of new town, never completed. All the high-rises were dynamited.

  PAULA: But what was the name of it?

  DAVID: Nicea. Like “Nice,” but pronounced differently and with an “a” at the end.

  PAULA: Oh, like the famous council, where a slim majority decided for the ages that the Son was consubstantial with the Father, not just of a similar substance.10

  DAVID: Why should I care about bullshit like that?

  PAULA: You shouldn’t. Your kingdom is of this world. If there is a world.

  DAVID: It’s really strange to say to yourself: there’s my mother. That’s her sitting right across from me.

  PAULA: Mother worship, in men, is crap. It’s just a cover for their contempt for women.

  DAVID: Sorry, I didn’t have time to arrange for you to be worshipped.

  (Silence.)

  PAULA: You don’t look enough like an Arab. You should have gotten more of your father’s genes.

  DAVID: So that I could be consubstantial with him, too, no doubt. Well, I had nothing to do with it.

  PAULA: We’re responsible for how our own faces look. You must be a racist deep down.

  DAVID: I don’t think that’s funny.

  PAULA: Neither do I. Knowing you’re the one in charge of all the horrific things going on here is hardly funny.

  DAVID: Careful! You have no impunity. I’ll have you arrested, if need be.

  PAULA: But of course! Mothers denounced by their own sons, or shot by a firing squad right in front of them: I saw things like that, in the provinces.

  DAVID: Well, what does it matter, after all? Chaos is spreading, blood is flowing. You think anyone will remember? None of us wants these particular atrocities to happen. They’re like a compulsory tax on the real. We need to restore the rule of law now.

  PAULA: “Restore”—there, you said it. What a pathetic excuse! People will remember the bloodbath all right, if what comes afterward is a repeat of what there was before. If you aren’t all criminals then you’re idiots.

  DAVID (lunging at her): Shut your mouth! Why have you come here? You gussied-up old bag! We have enough on our plates as it is. Shut up! Go crawl back under your rock!

  (They wrestle. But oddly enough, it’s PAULA who suddenly breaks free and DAVID who backs away, bent over in pain.)

  PAULA (out of breath): Ah, your old mother hasn’t lost her touch for giving her son a good wallop!

  DAVID: Wow, better not forget to wear a crotch cup when you go to give your mom a kiss!

  PAULA: You’re not hurt too badly, are you? Take a deep breath.

  DAVID: I’m obviously not an Arab. I should have you stoned.

  PAULA: Right. Then you could add Iran to Cambodia.

  DAVID: Wanna go a second round?

  PAULA: Enough of this silliness. The prologue’s over.

  DAVID: What exactly do you want?

  PAULA: I already told you. For all of you to give up power.

  DAVID: What is this relentless insistence of yours on using your maternal role in a counter-revolutionary direction?

  PAULA: You’re the counter-revolution. You’re all wiping out every last trace of the desire for justice. Your politics are vulgar.

  DAVID: Yeah, and you’re absolutely genteel.

  PAULA: Listen to me. Let me speak like a man. Our basic hypothesis—right?—wasn’t that we were going to solve the problem of what a good government should be. We didn’t get involved in philosophers’ speculations about the ideal State. We said that the world could tolerate the trajectory of a politics to be terminated later on, a politics that would put an end to politics. To domination, in other words. You agree, right?

  DAVID: I’m listening, professor.

  PAULA: What happened was that the historical realization of that hypothesis itself got swallowed up in the State. The liberationist organization everywhere merged with the State. The fact is that when it was underground, during the war, it became entirely focused on conquering the State.

  Thus, the desire for emancipation became deflected from its own origins. It needs to be reinstated.

  DAVID: What do you mean?

  PAULA: I mean put back in place.

  No correct politics today can claim to be carrying on the earlier work. Our task is to detach consciousness, which ensures justice, equality, the end of States or the illicit dealings of Empire, once and for all from this residual base wherein the lust for power alone absorbs all our energies.

  What a tremendous impact it could have if you were to announce a fidelity that would take the practical form of your returning to the path of the consciousness of the masses and its subjectivation! You’d leave the State to those who like all its pomp and circu
mstance, and its murderous stupidity.

  DAVID: Behind us, like an imperative surpassing our own will, is the sacrifice of thousands of people, to which our victory alone gives meaning. Just for the sake of some sublime abdication are we going to gather together a whole nation of the dead in loonyville?

  PAULA: We’ve already had “the Party of the executed”11 number pulled on us. What sense is there in putting the meaning of politics under the authority of the dead?12 That really bodes ill. And let me point out that masses of people are dying today not for victory but on account of it. No matter what choice you make, you’ll be forced to pick from among the corpses the ones that vindicate you.

  DAVID: What’s the point of moral blackmail like this? Compassion’s of no use. In the face of devastation, the priority is to rebuild. If we have to borrow from the past, we’ll have no qualms about it. After an upheaval like this, who could possibly imagine that the old state of affairs will revive as though nothing at all had happened? The world’s changed for good. You just have to trust in that. Mother dearest, you’re coming at things a little too pessimistically. You’re far-removed from the decision.

  PAULA: That’s an old one, David! I’m actually suggesting the only possible decision to you. Everything else is just about handling resistance, by the brutal means you have at your disposal. Sure, you’re going to create something new! You’re going to paint the sun’s surface gray.13

  DAVID: Exactly who are you? Are you condemning what we’ve done? Are you with the Whites, with the scum who are in hiding? I’m warning you, I’m starting to feel all my detachment from you again.

  PAULA: You did the dirty work that had to be done. The little imperial beast’s been slain. It’s lying in the hollow between these hills.14 You were the ones who performed the sacrifice. Thanks to you, the first phase of the history of justice has come to an end. That’s why you can announce that the second phase of its power is beginning now.

  DAVID: It’s anything but power you’re proposing—more like giving it up, and for a long time.

  PAULA (taking out a big piece of paper and unfolding it): Look at this military map. My brother Claude Villembray gave it to me, right before we executed him. The dream, the childish fantasy—it’s all in there. He would’ve really liked to conquer the whole earth, just like any old king. Are you going to go on endlessly pursuing such an infantile ambition? The unique greatness of the human race doesn’t lie in power. The featherless biped must get a hold of himself, and against all the odds, all the laws of nature, and all the laws of history, follow the winding road that leads to the idea that anyone is the equal of anyone else. Not just in law but in material truth.