The Incident at Antioch Read online

  DAVID: Wow, how passionate you are!

  PAULA: You’re wrong about that. On the contrary, I’m urging you to give up all passion. The decision you’ve got to make has to be an unemotional one. To anyone who gives in to the passion for images it’s incomprehensible. Let go of your obsession with conquest and totality. Take hold of the thread of multiplicity.

  (A long silence.)

  DAVID: But tell me, Paula, how can we prevent everything from breaking apart and scattering to the winds with the extraordinary act you’re suggesting?15

  PAULA: Don’t think I’ve got an easy answer. Since the deadlock has so long been that politics was only centered in and represented by the State, I’m telling you to push through that deadlock and ensure that political truth is steadfastly at work in a people sustained by the places of the factory,16 protected from the State by their own inner resolve.

  Politics is like an event, as unrepresentable as all the hard work in the theater that ends up making the play we see before us a mysterious, one-time thing.17

  DAVID (at a loss): But where can we begin something you say has no beginning?

  PAULA: Find the people who matter. Stay connected to what they say. Organize their consistency, with equality as the goal. Let there be core groups of political conviction in the factories. And committees of popular will in the cities and the countryside. Let them change the way things are and rise to the generality of situations. Let them oppose the State and the private property sharks in direct proportion to their inherent strength and the thinking that they practice.

  DAVID: That’s no strategy at all.

  PAULA: The politics of the future initially only involves giving shape and substance to its own formulation. Politics is about uniting people around a political vision, free from the mind control exerted by the State. Don’t ask anything more of me than that circle, which is the circle of any thinking at its inception. We’re founding a new era on a tautology. That’s only natural. Parmenides laid the foundation for philosophy for two thousand years merely by declaring, with the requisite clarity, that Being is, and that not-Being is not.

  DAVID: Politics is about making politics exist, so that the State should no longer exist.

  (Silence.)

  PAULA: Son! My son! Will you have confidence18 in that thought, to which the old hypothesis, the previous interpretation, is now returning, after its initial meandering history?

  DAVID: My head is spinning. I can see the undecidable clearly.

  PAULA: One politics, and only one.

  DAVID: I have confidence in that.

  PAULA: I have confidence that a politics is real through myself, free from the State’s grasp, unrepresentable, and endlessly decoded.

  I have confidence that following what’s indicated in the intelligence of the will gradually leads a Subject’s inner resolve to except itself

  From the rule of domination.

  I know that that path lies in the uniqueness of its tenacity and in the relentless subtlety of its thought.

  I have confidence in infinite liberation, not as a pipe dream, or a dictator’s smokescreen, but as a figure and a working model, here and now, of what makes human beings capable of something other

  Than just the highly organized social structure of ants.

  DAVID (tonelessly): All of that. All of that.

  PAULA: Take up the sword, my son, for your renewed confidence. May the never-ending struggle for power here turn into the never-ending struggle for its downfall. For its destruction.

  DAVID: O sovereign decision! Pride of the intemperate winter!

  Yet I’ll promote patience.19 But what about you, Mother? What will your role be, now?

  PAULA: What I could do, you can say, yes, you can really say, I’ve done.

  (They embrace each other.)

  SCENE 6: In the place of foundations.

  It is noon. MOKHTAR, RENÉ, and CAMILLE are sitting off in a corner. DAVID is in the middle.

  DAVID (to the others): So it doesn’t matter where Paula is. Imagine she was just a dream. A visitation.20

  RENÉ: I’m not convinced.

  CAMILLE: Me neither, not by a long shot.

  DAVID: We’ve got plenty of time.

  CAMILLE:

  The naked truth:

  You wanna know?

  We’re dead meat, guys.

  Not long to go!

  MOKHTAR: We’ll be able to defend ourselves.

  RENÉ: So, it’s back to guns already?

  DAVID: This isn’t a philosophy for sheep. We’ll bare our teeth every time they try to silence us.21 (From the opposite side of the stage, ENTER MADAME PINTRE, tremendously aged.) Look, the others are back. Here’s Madame Pintre.

  RENÉ: The symbol of going back in time.

  MOKHTAR: The symbol of a unity reconstructed on high. The conjunction of the light of the sun and the moon. Midnight diffused in Noon.

  CAMILLE: A conjunction that causes an eclipse, where everything goes dark.

  DAVID: But it’s also darkness, on the stage, that signals that one act is coming after another.

  RENÉ: And it’s no less a play for that, is it?

  MADAME PINTRE: One evening, there was a break in the clouds, and then came the storm.

  All the trees were bent over, with their foliage

  All sleek.

  The machinery of the heavens was shorted out.

  The maintenance men, some old guys in workmen’s caps, were playing pinochle on a tree stump. A big fir tree came crashing down on them. The poor guys were crushed to death.

  They didn’t think it could ever happen to them, actually—they’d become the metaphysicians of alcohol.

  A few truckloads of skeletons were brought in to replant the trees. A bunch of very sullen young kids stood guard over them with rifles. But it was a bust. They were sinking up to their ankles in the moss. They had snails in their socks.

  So it all started over again, the chaos and the sun. It’d be easier to squeeze the storm into a bag.

  The event is nothing other than the break in the clouds.22 The colors are so pure that your vision is greatly magnified.

  The wolves have been driven out. But now there are no more squirrels.

  DAVID: Nymph of the human forest! O sorceress! Human beings aren’t meant to turn their faces toward blood. I’ll keep the younger generation in check. I won’t let anyone suck up to the least members of society.23

  RENÉ: It’s true that time has gone by. The gold of night has no hallmark anymore.

  CAMILLE: Do we have to make our way in the dark with nothing to guide us? There’s not a breath of wind on the water stirring the yellow eyes of the buoys. The way to port has been forgotten.

  ALL IN UNISON: The eclipse of every subject.

  RENÉ: But that’s the very subject.

  CAMILLE: There’s nothing’s left! Nothing except law and order shot to hell.

  MOKHTAR: Take it from the Arab: in the desert, you need to have the subtlest thought, truly the finesse of a philosopher, to find

  What?

  The dew, the fox, and

  The trail.

  (EXEUNT everyone except DAVID.)

  DAVID (alone): And now, century at its close, let’s see what you have to say.

  (EXIT DAVID.)

  NOTES

  TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

  1. Thinking French Translation (New York: Routledge, 2002), 163.

  2. The phrase describes L’Écharpe rouge in Olivier Neveux’s Théâtres en Lutte: Le théâtre militant en France des années 1960 jusqu’à aujourd’hui (Paris: La Decouverte, 2007), 194, but applies as well to The Incident.

  INTRODUCTION

  1. At this point, there have been three public readings or semi-staged productions of scenes from The Incident at Antioch, besides Vitez’s performance: in February 2009, at the University of Glasgow; in May 2011 at the UCLA Program for Experimental Critical Theory (the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles); and in June 2011 at HAU 1 in Berlin (sponsored by the
Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung).

  2. See 1 Corinthians 12:12: “For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.”

  3. While for Hegel the Owl of Minerva takes wing at dusk, for Nietzsche philosophy thrives in the bright light of noon. Badiou discusses Claudel’s 1906 play Partage de midi in relation to Nietzsche and Hegel in his unpublished 1994–95 seminar on Lacan.

  4. In a draft of a letter to Cohen found in Gödel’s Nachlass, dated June 5, 1963. Quoted in Solomon Feferman, “The Gödel Editorial Project: a Synopsis,” 11.

  5. Paul Cohen, “The Discovery of Forcing,” p. 1091. Also see Mary Tiles, The Philosophy of Set Theory for a lucid discussion of Cohen’s ideas, and Thomas Jech, “What is . . . Forcing?” for an extremely succinct account. Cohen’s classic work in this area is Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis.

  6. Unlike the strength of logical implication, where “if p then -q” means that p and q are mutually exclusive (if one is true, the other must be false), the statement “p forces -q” means, in Badiou’s explanation, “there exists no condition that is stronger than p and that forces q. . . . The statement q finds itself, so to speak, freed with regard to the conditions that are stronger than p” (Theory of the Subject, 271–72).

  7. In Theory of the Subject, Badiou links this retroactive or future perfect temporality with the relationship of Jesus and Saint Paul: “Christianity, too, begins two times: with Christ and with Saint Paul. Note that the certainty of the first beginning is attached to the truth of the second. Without the founding militant activity of Saint Paul. Without the idea—against Peter—of universalizing the message, of leaving the Law, of exceeding the Jewish universe, what would have become of this millenary power, from which alone we can read a beginning in the tangled history of that sectarian leader liquidated by the Palestinian establishment under the protection of the neutrality of the Roman State?” (125).

  8. Traditionally, the Rabbis have been very suspicious of the dechikat ha’ketz (“forcing the end”), the idea of hastening the coming of the Messiah and the redemption he heralded. It is not so much that they doubted that it could be done, but on the contrary, they feared that it might be possible, but contrary to God’s will. I discuss this concept in “Forcing the Messiah: Paul, Rosenzweig, and Badiou” in Rosenzweig-Jahrbuch 4 (2010).

  9. We can find a parallel discovery of such “weak forcing” in Walter Benjamin’s account of a “weak messianic power” in his famous theses on “The Concept of History,” which Giorgio Agamben has argued is a covert commentary on Saint Paul.

  10. See Badiou, “Rhapsody for the Theatre,” 213. It is worth noting that Lacan too finds perhaps unexpected resources in Claudel, devoting considerable time in his 1961 seminar on transference to a discussion of the Coûfontaine trilogy.

  11. A passage from this letter, discussing Pottecher’s visit to Bayreuth, is reproduced in Jacques Petit’s excellent critical edition of La Ville (26). As in the case of Badiou, Wagner is one of Claudel’s important influences, and although Claudel’s early enthusiasm was later tempered by strong criticism, traces of Wagnerian poetics and aesthetics remain in his work.

  12. Susan Spitzer has pointed out that Cephas refers to another personal motivation for his revolutionary rage in Act I, scene 1: “My father . . . kept his wife in a state of mute anarchy. And I, his son, am making that silence speak the old language of strife.”

  13. In a rather coy account of this in Being and Event, Badiou comments, “Due to a predilection whose origin I will leave the reader to determine, I will choose the symbol ♀ for this inscription. This symbol will be read ‘generic multiple’” (356). One suspects a Lacanian provenance for this choice, because for Lacan woman is “not-all,” an infinite and open set, not determined by a universal quantifier, as is the case with men.

  ACT I

  Alain Badiou’s comments to me about some of the lines noted below have been prefaced with AB. Only the titles and relevant page numbers of the works cited herein are referenced parenthetically; additional information can be found in the bibliography.

  1. See Kenneth Reinhard’s introduction for a description of the Biblical incident at Antioch and its far-reaching implications. In his 2010 book The Communist Hypothesis, Badiou sheds light on The Incident’s political message in a discussion of the situation in France following the “Red Years” of the 1960s and 70s. Noting a twin failure–the betrayal of their ideals by former Maoists and other militants who rallied to the bloodless socialism of Mitterrand in the 80s and to the “delights” of parliamentary power, on the one hand, and the still-fresh memory of the “ultra-left” failure of terror (certain aspects of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Khmer Rouge, and the Shining Path in Peru), on the other, he remarked, “This in fact seems to be unavoidable at times when the political dynamic of revolutions can no longer invent its becoming or assert itself for what it is” (19). The Incident at Antioch, he went on to say, is devoted to this problem of the need to combat both the right and the ultra-left simultaneously, since neither peaceful continuation nor ultimate sacrifice can lead to a just society. Only universality, represented in the play by Paula, will allow us to live under the rule of equality.

  2. Christ’s name for the apostle Peter, derived from the Aramaic kêfâ, meaning “rock.”

  3. The French term, increasingly used in English, was retained here to refer to the towns ringing Paris that are associated for the most part with large working-class and immigrant populations, unemployment, and crime. In Act I, scene 3, Paula recites the names of a dozen Paris banlieues, calling them “the guardians of the place of the true.”

  4. War reserves are defined as “Stocks of materiel amassed in peacetime to meet the increase in military requirements consequent upon an outbreak of war.” (Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. US Department of Defense, 2005) The literally translated phrase “place of the war reserves” has the advantage of maintaining homogeneity with the four other fable-like “places” in which the play is set.

  5. On the road to Damascus to arrest followers of Jesus, the zealous Pharisee Saul of Tarsus had the conversion experience described in several New Testament accounts. See the introduction for a fuller description.

  6. In an interview with Peter Hallward, Badiou remarked, “Emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible” (Ethics, 121). Or, as he put it elsewhere, “The possibility of the impossible is the basis of politics” (Can Politics Be Thought?, 78).

  7. This is an allusion to a well-known line in Racine’s tragedy Bérénice, Act I, scene 4: Dans l’orient désert quel devint mon ennui! (“How my anguish grew in the desert of the East!” in David Gervais’s translation). Badiou’s “desert of the West” bears a close resemblance to “the desert of the Real,” Slavoj Žižek’s name for the “capitalist utilitarian de-spiritualized universe” that features in his book Welcome to the Desert of the Real.

  8. AB: “The current symbolic organization, in other words, is worthless.” Democracy, in particular, is the “emblem” targeted by Badiou: “Despite all that is devaluing the word democracy day after day and in front of our eyes,” he wrote in “The Democratic Emblem,” “there is no doubt that this word remains the dominant emblem of contemporary political society. An emblem is the untouchable in a symbolic system, a third rail” (Democracy in What State?, 6).

  9. The religious phraseology prevalent in The Incident links the play to its Biblical context. Note that Cephas’s language overall in this speech has an archaic flavor.

  10. Line hunters walk in small groups, with about 10 yards between them, to flush out quail, doves, and other prey.

  11. AB: “As you contemplate summer from the window, you have an experience of nothingness. You’re tormented by the force of nothingness, nothingness visible.”

  12. AB: “This image can be compared with th
at of a primly dressed woman suddenly removing all her clothes.”

  13. The condition that is meant here is that of people whose minds have been deadened or numbed by the capitalo-parliamentarian order.

  14. AB: “This image conveys the idea of someone locked into their own narrow way of seeing things.” A sharp contrast with Cephas, in this scene at least, is provided by the related character Avare in Claudel’s The City, whose own alienation from the friends with whom he is dining he seeks to cure through isolation: “and the desire came over me to set alight the four corners of this place of lies: That I might be alone.”

  15. AB: “The absence here is an active, positive one: it’s the absence or the subtraction from ordinary law, it’s everything striving to be absent from that law. It’s a revolutionary language that makes it possible to think the real situation based on the fact that people are subtracting themselves from ordinary law. Anonymity is something positive, the life of anonymous power; you’ve become an anonymous part of it all.”

  16. AB: “Filiation implies heredity. You can name what you are and are becoming inasmuch as you are the children, or heirs, of a century and a half of innocence, i.e., the working class from about 1800 to 1980.”

  17. Capturing the moon’s reflection in a washbasin or a bowl is part of an old Chinese ceremony honoring the moon. Here the image is related to an illusory politics or struggle in the past. AB: “The washbasin was painted red to trick people into thinking that it was really the revolution that was involved.” Not surprisingly, the color red, with its connotation of revolution, is evoked several times in the play, notably in connection with a red scarf (see note 27 below).