The Incident at Antioch Read online

  THE INCIDENT AT ANTIOCH

  Despite its references to the banlieues, media, the fall of communism, Arab workers, and other markers of modern France, the setting of Badiou’s final version of The Incident at Antioch is abstract and underdetermined, much like the second version of Claudel’s La Ville. Both revisions are simplified and generalized, as if to avoid the particularity of historical and geographical context for the sake of the immediacy of a drama of ideas. The world in which Badiou’s play takes place, composed of shards and fragments of Claudel’s poetic language, is a world in which the Paris of May 1968 and the Paris of the 1871 Commune converge—not as similar historical events, but as singular Events that fall out of any historical continuum. The Incident offers us access to Paul Claudel’s City through the technique of forcing practiced by Paul of Tarsus and formalized by Paul Cohen.

  Act I, “The Road to Damascus,” begins in the Official Place of Politics, where the current situation is laid out: The unnamed City has been ravaged by economic crises, and the government is collapsing. Politicians on the right and left, the clownish brothers Jean and Pierre Maury, put aside their differences to call for the return of the retired elder statesman Claude Villembray to form a “national unity government,” as the only remaining hope of averting disaster. The radical Cephas, on the other hand, broods on the “worthlessness” of all existing political discourse and rejects what he sees as desperate attempts to salvage the state; he dreams of a new political order and gazes up at the “star of power” that now seems within reach. The scenario here closely follows the opening of The City, with Villembray in the role of Lambert de Besme, and the part of the melancholy revolutionary with a passion for destruction played by Cephas. Badiou “samples” here liberally from Claudel, borrowing individual words, snatches of dialogue, and sometimes entire phrases from The City, at times leaving them intact, at other modifying or recombining them. But a consistent one-to-one relationship between dramatis personae in the two plays cannot be established: Sometimes Badiou’s characters speak lines drawn from several different figures in Claudel’s play, and sometimes lines from one of Claudel’s characters are divided among more than one figure in Badiou. So Villembray’s speeches combine lines from both Lambert and Isidore de Besme, and Paula’s include elements of both Lâla’s and Cœuvre’s discourses in La Ville. It often feels as if Claudel’s play constitutes an unconscious storehouse of phrases and images that move into Badiou’s play of their own accord, like elements of a dream work; but elsewhere, Badiou’s appropriations and modifications of Claudel seem precise and strategic. For example, in Act I, scene 1 both Avare and Cephas recollect primal scenes of their political rage: In Claudel’s play, it is Avare’s memory of public indifference in the face of a personal loss that makes him now yearn “with a force like the rigor of love” to restore the “glory” of death to the world. He looks down at the City, where he sees the people locked in the prisons of their own conventionality, and wants to “liberate” them from the corruption that is their lives. In Badiou’s version, it is a scene of police brutality, the obscenity of the Law, that galvanized Cephas, and drives him now to purge the city through fire and terror. And whereas it is death that Avare wants to restore to a world that has forgotten it, Cephas seeks a new language, new rules—indeed, consistent with his Petrine name, a new Law “where ordinary law leaves off.” The desire of each is to re-establish a limiting, regulatory principle (death, law) that has been corrupted: Thus both Avare and Cephas are reactionary revolutionaries, each caught in the vicious circle of his own ressentiment and each working to transform the old rather than to discover the new. And by putting Law in the place of Death in Claudel’s text, Badiou tacitly makes the Pauline argument that it is the law itself that has brought death into the world. Both Avare and Cephas are motivated by memories of injustice that they wish to rectify, and neither is simply condemned by their authors.12 But each is limited by and to the terms of the primal scenes that structure their revolutionary desires and tie them to the past. Those scenes are in a sense the inversion of Badiouian events, and to be “faithful” to them is to linger in the particularity of private wounds. Once their initial destructive vision is achieved there is nothing left for either Avare or Cephas to do but disappear without trace or consequence.

  Scene 2 of Act I is set in the Place of the War Reserves, the allegorical locus of ammunition for the consideration of politics by other means. Here we see the cynical Villembray, who no longer believes in the possibility of change: “Action merely obeys a pointless necessity,” he comments, “everything comes about with completely predictable results.” Paula, Villembray’s beautiful and strangely charismatic sister, agrees with Cephas that nothing will be gained through reformist policies, but she is neither resigned to political decay like her brother nor committed to Cephas’s revolutionary vision. Paula feels inexplicably liberated from the constraints of history and women’s conventional roles. She believes that all existing accounts of political power are inadequate, but as yet she is unsure how to pursue the transformation—one finally more radical than the total destruction envisioned by Cephas—that she obscurely senses: “What do you measure power by?” she asks her brother. “The powerful fragrance of misty gardens, where the boxwoods have just been pruned? The power of truths in the banlieues, at the factory gates, on public transport? The powerful melancholy of the Arabian sands? Doesn’t Venice draw its force from having no force at all anymore?” Paula’s idea of a certain kind of power of powerlessness is central to the play, and over the course of Act I her uncertain musings will develop into subjective certainty. Paula believes that the materials for change are already at hand, but her confidence is intuitive and inchoate—more existential than conceptual. When a dilapidated battleship appears in the harbor, representing the obsolescence of conventional military might, Paula salutes the “overly symbolic ship” by throwing her overdetermined “red scarf” (l’écharpe rouge) into the water, but she acknowledges that the gesture is “ambiguous”: Does she anoint the battleship with the emblem of revolution, or is she taking leave of both symbols? As if following the orthodox Marxist location of political reality in the means of production, Scene 3 continues Paula’s investigation at the gates of a factory, The Place of Truths. There Paula, her Arab husband Mokhtar, and a factory worker, Madame Pintre, salute the workers for their concrete experience of the real. But for Paula there is no longer any certainty here. The workers are silent and the revolutionary discourse of the truth of Labor belies the conventionality of the party politics at the factory, which for her reeks with “the stench of a dead State.” The city is already in flames and the old models no longer apply, and she alone senses the immanence of a new world in this void. For Paula “the world is starting today,” every moment is a new beginning, on the verge of redemption, and the path to the new world she obscurely senses leads from the ecstasy of “this very nothing that I am” to “the dispersion of being” as such, a destitution beyond the material destruction called for by Cephas.

  In Act I, Scene 4 we have reached the Place of Choices, the road where Paula will have her “Damascus” event. The Maurys continue to press Villembray to take control of the foundering government and enact the drastic cuts required to salvage the economy. And as in La Ville, where Lambert announces that his decision will depend on Lâla’s response to his marriage proposal, so Villembray here leaves the decision to Paula. But rather than answering, Paula falls to the ground, her arms outstretched in ecstatic revelation, as in Caravaggio’s painting of Saint Paul falling off his horse: “Chance, illusion of meaning, whereby I know what it knows! The pebbles in my mouth are changing into clear words.” Paula’s revelation overflows in a rush of surreal images, her subjective conversion experienced as an impersonal “it knows” of unconscious truth, beyond the personal “illusion of meaning.” Like Socrates’s daemon, Paula’s revelation calls her back from precipitous action, the “feverish exaltation” of revolutionary enthusiasm. She arises, shatt
ered, “a woman broken in two,” and transfigured, a radiant new subject with “the precision of an axiom,” no longer bound by the world she lives in. In language that recalls Lacan’s description of the terrible splendor of Antigone, she sees herself as “the sudden flash of light, the magnificent imminence” of a new subjective possibility. She is possessed too by new ideas, indeed the idea of new Ideas, “the inexistent’s ability to be thought”—political ideas that she embodies as much as understands: “I exist in the splitting of the law.” The “splitting” of the law is neither hairsplitting obedience to state authority nor political disobedience, but indifferent or diagonal to such oppositions. The revolutionaries are swept up in Paula’s revelation and commit to follow her; they experiment with different militant interpretations of the event, but they don’t really understand her. And how can they? Her experience is literally beyond their frame of reference; as she says, “I’m taking place out of place [J’ai lieu hors lieu].” “The road to Damascus” in Act I has led from Place to Place until finally taking Paula entirely beyond the coordinates of the political discourses surrounding her. This “place out of place” (the horlieu or “outplace” of Theory of the Subject) in which Paula now finds herself, at the center of the new revolutionary movement but also strangely excluded by it, recalls Lacan’s notion of “extimacy” (extimité), the topological folding of outside and inside, subject and other, characteristic of the objet a. Paula is the catalyst of the crowd’s excitement—and like the objet a, the cause of their desire—but according to Badiou’s stage directions she is “almost completely hidden” behind them, again like the objet a, shrouded by their projections and recontained by their imaginary embrace.

  As the revolutionaries wrap themselves together in the red scarf, Paula recites a long list of great women (including Sappho, Hypatia, Joan of Arc, Emily Dickinson, Rosa Luxembourg, and Camille Claudel), concluding that “this marks the end of all the exhausting efforts to bring you to light. The declaration of the end of exceptional circumstances.” Paula is not associating herself with these women as representatives of Woman or an underlying feminine essence, but breaking with such an account: As Madame Pintre (the canniest of the revolutionary chorus) will say, “after the woman of the ages comes the woman of the hour” (A la femme éternelle succède celle de l’instant). In fact, Paula’s list is remarkably heterogeneous, insofar as there is little that associates these women with each other besides the fact that they are all heroic exceptions, each was “the woman of the hour.” And by marking the end of historical “efforts to bring [them] to light,” their determination in terms of particular “exceptional circumstances,” what is truly exceptional in them is formalized as generic, as lightly marked as possible; indeed, the very fact that it is a list of women would seem to emphasize this point for Badiou, insofar as his own symbol of a generic set is ♀.13 But the revolutionaries close around Paula, and it is not clear that they fully comprehend her revelation and the new political topology it demands. Villembray, however, understands her experience as implying that he should not engage in conventional politics. He is repulsed by the “primitive ritual” enacted by the revolutionaries wrapped in the “Red Scarf,” taking refuge in it as a symbol of “the insularity of the revolution.” Similarly, the comfortable familiarity of a passage from The German Ideology circulates among them, concluding with the declaration that “it’s incumbent upon us to put an end to the state,” and this becomes their single clear goal, unlike the strange restraint called for by Paula, whom they now designate “the indiscernible one.” Villembray condemns them all, politicos and revolutionaries alike, as “the eclipse of every subject” (Éclipse de tout sujet), which for him implies the abandonment of subjectivity as such. In the same words that concluded the first act of La Ville, Act I ends with Mokhtar contemptuously calling Paula to follow him, “Come on, you!” (Toi, viens!), the strangeness of her revelation forgotten as she is elevated to the status of glorious symbol of the revolution, both “invisible and essential.” Paula’s “road to Damascus” has led her off the map of all conventional politics, beyond the opposition between conservative attempts to salvage the state and revolutionary attempts to grab state power, but it is unclear if anyone will follow her on the path she obscurely indicates.

  In Act II, the Incident at Antioch proper, the conflict between Paula’s critique of power and the scorched earth politics of Cephas comes to a head. Cephas’s vision of “the total disruption of everything” is gaining adherents, and without Villembray’s influence, the government will surely collapse. The people love the spectacle of destruction, and Cephas knows that faced with the prospect of endless anarchy they will call for the restoration of law and order, allowing him to assume full dictatorial power. Although some of the revolutionaries are skeptical about Cephas’s motivations and plans, they don’t really understand Paula’s position, which, it must be admitted, she does little to explain and may not fully understand herself. Whereas for the revolutionaries Paula’s refusal to take power is an inexplicable failure to act, for Paula not taking action is a new kind of act. Paula senses that a politics that abandons the endless oscillation between State and Revolution, power and powerlessness, is possible, but she doesn’t have a positive language for it. And whereas the charismatic event of her “conversion” experience had produced powerful, if confused, positive responses in her fellow revolutionaries, now her act involves a negation, a resolute “no!” to the political as it stands. Susan Spitzer has characterized Paula’s negation as an act of subtraction in which her refusal to participate in the dialectics of state and revolutionary counterstate reveals the void concealed by that opposition. Paula rejects Cephas’s revolution as pure repetition without development or transformation, just as Villembray realizes that moderate reform will merely continue political business as usual.

  Act II begins in the Place of the War Reserves, where Paula finds Villembray fishing in the harbor, as he says, “practicing nothingness.” Like Lâla to Lambert in Claudel’s play, Paula tells her brother that she has left Mokhtar and their son David, both of whom have been swept up in the revolutionary momentum, and now she intends to confront Cephas directly. Paula tells Villembray that “the people are taking shape,” are becoming political once again, and she urges her brother to join them in “the rapture of a new day” and the project of “inventing a politics” hitherto unknown. But Villembray can only see himself as part of a superannuated past, and refuses. Scene 2 advances to the Place of Truths, where the terms of the disagreement between Paula and Cephas are elaborated. The people are torn between Cephas’s stark vision of “the total disruption of everything,” despite their suspicions of his motivations, and Paula’s apparent quietism, although her insistence that “power, even if it’s there for the taking, isn’t always the right thing for us to take,” is a provocation: “Paula’s turning our patience into an endless waiting game.” As we saw, the biblical “incident at Antioch” was not the conflict between Peter’s legalism and Paul’s antinomian liberation from the law, but the difference between the dialectic of prohibition and transgression, on the one hand, and Paul’s “indifference” to that dialectic, on the other. In Badiou’s play this proposition is expressed in Paula’s refusal to support either the political reformers (the Maurys) or their revolutionary antagonists (Cephas and the others), who represent state and revolution as two sides of a coin. The difficulty of moving from this distinction to a new political practice remains to the very end of the play.

  Scene 3 of Act II returns to the Place of the War Reserves, where the two conventional politicians of the Left and Right, Pierre and Jean Maury, again try to persuade Villembray to save the crumbling government. But he has only contempt for their pleas, and the surreal scene pokes fun at their empty sloganeering. The powder of conventional political munitions is evidently damp here, and their great white hope is fading into the bitter irony of his solipsism. In Scene 4, however, a new sequence begins again by jumping over the question of truth to t
he Place of Choices, where, at a large conference table, surrounded by all the other revolutionaries, Paula and Cephas have their “incident at Antioch.” Paula is called on to defend her inexplicable resistance to taking power, which is beginning to tire even those sympathetic to her. Even her former ally, Madame Pintre, calls her to join with Cephas, “so that we can muster the forces for continuing and bend our action to support what’s becoming” (afin que nous rassemblions la durée, et pliions l’acte à la consolidation de ce qui devient). Another revolutionary, René, calls on Paula to help them “put an end to the way things are” so “those who exist can come into their rightful place of superiority” (afin que nous interrompions ce qui est, et que celui qui existe advienne à sa suprématie). The terms in which the revolutionaries plead with Paula reveal how far apart they are: “To support what is becoming” may sound like revolutionary progressiveness, but for Paula “becoming” is simply a transitive mode of “being,” and what she is calling for is, we might say, unbecoming, the emergence of the inexistent as such, the abandonment of the entire state of things, not the circular “revolution” imagined by the partisans of Cephas, in which the existent takes the “rightful place of superiority,” like the meek, inheriting the earth. Paula argues that the easy victory that Cephas offers them would fail to achieve real change, it would only be a local modification, “revolution” merely as rotation, and at enormous human cost: