by Alain Badiou
Accordingly, The Incident at Antioch is characterized by a rich linguistic mélange, a virtual kaleidoscope of styles and genres: poetic or highly elevated literary language, language borrowed directly from the Bible or with religious overtones, pompous rhetoric, made-up proverbs, everyday French that often tends toward the colloquial, if not at times the vulgar, all overlain with the remnants of a certain Marxist vocabulary, or with terminology bearing the stamp of Badiou’s own philosophical œuvre, and studded with allusions to, or quotations from, Marx and Engels, Goethe, Shakespeare, Racine, La Fontaine, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Greek mythology, along with myriad references to the contemporary world.
What’s more, the characters themselves switch effortlessly between one type of speech and another, defying all efforts to associate any of them with a consistent social register, a characteristic style of language-use from which their social stereotype could be inferred. The speech of the two workers in the play, Madame Pintre and Mokhtar, for example, is not only distinctly poetic at times but even what might be called prophetic in its sweep. Nor is Camille, the tough girl from the banlieue, limited to youthful colloquialisms or slang; she is often indistinguishable from her older comrades in her use of high-flown language. Normally, a translator will strive to maintain a consistent social register for, as Sandor Hervey has written, “if the paysan sounded like a cross between a gentleman farmer and a straw-chewing rustic, the effect could be ruined.”1 In Badiou’s play, however, such inconsistency is precisely the sought-after effect. A constant fluctuation between everyday French and a more heightened, literary or poetic stage-language can be found in the speech of virtually every character in The Incident. Thus, the fundamental hybridization that characterizes the play as a whole inheres as well in its dramatic expression, a poetry that is entirely that of the theater.
The stylized use of a literary, frequently lyrical, brand of speech by characters from whom we would not necessarily expect it creates an “effect of strangeness,”2 and an odd sense of unreality in the midst of the very concrete situation—an insurrection with its tragic consequences—depicted in the play. Perhaps only the two politicians, the Maury brothers, because they function as targets of ridicule, can be said to display a stable, if hollowly rhetorical, style of language. And it is this very stability that contributes to making them the characters we love to hate, if that is not too strong a term for such obviously satirical villains. Indeed, the intrusion of comedy, the way the play “plays” with its self-defined status as tragedy by incorporating farcical interludes or indulging in humor in the form of ironic barbs or otherwise comic exchanges between characters, bespeaks the essential strangeness at its heart and serves as the counterpart of the deliberate dislocation of time and place in which The Incident also revels.
The road to Damascus, Antioch, and Nicea—names or, above all, symbolic places in the play—are populated by a cast of characters who foreground the intentional connection to Saint Paul and the Acts of the Apostles announced in the play’s title while remaining thoroughly contemporary figures. It goes without saying, then, that any notion of realism with respect to either time or place in the play had to be immediately abandoned. Remaining faithful to the flavor of this essential strangeness represented a major challenge of the translation. Faced with the decisions entailed by such a lyrical, ludic hodge-podge, I occasionally shared the sentiment expressed in Paula’s plaintive question just prior to her “conversion”: “Why is this confusing spectacle being left to me?”
The least fraught of the decisions that needed to be made at the outset concerned the possibility of domesticating the play by transposing it to an anglicized cultural context. Given its essential link to the events recounted in Acts, however, it clearly could not become The Incident at Antioch, Ohio. The retention of some of the play’s “foreignness” in the translation is immediately apparent in the characters’ names, for example, which I have left for the most part in French, with the notable exception of Paula and two others. Because the pronunciation of “Paule” in English sounds too much like “pole”—an unsuitable name for a heroine—her name had to be anglicized. (A different French name could not be substituted, without losing the crucial connection to Saint Paul.) The name Paula is joined by the anglicized versions of David and Cephas, so that there is actually a blend of French and English, as well as one Arab name, Mokhtar, in the translation, just as there is a mixture of place names: the conventional English equivalents Damascus, Antioch, and Nicea coexist with the dozen or so unchanged French banlieues—Nanterre, Vitry, Flins-les-Mureaux, and so on—that Paula evokes in Act I. Although this seemingly arbitrary mix of names may create a certain discordant effect in the translation, such incongruity is a hallmark of The Incident, where French-named characters of another time and place dot the landscape of an impressionistic early Christian Middle East. Adding another layer of incongruity, then, through the anglicizing of some of the names, seemed appropriate, reproducing as it does, on a purely linguistic level, the play’s larger discontinuities and dislocations.
This cultural transplantation of names nevertheless represented only a minor aspect of the challenge involved in translating The Incident, for a distinguishing feature of the play is that it is already itself a translation: it “carries over” much of its language directly from the second version of La Ville, written in 1897. Rather than being “based on” Claudel’s play, The Incident could be said to enact a sort of musical “sampling” of one playwright by another. Many of Claudel’s lines are lifted intact, or only minimally changed, and set down in The Incident where they function as often as not to invert Claudel’s conservative, religious message. In standing Claudel on his head, so to speak, Badiou freely appropriates the earlier playwright’s lyricism for his own purposes. The essential decision regarding the translation of The Incident, then, concerned how to translate this unique “translation” of Claudel.
Because The City, the sole existing English translation of Claudel’s play, dates from 1920, its language strikes the modern ear as somewhat stilted if not downright overwrought in places. Using similar language to translate The Incident would have added an unwanted exoticism to the play in English; clearly, an updating was in order. In fact, Badiou himself often modernized the language of the Claudelian text from which he borrowed. The standard modern French in which much of the play is written has been rendered by its equivalent in English so as to produce a translation that sounds contemporary, for the most part. Sometimes, however, a decision was made to leave intact in the characters’ speech a certain “archaic” quality, occasionally religious in its overtones, in keeping with what I judged to be the playwright’s intention. A balance needed to be maintained between the poetry in The Incident, which risked being flattened by too contemporary a translation, and the prose, which could sound too florid if it were not made contemporary enough.
Ultimately, the new relationship between abstraction and images in Badiou’s richly innovative dramatic language generates striking similarities with music. It is perhaps no coincidence that his earlier drama, L’Écharpe rouge, was performed in the 1980s as an opera. While The Incident, unlike L’Écharpe rouge, is not subtitled a romanopéra, there can be no mistaking the ample use it makes of musical techniques. Badiou himself notes in the preface that an earlier version of the play included a chorus with a great number of voices, which he subsequently reduced. In the later version published here, I think it fair to say that a certain choral effect persists, particularly in Act I, when the revolutionaries react to Paula’s “conversion” and ultimately give what amounts to an antiphonal recitation of a passage from The German Ideology. Overall, what I have called the “sampling” of Claudel makes The Incident a unique aesthetic production, in which a variety of musical modes can be discerned. Long, aria-like passages contrast with short bursts of dialogue, lending the writing a distinctive rhythm throughout. Individual voices play off each other when characters speak at cross-purposes, as do Cephas or Villembray in c
onfronting the banalities of the Maury brothers, who, in Act II, take their revenge in the form of a stichomythic duet. A more orchestral phenomenon can be noted at times in speeches begun by one character and completed by another. Mokhtar in Act I recites what Badiou described to me as a song. This list could easily be continued, but it is perhaps above all the subtle dialectic of sound and silence, in a work punctuated from beginning to end by numerous pauses and silences, that constitutes its essential musicality, some of which I hope to have conveyed in this first English translation of Badiou’s remarkable play.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A number of people generously assisted me with the translation of The Incident at Antioch. Among them were three colleagues at the University of California at Los Angeles: Eric Gans, who was the first to lay eyes on my earliest, very rudimentary draft, which he helped me improve immeasurably; my husband, Patrick Coleman, who contributed countless helpful suggestions and provided unfailing encouragement and support; and Ken Reinhard, who made many improvements to the translation and was with me every step of the way. I am deeply grateful as well to Isabelle Vodoz, whose invaluable explanations, in the course of our exchange of long, detailed emails, clarified much that was obscure for me in the play, and to Adrian Johnston of the University of New Mexico, Joe Litvak of Tufts University, and Steve Corcoran of the University of Cyprus, Nicosia, all of whom gave me useful comments and suggestions early on. Thanks are also due to Ward Blanton of the University of Glasgow, who invited me to attend the 2009 conference there at which a few scenes of my translation of the play were read, and to Wendy Lochner of Columbia University Press, who, as a dedicated supporter of this project from the start, awaited its completion with admirable patience. I also want to express my appreciation to Ron Harris for his scrupulous editing of this technically challenging en face bilingual edition. Last but not least, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Alain Badiou for his enduring confidence in my skills and for his forbearance in the face of my relentless interrogations.
INTRODUCTION
BADIOU’S THEATER:
A LABORATORY FOR THINKING
Kenneth Reinhard
Although he is primarily known as a philosopher, Alain Badiou’s first major publications were the experimental novels Almagestes (1964) and Portulans (1967), and he continued to write and publish fiction through the 1990s, when Calme bloc ici-bas appeared (1997). In the years between, Badiou wrote a series of plays: the political tragedy, L’Écharpe rouge (The Red Scarf) (1979) and the four Ahmed comedies: Ahmed le subtil (Ahmed the Subtle) (1994 [written in 1984]), Ahmed philosophe (Ahmed the Philosopher) (1995), Ahmed se fâche (Ahmed Gets Angry) (1995), and Les Citrouilles (The Pumpkins) (1996). Badiou rewrote L’Écharpe rouge as an opera, and it was performed in this form almost two dozen times in the 1980s. The four Ahmed plays—especially Ahmed philosophe—have been staged numerous times, and continue to be performed frequently. But Badiou’s other tragedy, L’Incident d’Antioche, which dates from 1982, has never previously been published and has not yet received a fully staged production. We are proud to present it here in the original French and in Susan Spitzer’s translation, as the first of Badiou’s literary writings to appear in English.
We could describe The Incident at Antioch as “political theater,” except that all of Badiou’s plays are political, and for Badiou theater has a distinctively close relationship with politics. Incident, however, directly addresses political questions in its setting, themes, and events: its characters are statesmen, revolutionaries, and workers, and their dialogue is almost exclusively about the nature and practice of politics. Badiou’s earlier explicitly political drama, L’Écharpe rouge, was a play of its times, the “Red Years” following May ’68 and continuing into the 1970s. It is a vast tableau of scenes of classical party politics, with multiple struggles, splits, and polemics surrounding a largely successful revolution; it brings out the intensities and exuberance of its historical moment through extensive borrowings from Paul Claudel’s enormous baroque drama of 1929, Le Soulier de satin. But with the 1980s the “Red” political sequence seemed to be waning and a new one emerging, the “Black Years” of political disillusionment and compromise, redolent with the “elegant despair” of the anti-Marxist New Philosophers. Hence the question of revolution in The Incident at Antioch is more problematic than in L’Écharpe rouge, and the possibilities of transformation glimpsed in it are uncertain. The Incident at Antioch reflects on the situation of the ’80s again as refracted through Claudel’s drama, this time his earlier play La Ville (The City) and now also through events in the life of Saint Paul and the early history of the Church. In these two “Pauls,” Badiou finds the primary resources for his literary and conceptual experimentation: Saint Paul and Church history provide a structural framework and conceptual material, as well as the titles of acts and names of characters and places; whereas literary texture—elements of setting, plot, style, and dialogue—are borrowed from Claudel, to create a language that is densely poetic, often surreal, and sometimes obscure, as well as concrete and surprisingly colloquial. Moreover, along with these two Christian “Pauls,” the Apostle and the Playwright, I would like to suggest that we can find traces of a third, Jewish Paul in Badiou’s play: the mathematician Paul Cohen, whose innovative concept of a “generic set” and remarkably generative technique of “forcing” were becoming increasingly important to Badiou’s thinking in the late ’70s and ’80s. The presence of this third “Paul” is less overt than the other two but nevertheless plays a key role in Badiou’s play. In a sense, Paul Cohen’s ideas mediate between the other two Pauls, spacing and dialecticizing their relationship in Badiou’s play, and proposing ways for each of them to produce more theatrical knowledge than they might appear to contain. The Incident at Antioch finally is an experiment in dramatic thinking whose materials are largely drawn from the work of these three Pauls.
BADIOU, THEATER, PHILOSOPHY
Before we examine some aspects of these “Pauls” and their functions in The Incident at Antioch, let us briefly consider some of Badiou’s ideas on theater and its relationship to philosophy and politics. Readers familiar with Badiou’s other writings will no doubt recognize echoes of them in The Incident at Antioch, including the central concepts of the event and the subject; the distinction between truth and knowledge (as well as opinion); the nature of political decision, act, and force; the status of groups, parties, collectives; the difference between unity (and the One) and universalism (and the multiple); and the “indifference” of conventional political oppositions such as Left and Right, and the possibility of cutting “diagonally” between them. The Incident at Antioch is of a piece with Badiou’s other work in the late ’70s and early ’80s, especially Theory of the Subject, and it anticipates ideas he will explore in his later work, including his 1998 Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. But we should not approach Badiou’s dramas as merely the mise en scène of ideas articulated more rigorously elsewhere in his work. Indeed, one might argue that Badiou’s theater doesn’t reflect his philosophy as much as produce discoveries that his philosophy will develop or think otherwise, in nontheatrical modes; for Badiou theater constitutes a distinctive mode of thinking that produces its own characteristic ideas, neither simply derived from nor transferable to philosophy. In the preface to the recent edition of his Ahmed tetralogy, Badiou describes theater as “a particularly active form of thought, an action of thought” (La Tétralogie 21, emphasis added). According to Badiou, the activity of theatrical thinking takes place primarily in the movement from textual referent to theatrical performance and in relationships among its performative elements—actors, staging, audience, and so on. Any literary text is a kind of thinking, of course, but the thought proper to theater requires the additional movement from text to performance. Under the larger mode of thinking that is Art, theater is especially “active” insofar as each performance is a singular and transient occurrence that opens the possibility of a specific kind of truth. But wh
at sort of ideas can theater generate, and what in this context does Badiou mean by truth? Why use such an apparently philosophical word in the context of art? In an essay from 1998, “Théâtre et philosophie,” Badiou defines “the singularity of the theater-truth” succinctly as “an experimental quasi-political event which amplifies our situation in history” (13). Let us extract and expand four central ideas from this compressed formulation:
1. The “experimental dimension of theatrical truth” involves, first of all, the leap over the abyss that separates text and rehearsal from performance before an audience. In his long essay from 1990, “Rhapsody for the Theatre,” Badiou writes that “the essence of theater lies in the existence of the opening night,” which is not the culmination of a process of rehearsal but the interruption of repetition (189). Theater, properly speaking, does not occur prior to crossing the Rubicon of Opening Night, and its outcome is always uncertain, no matter how well laid the plans of directors, actors, and other contributors. Each subsequent performance, moreover, is another roll of the dice, the wager that tonight will not be merely another “dress rehearsal” in the presence of an audience, but the emergence of something new through the collective work of writers, actors, painters, musicians, audience, and so on. Theater is experimental in a sense characteristic of art rather than science: The results of its investigations can rarely be predicted and never replicated. Contingency and “noise” are not necessarily seen as contaminants to be avoided, but may be welcome, even cultivated; there can be no theatrical “control group” and no external or objective position from which results can be assessed, insofar as the theater-experiment is subjective—which is not to say individual, private, or impressionistic. For Badiou theater functions as a kind of laboratory for the experimental production and investigation of new subjectivities, new ideas, and new temporalities. As such, it may have implications for philosophy, which can learn from it (consider the originary case of Plato, for whom theater is philosophy’s noble rival), but this is not a reciprocal relationship—theatrical experimentation produces results undreamt by philosophy, which has little to offer it in return. Nevertheless, through philosophy’s mediation, theater may have productive implications for other fields, such as politics, love, and perhaps even science.