by Alain Badiou
The action I’m calling for is valid at all times anywhere on the face of this earth. An endless working on oneself, reproducible everywhere. St. Paul’s rejection of the old law had the time-honored power to afford the child and the slave, the Persian and the Viking, the opportunity for grace and salvation. So now we’ve come to the second foundational moment, when the unprecedented act consists in not seizing a power that’s there for the taking. Because that’s how the world will learn that the law has been split in two and that we’re no longer burdened by having to take power. Revolution: the nominal pride of people everywhere. But, thereafter, the prelude to Empires. Let’s rule that word out, valiantly. It brands us with the obsolete law, the law in which the subsumption of our thinking of equality by the social bond is not yet mature. Just as circumcision was for St. Paul, revolution is nothing and unrevolution is nothing.
While the revolutionaries wait impatiently for Paula to act, she insists that her nonaction announces a new kind of action. This is not nonviolent resistance or any other mode of passive aggression or turning the other cheek, but the decision to reject the oppositions that structure the conventional political vocabulary as local, particularist, and in this case, merely in the service of Cephas’s personal rage. Paula realizes that the revolution Cephas proposes would simply lead to another empire, more of the same; her revelation was of a “splitting of the law” that requires an entirely new politics. Paula wants to “light a bright fire whose mystery will be interpreted by everyone all the way to the horizon.” There is no doubt that Paula’s idea is still inchoate, she is working more from the strength of her conviction than from clarity about what the change she intuits will involve. However, this obscurity is not her youth or lack of vision, but the very nature of the truth she has discovered: Indeed, from within the old situation, the new truth is precisely indiscernible. The revolutionary women seem to hear some of what Paula is saying, but the men still reach for the brass ring of power Cephas dangles before them: While Mokhtar argues that “the decision seizes the chance,” Madame Pintre knows that “the decision remains outside of place [hors lieu].” The truth that was subjective, but evanescent, and without consequences in Act I is extended and expanded here, into the beginnings of a theory of the political. Nevertheless, most of the people rally around Cephas, Villembray is murdered, and Paula disappears.
Act III, “The Council of Nicea,” is set fifteen years later in “the Place of Foundations,” when Cephas’s revolution has ended in ruin: Everything—state, industry, nature—has collapsed and the survivors keep watch over the still smoldering fires, struggling to imagine a new beginning. Cephas understands that his role has come to an end, that “beyond victory there’s only defeat”—the defeat that “restores the State’s power.” His destructive function exhausted, he departs, like Villembray in Act I, leaving his gun with Paula and Mokhtar’s son David, whom the revolutionaries embrace as their new leader. But David is unsure, wondering if rebuilding the state would make the entire revolution meaningless, and all its “sacrifices” in vain. He is groping for something, but he only knows that it can be neither a renewal of the old order nor the radical disorder left by Cephas, and he wonders if such “going around in circles” is simply the nature of politics. Suddenly Paula returns, elegantly dressed, still young and more fascinating than ever, and this last act focuses on Paula’s struggle with her son over the political future. Paula advises the revolutionaries once more to “give up power! Let things run their course without you. . . . Start your group over on the basis of this 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. [ . . . ] Our generation knows the hidden blackness in the red. It’s up to us, by making an unprecedented decision, not to let that knowledge go to waste.” The logic of revolution practiced by Cephas was “classical,” of another time; he tried to put an end to repetition, but his ideas and techniques are no longer effective: “Today . . . when every classical revolution leads only to Empire, there’s no neo-classical purity save death.” Paula tries to stop David from leading the transition from revolution to reconstruction, and to convince him that restoring the state is not the solution: David must work for a more profound political subjectivation that is the exception to the law of domination and the dominated. Forget the state, she insists; grasp the thread of multiplicity, against the logic of the One that the state inevitably requires. Rather than constructing a revolutionary counterforce to state force, “scatter among the people,” as elements of a generic set—not merely another party, but the forcing of a new part whose addition opens the possibility of a much more profound political transformation. It won’t be easy, but we must go beyond the localization of politics in the state apparatus; politics is what is subtracted from the state. The event from out of which a political truth may arise is fleeting, Paula tells David, but it is all we have to work with: “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.”
The truth that Paula experienced “on the road to Damascus” was singular; the question is how to work to extend it, how to remain faithful to it, how to force it to produce knowledge. And there is something theatrical about this work, in two senses. First, it is as invisible as all the work that prepares for a theatrical production but that must vanish for the theatrical event. Truth is subjective; its universality unfolds in the infinite sequence of its investigative extensions. Second, the truth-event, like the theatrical event, vanishes in its very emergence; it is essentially transient as a performance, and each iteration is unique, with only the possibility of being extended by a faithful subject.
But, David asks, reasonably enough, where to begin? Paula replies, “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.” David objects that what Paula suggests is no strategy at all; and indeed we might better characterize it as an investigation, an aleatory process of finding the people who have already sensed the void in the existing structure of politics, organizing them into groups based on nothing more than the conviction of equality (their indifference to existing differences), and letting them “rise to the generality of situations”—that is, gather themselves into immanent generic multitudes, rather than factions located on the continuum of the political Left and Right. At first they will indeed be indiscernible, invisible to the rest of the world, but finally this is precisely what will allow for the emergence of previously unthought possibilities as new knowledge. David finally seems to understand Paula’s point when he concludes, “Politics is about making politics exist, so that the State should no longer exist.” That is, a political truth, such as radical equality (at this point only partially knowable), may be forced and in the future perfect (that is, by assuming its eventual completion) it may produce knowledge that we can work with now; but it is a risk, always subject to appropriation by the demagogues of the Left and Right, the Fools and Knaves. Nevertheless, confidence that there is a politics that is “free from the State’s grasp, unrepresentable, and endlessly decoded,” a politics of “infinite liberation,” is what David finally learns from his mother; and although there are no guarantees, this confidence may have been enough to change the world.
At the end of the play, Paula disappears, but David is ready to pursue the truth that she encountered and to force it to imply new knowledge. In nearly the final lines of the play, everyone seems to experience a radical new truth, based on the dual accounts of Paula and her brother, Villembray:
Eclipse of every subject.
But that’s t
he very subject.
[Eclipse de tout sujet.
Mais c’est le sujet, même]
For Villembray in Act I, the “eclipse” of the subject meant the disastrous end of subjectivity, but now a new subject may indeed emerge at and as the site of the disappearance of the reactionary and obscure subjects gathered at the end of the play in the Place of Foundations. A new kind of revolutionary subject can arise only through a process that includes the “eclipse” of the old. David may instantiate this new faithful subject—a new “Jew,” born of the “Christian” Paula and the Arab Mohktar—but there is no promise that a new foundation will indeed be forced to appear; left alone on stage, David wonders what the new century will have to tell us.
The Incident at Antioch is a nodal point in Badiou’s oeuvre, bringing together art and politics, theology and mathematics, the Paris of 1871 and the Paris of 1968, while building on Theory of the Subject and anticipating Being and Event. As an experimental procedure, it investigates the text of Claudel’s La Ville, seeking to discover in it the materials for new theatrical possibilities and political ideas. Because Claudel’s play is already “Christian,” we might say that Badiou’s experimental procedure involves adding to it something that is already there—Saint Paul—through a remarkable adaptation of the technique developed by Paul Cohen. But the “addition” of this supplement, the overlay of Paul Claudel’s story with Saint Paul’s structures, brings out something immanent to Claudel but not yet clear in his text: the generic nature of Lâla’s ecstatic prophecy, its apparent contentlessness. In this sense, The Incident at Antioch forces La Ville to reveal a revolutionary knowledge it will have had, by expanding the Pauline truth of the event and its generic extension, with potentially unlimited new possibilities for thinking. The results of Badiou’s experimental forcing can be seen in his extraordinary extension of the concept of the generic in Being and Event, and in his book on Saint Paul, where the theory of the event is instantiated in perhaps its most crystalline form. The bilingual publication of The Incident at Antioch now, thirty years after its writing, has enormous implications for the great and still expanding corpus of Badiou’s writings and ideas. Moreover, I am hopeful, nay, confident that we will not have to wait another thirty years for a full production of the play.
L’INCIDENT D’ANTIOCHE
TRAGÉDIE EN TROIS ACTES
REMARQUE: CUP a modifié le format de ce livre électronique. Le livre imprimé alignait le texte des deux langues côte à côte. Dans la version électronique, des liens figurant au début de chaque acte et scène permettent d'accéder aux versions française et anglaise.
LISTE DES PERSONNAGES
JEAN MAURY: homme politique de droite
PIERRE MAURY: homme politique de gauche
CÉPHAS
CLAUDE VILLEMBRAY
PAULE: sœur de Villembray
MOKHTAR: ouvrier arabe de cinquante ans
CAMILLE: louloute de banlieue
RENÉ: paysan
MME PINTRE: ouvrière
DAVID: fils de Paule et de Mokhtar
LISTE DES LIEUX
Le lieu officiel de la politique: une grande salle nue
Le lieu des réserves de la guerre: un vieux port militaire
Le lieu des vérités: une porte de grande usine
Le lieu des choix: une route départementale dans un champ de betteraves
Le lieu des fondations: une ville détruite
ACTE PREMIER
Le chemin de Damas
SCÈNE 1: Dans le lieu officiel de la politique.
LES DEUX MAURY sont assis sur des chaises d’école, l’un côté cour, l’autre côté jardin, vers le fond. CÉPHAS est en avant, le dos tourné au public.
JEAN MAURY: Il faudra bien qu’ils se décident à faire revenir Villembray. (Silence.) Claude Villembray. Il n’y a plus que cela de possible.
CÉPHAS: Alors, désirons l’impossible.
PIERRE MAURY: Collègues dont l’Occident désert compose tout l’ennui! Prospérons à l’abri fracassé des empires d’Orient.
CÉPHAS: Que je témoigne n’être à jamais aucun d’eux.
JEAN MAURY: Nul n’est aucun, qui ne soit nous.
CÉPHAS: Ô nullité de tout emblème existant!
PIERRE MAURY: Qui a parlé que je n’entends point?
CÉPHAS: Et moi j’entends bruire un vol de palombes, monotonement. Détestable cliquetis d’ailes, au cœur du terrestre témoin!
Les gens sont ici rassemblés par vols migratoires comme qui va se prendre aux filets des sapins. L’endroit n’est pas plus fait pour l’existence que ces taches grises à l’intérieur d’où dégoutte le sang des chasseurs en ligne. Au nom du ciel! Cela sent la plume, la fiente et la tuerie! (Silence.) Vous n’avez rien à dire?
JEAN MAURY: Nous jouissons de la tombée de la nuit.
CÉPHAS: La nuit, la nuit même ne vous sert plus à rien.
PIERRE MAURY: Ne sert, ce qui s’appelle servir, que ce dont les journaux vont parler.
JEAN MAURY: Comptes de la nation! Balance des paiements! Tenue de la monnaie! Onzième choc pétrolier! Restructuration du tissu industriel! Europe supra-nationale! Excédents de lait de chèvre!
PIERRE MAURY: Plan social! Du chômage, mais social! Une insertion entièrement sociale! Des immigrés, s’ils sont sociaux, et non cas sociaux! Aucune exclusion, à moins qu’elle ne soit sociale! L’Europe, mais carrément sociale! Le social comme âme, comme finalité, comme entéléchie, de tout le corps démocratique! Mon cheval pour du social.
CÉPHAS: Harcèlement du rien aux lucarnes de l’été. Le monde est comme un papier d’emballage que tamponne la mention d’un destinataire inconnu.
Moi aussi je suis né de ce pays phraseur. Mon père était dans les honneurs au parlement, oui, oui. Homme droit et disert, il tenait son épouse dans l’anarchie muette. Et moi, son fils, je fais parler à ce silence la vieille langue du conflit. Je vois partout la guerre. Réjouissance!
Toutefois, suis-je indemne? N’ai-je pas été blessé? Considérant les grands pins des landes au ras de la mer, je suis tenté de tout absoudre, comme si la nature de ce pays me faisait le prêtre d’un monde usé jusqu’à la corde. Ou bien je n’ai d’œil que pour cette femme qui vient de délinéer la clôture de sa gloire. Et je rêve d’un intemporel été sur quatre lacs, aux espaliers des monts du sud.
PIERRE MAURY: Technologies modernes. Soin porté à l’écologie des rivières. Citoyenneté des femmes, des enfants, des animaux, des handicapés, des mal voyants, du cresson des vieux puits.
CÉPHAS: La vraie terre fume et remue sa foule et ses tracteurs sanglants sur la motte salée! Les hommes abrutis mangent à leur faim, et pénètrent en foule dans les bureaux aux vitres d’or!
Métropole dévastée! Je t’aime et te proscris! (Il lève son poing au-dessus de sa tête.)
JEAN MAURY: Cet homme, à la fin, est-il connu des services de police?
CÉPHAS: Je suis inconnaissable. Un jour, j’étais ailleurs, et je me suis connu. Une maigre foule courait sous la pluie, talonnée par les flics. On assommait sur le pavé les moins véloces, ou les plus courageux. Tout à coup je sentis que je n’endurerais jamais plus de voir ainsi la traque et le gibier. L’envie me prit d’en finir avec la solitude de l’œil.
Et je l’ai fait, car une langue existe! Elle vous indique où s’interrompt la loi commune. Si vous suivez son ordre, vous voici dans l’appareillage de tout ce que la cité contient d’absence. La vie est anonyme, on ne connaît plus vos actes, qui ne sont plus les vôtres, mais ceux du manquement lui-même à tout le convenable du lieu. Vous viennent des compagnons malaisément identifiables, gens sans décoration ni entours. Avec eux vous existez dans les pliures de la langue, vous nommez ce que vous êtes et devenez dans la filiation d’un siècle et demi d’innocence.
Je ne serai connu que trop tard, quand l’arène ancienne de la connaissance aura flambé, quand l’ignoré ancien sera source unique du savoir.
Nous chasserons du lieu tout ce qui ne consent pas d’y faire
exception!
Nous voyons briller dans la nuit l’étoile du pouvoir. Comme elle paraît lointaine! Mais proche aussi, si proche qu’il nous est enjoint, à nous, les inconnaissables, de la saisir comme on fait de la lune à la demande d’un enfant.