The Incident at Antioch

by Alain Badiou

  JEAN MAURY: You two-bit Stalin!

  PIERRE MAURY: Two-bit Stalin! That’s a good one!

  (They stop, out of breath. DE GAULLE falls asleep on the crate. A long silence ensues.)

  VILLEMBRAY: To whom do I have the honor of speaking?

  SCENE 4: In the place of choices.

  A big conference table is set up crosswise on the road. Around the table are CEPHAS, PAULA, and ALL THE OTHERS.

  PAULA (looking at them one by one as though having trouble recognizing them):

  Is this the calm before the storm? I see you in a golden light. What’s the purpose of this table that’s like an ox-drawn wagon for going into exile? I imagine such slowness!

  CAMILLE: Stop acting crazy. This is a mighty serious matter.

  PAULA: Fine. No more relying on my youth. Mokhtar! You took it away with you.

  Vection16 of the sky above the factory! The wondrous amazement of male authority in which I was cloaked when with you is ended. I’ve been released from your hands suddenly aged.

  CAMILLE: Oh, come on, sweetheart! I’ve wedged my foot in the door. The neon lights from the dance halls have covered the walls of the place with a whole mess of colors!17 Let’s trash it all.

  RENÉ: You’re preaching a kind of slowness that’s all too like farming. With plowing, you always have to turn around and go back—oh, the hell with that. Standing on my tractor at noon, I check over east to see whether the city’s going up in flames yet. Cephas, I think to myself, will give the signal. Then we take the hunting rifles down from the wall. I give a blast on the horn. Here we are crouching down low under the hedges. Paula, you can’t delay this picture any longer. It’s been fined every set amount on earth.

  MADAME PINTRE: Except the amount’s always set after the fine’s imposed.

  PAULA: Your arguments are the same. What village18 does this road lead to?

  CAMILLE: Antioch.

  RENÉ: Silly girl! It’s Jerusalem that matters.

  The beets, O Paula, the hogs that are slaughtered, the milking machines and humming tractors, the sowing and fertilizing, the long, slow tending of the vines can have no part in your thinking if I can see you hesitating to bring down the axe of will.

  Since Villembray—no, don’t worry, I’m not reminding everyone that he’s your brother; things like that, out here in the country, are too important—since Villembray withdrew, and luck is on our side, and Cephas is keeping quiet, it’s up to us to explain the error of stagnant growth.

  CAMILLE: If, after a really nasty hangover, I walk by the stained-glass windows of the Bank at the crack of dawn and I happen to have a slingshot in my hand, wouldn’t it be a crime just to walk by like some stray dog? The explosion of shattering glass lights me up! Saved from the dreary night! We’re like street performers lined up on a tightrope between dispersing as usual and setting off a firestorm.

  PAULA: Your arguments are banal.

  MOKHTAR: Given that we’ve been able to increase our numbers on the working shop floor; given that the foremen, though quick, haven’t been able to keep us from spreading the good word; given that fatigue and the deafening roar of the presses haven’t demoralized us; given that the powerful want to use force; given that our wages are worse than nothing; given that men have needs and women have desires,19 I declare that the time has come.

  MADAME PINTRE: The city is the model of humanity. Oh, just think how dynamic the city will be

  When, once the circulation of signs has recovered its truth, everyone is placed in a visible relationship with everyone else,

  And from their place having learned what can displace it, they joyfully exceed its bounds,

  And with their anxiety deposited in courage, they make withdrawals of light from the real,20

  Subjects of a science in which their desire can be dissolved.21

  CEPHAS: Conclude! Finish!

  MOKHTAR: Natural science handed the world over to the financiers; now the science of history is handing it over to us. Around the dark-skinned worker the whole human race is configured like a body. The architecture of its limbs must lift the heavy club like a symbol and bring it down with both hands on the fly of State.

  And on the ruins I’ll stride over, lovingly picking up each stone, I’ll build the mosque of justice.

  PAULA: Well said.

  MADAME PINTRE: Paula, join Cephas and us so that we can muster the forces for continuing and bend our action to support what’s becoming.

  RENÉ: Cephas, join Paula and us so that we can put an end to the way things are and that those who exist can come into their rightful place of superiority.

  PAULA: No!

  CEPHAS: So you’re content with the usual order of things?

  PAULA: Only rage, with regard to that desire!22 There’s nothing to satisfy us here; we’ve been around for

  As long as the city.

  Be aware that the opportunity we’re being offered for armed combat is merely the way we’ll accomplish

  What the usual order of things has declared about its own demise.

  I’ve spread death for a long time, and it’s not even spread by the lust for victory

  But the eradication in us of the subject that wills

  By what we think is the luck of the moment

  But is merely what the place requires.

  A confusion between space and time!

  I observe, I study the moldering away of the society I live in. However,

  No more does a picture window facing the South Seas compel me to smash its transparency by the fantasy that I could thereby possess the waves and the salt,

  Or does a boulder balanced for millennia on the edge of a tree stump sanction the desire to push it off—and let the stream gush forth in foam!—

  Than would the chance to seize victory be the proof that I exist.

  The law of victory is too specific for the universal subject to put an end to any constraint in it; it’s he who’ll be destroyed by it.

  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’s been split in two and 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.23

  Just as circumcision was for St. Paul, revolution is nothing and unrevolution is nothing.24 Let’s relegate those incidents to the realm of trivial images.

  Revolution has never been in the revolution.25

  Beyond! Beyond any such storm!

  The alternative history, based on nothing but its stumbling around in the dark for the past hundred years, is finding its cross here. Are we the last warriors of the old era? Is the consummate rupture of all time between the classes the age-old civil war?

  Consider the man who from the top of a hill surveys the plain with hawks circling over it.

  He wonders whether he, too, should swoop straight down the slope and the grass to the village as he would on a prey,

  Or sit down and light a bright fire whose mystery will be interpreted by everyone all the way to the horizon.

  That’s what we choose. Its merit is that no one will lose hope, and that people everywhere will become convinced that, after all these centuries of the State,

  There now comes this thought that nothing can subdue,

  And whose very intensity is the painting

  Of a Nativity.

  (Silence.)

  MAD
AME PINTRE: Cephas! Listen to what you’re being told. Let’s not be the criminal courts passing judgment on an ailing body already.

  CAMILLE: The young are so disgusted with the world that it’s got to be reduced to ashes. Just look, still, at the high-spirited, self-assured way they saunter down the street in their tight pants, swinging their arms and scowling at everything! What do we have to offer them, other than the ruins they live in and love?

  MADAME PINTRE: Forget about anxiety, honey, and give yourself up to equanimity and the keenness of a new sense of bravery. Listen to what Paula’s saying. Go beyond the bounds of your dream. Don’t resort to the complacency of terror.

  MOKHTAR: Think about the whole past that’s blossoming here in the sun and whose petals have to be pulled out before they wilt. Have no pity.

  RENÉ: Murder is the source of food, possession is the meaning of being. Without power, all we have to console ourselves with is a disdainful glance at our humiliation. Reality must come into the glance, like a horse obeying a command.

  CAMILLE (banging on the table): What moaning and groaning! Enough is enough! Do we always have to be looking over time’s shoulder

  And reserving our seats for the class reunion?26

  MADAME PINTRE: The decision remains outside of place. O cutting of the fabric! Compatible consequences!27

  MOKHTAR: The decision seizes the chance. O cutting of the fabric! Fertile moment!

  CEPHAS (staring at each of them in turn and saying their names): Mokhtar! Madame Pintre! Camille! René! And you, too, Paula Villembray, my equal in all things.

  Is it up to us to change the decision? Consider this: a true decision is more important, by far, than the person making it.

  So I think all of you are wrong, however deep the split between you.

  For some of you are like a hunter in his blind pondering whether shooting the bird flying by

  —Ah, the streak of blue over the golden broom flowers!—

  Is really consistent with the enduring elegance of hunting and the ethics of life and death it exemplifies,

  When killing the dove is the only proof there is. Even before any thought, in the pure grace of the eye, the shot has to have finished off and cut down the majesty of the bird’s flight.

  But the others are like a fisherman in his boat, drifting among the reeds in the misty morning on the pond. He’s seen the shadow of a big carp just barely stirring the mud at the bottom. In the grip of impatience, he jerks his line around wildly.

  He forgets that only his silence and stillness, extending the art of the lure, can elicit the exquisite joy of seeing the float suddenly plunge down with the fish that’s been hooked.

  A decision, dear comrades, as to what’s in dispute between us, is a very strange compound. On the one hand, it’s a take-over of our act by a higher order, a short-circuiting of all reflection, while on the other hand, it summons up what we know in its entirety, through a silence and a stillness from which we suddenly emerge at our best. It jeopardizes all the tenacity we’ve been able to maintain, on account of the hole punched in it by what’s no longer dependent on it, the hole in which there dwells—after the act, not before—the true subject of a promise.

  The time has come, Mars is entering Leo.

  And birth, too, is a sign, her own opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, of such women as the one you see before you, Paula. Paula herself is the most powerful injunction not to have to take any account of what she’s suggesting.

  PAULA: What are you thinking of doing?

  CEPHAS: I don’t think, the way you imagine one thinks. I haven’t tamed my heart like a cat with a bit of yarn. On what road, other than this one, leading to nowhere but Antioch, a paltry little village, would we have stopped an army whose high command would be debating whether or not to fight?

  Things never happen that way. I object, Paula, to the uncertainty into which your thinking of what’s valid for everyone is plunging our blind wager. Let’s throw the dice!28 Yes, let’s, because it’s our turn now. Those are the rules. Doing away with the particularity of terror, as you would have it, only leads to the destruction of the bond. It’s true we haven’t chosen what’s there to be taken. But no one can hope to go back from the opportunity for a choice to the opportunity for the choice itself to be chosen.

  I don’t turn my nose up at revolution. What happens after it can be understood only by someone who was able to close his eyes right when the turmoil crashed down on him and shut him up within the narrow walls of action.

  Let’s carry out right now what’s giving us a chance to be One.

  Let’s not die without having experienced

  That here, even if only within the bounds of this “here,”

  The weaker party was victorious.

  PAULA: Your “here” will hardly put a stop to the old world’s same old song. Unfortunately, in what you’re saying, and in what’s already been accomplished, the predictable novelty is ending up repeating what it was originally intended to combat. So, is it all over?

  (Silence.)

  CEPHAS: By the way, the uprising will begin with Villembray’s trial and execution by the people. The parliamentary city’s latest darling will be condemned to death. No doubt about it. (PAULA doesn’t react.) Let’s have a show of hands, so the scribe can write this down: near Antioch, a little beet-growing burg, the turning point of History was decided by?

  (CAMILLE and RENÉ raise their hands. So does CEPHAS, a few seconds later.)

  MOKHTAR: I’m having misgivings all of a sudden. I’ll go along with whatever the majority decides, though.

  CEPHAS: Three in favor, two against, and one abstention. Such a narrow majority will be great for the legend.

  Well, dear comrades, let’s be both good fishermen and good hunters. Our prey, albeit weakened, still has a hell of a lot of strength left in its wings, and it can burrow in the mud, too.

  Oh, the world is like a lake, transparent on the surface and deep as a volcano!

  We can hear our own breathing.

  (PAULA, as if suddenly coming out of a trance, stands up, knocking over her chair in the process.)

  PAULA: I’ll prevent this crime from happening. Although action may be restricted,29 let it be this preventing!

  (EXIT PAULA.)

  CEPHAS (raising his hand): Goodbye, Paula!

  SCENE 5: In the place of the war reserves.

  The harbor is deserted; it is dark and rainy out. VILLEMBRAY and PAULA are sitting on the pier with their legs dangling over the side.

  VILLEMBRAY: Remember how I trained myself to get used to your toughness, to pain. I’d run on the dunes, up to my knees in the sand, till I collapsed from rage and exhaustion. And there my sister would sit reading in the dappled shade, under the pine trees. I see our childhood together as one long drill, right up to today when you’ve come to tell me: they’re planning to kill you, get away from here. This time you’re the one who ran, poor Paula, and I’m the one who’s sitting still.

  PAULA: I’m asking you to leave for their sake, as much as for my own. If there’s no victim, it can throw off the whole sacrifice, the whole ritual. I couldn’t convince them. I struck myself as being faint-hearted. Cephas was superb. Wait—are you crying?

  VILLEMBRAY: Someone’s crying in me. Someone from a country that’s gone missing.

  PAULA: My comrades are still going to use us as an example for the world to behold.

  VILLEMBRAY: They won’t get much farther than my dead body. The army’s still holding out. It’ll take them another twenty years. I feel terribly resentful about this whole waste. I’ve been personally wronged.

  PAULA: What little comfort your tears are to you!

  VILLEMBRAY: Now there’s a sweet remark! Where I was hoping for a whole nation to be loyal, the only thing that’s been faithful has turned out to be women, you being the first, right from childhood, and now the last.

  PAULA: Well, this woman orders you on behalf of all the rest to go away and wait.

 
VILLEMBRAY: I lacked a certain amount of stupidity. I’m sick of the whole game. In politics, you have to keep your appetite, even when the dish you’re served is disgusting.

  PAULA: There’s no time to lose, Claude.

  VILLEMBRAY: Kingship belongs to the child.30 I know how that works. Your comrades are singing the old refrain about leaping at the chance. How well I understand them! And the symbol of my execution! How perfectly banal! I can’t even manage to be glad that I’m the symbol, because I know better than anyone how worthless it is.

  Hear my last words.

  PAULA: You’ve always been one for pontificating. The old male syndrome of posturing! Get away from here, run and hide—that’s where good sense and greatness lie.

  VILLEMBRAY: Living here with a dog whose chow I shared, I made a discovery for which it’s right that I atone, so as not to have to spread it.

  PAULA: I can see you won’t spare me, O brother who can die with a happy heart so long as he can finish what he’s saying!

  VILLEMBRAY: There’s nothing but logic, and all reality is its product. He whose only rule is to infer from axioms produces greatness as well. That’s his reward, but he can only get it by never having wanted it. That’s what I call the principle of obtuseness. Happy in politics is the obtuse mind that sticks strictly to the rules and doesn’t bother about any extraneous details.

  You see, in the dealings between the various forces, I intended to inject a bit of myth under the surface of cynicism. I thought that a nation that could dream itself up would have a better chance of reversing what’s hastening its decline. I wanted to secretly replace a robust economy with the austerity of images.

  Now I see my mistake. The darkness of death slipped in.

  Rather than witness its gradual deterioration, the reign of scarcity, I unwittingly wanted my country to die, so to speak, through excess.

  PAULA: That’s what your killers have in store for it. Oh, I see you’re their partner in crime!

  VILLEMBRAY: My death is a mathematical given. The only way I could avoid it is if I went back to dreaming, and I’ve already seen the futility of that.

  Paula, my sister, in these times so lacking in myth, I want to give you this, like an urn before it’s been filled with ashes. (From his pocket VILLEMBRAY takes out a large map and unfolds it.) This is the plan of a war that I’d secretly mapped out with some friends from the high command, during my second term as chief of staff. We were to win in three days, with a big surprise attack. We were to have captured three additional provinces by the end. And we would’ve held on to them too. You just have to be daring and act quickly. This is all I brought back from the coffers of the State.