The Incident at Antioch

by Alain Badiou

  18. Paula’s assertion of women’s equality here is strictly in keeping with Badiou’s aversion to identity politics. What matters is only that men and women should both be able to participate in a truth process. To that extent, Paula’s declaration echoes St. Paul’s in Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female.” See also Badiou’s remarks about women and politics in the Glasgow interview included in this book. The play’s conversion of Paul into Paula moreover raises the question of the author’s identification with her as a symbol of the feminine, or “that which, when it ceases to be the domestic organization of security and fear, goes furthest in the termination of all cowardice” (The Century, 26). A vivacious female character who challenges Socrates at every turn features prominently as well in Badiou’s recent La République de Platon (English translation forthcoming from Columbia University Press). Amantha, as she is called, carries the “spectral” aspect or subtext of the work. “That it should be a female character once again vindicates Hegel, who saw in women ‘the community’s irony’” (Plato seminar, June 9, 2010). Characterizing Claudel’s character Lâla similarly, Badiou in his preface nonetheless distinguishes Paula’s voice as one of “emancipatory truth,” not irony.

  19. AB: “The images here are intentionally surrealistic: two ideas of grandeur.”

  20. Paula’s inner conflict regarding the undecidability of the event names the play’s key issue of subjectivation. “The fact that the event is undecidable,” Badiou has written, “imposes the constraint that the subject of the event must appear. Such a subject is constituted by a sentence in the form of a wager: this sentence is as follows. ‘This has taken place, which I can neither calculate nor demonstrate, but to which I shall be faithful.’ A subject begins with what fixes an undecidable event because it takes a chance of deciding it” (“On the Truth Process”). In Act III, David’s “conversion” to Paula’s thinking of politics begins with his saying “I can see the undecidable clearly.”

  21. AB: “In the term errance there is the idea of instability.” The unsettling nature of Paula’s revelation of women’s equality will provoke anxiety in the women and trigger a desire to maintain the status quo. Anxiety, one of four affects that, for Badiou, signal the incorporation of a human animal into a subjective truth process, is associated with “the desire for a continuity, for a monotonous shelter” (Logics of Worlds, 86).

  22. These lyrics from The Internationale would be immediately recognizable to a French reader or audience.

  23. While “superfluous” might have served to translate “inutiles” in this particular instance, “useless” seemed more appropriate in that uselessness is a key trope in the play, a condition bemoaned by both Paula and her brother at various moments.

  24. Badiou agreed that a play more familiar to Anglophone audiences than Racine’s tragedy Britannicus should be substituted here, with the caveat that it contain, like the French work, a political theme.

  25. “The Arabian sands” here stands in for what might otherwise have been for Anglophone audiences a baffling reference to the Syrtes, a remote, barren region of Libya. Badiou may have had in mind the melancholy atmosphere permeating Julien Gracq’s novel Le Rivage des Syrtes (The Opposing Shore).

  26. The word “present” is in itself ambiguous: It may be an existential reference or a reference to the gift—her scarf—that Paula is about to throw in the water. AB: “The ship metaphorically sings a song of praise the way that poets once celebrated warriors’ high deeds.”

  27. The eponymous red scarf of Badiou’s 1979 “romanopéra,” L’Écharpe rouge is reprised here in Paula’s scarf as well as in the one Camille wears, which the revolutionaries will later wrap around themselves in scene 4. The allusion is to the red scarves worn by the Paris Communards. The fiery revolutionary Louise Michel (1830–1905) brought her own red scarf with her to New Caledonia, where she had been deported after the crushing of the Commune, and tore it in half to give to two of the insurgents of the local Kanak uprising against the French in 1878, with which she deeply sympathized. I am indebted to Isabelle Vodoz for alerting me to this reference to Louise Michel, who is, moreover, the first of the women mentioned in Paula’s litany of extraordinary women in Act I, scene 4.

  28. Badiou told me he was thinking of actors here, who sometimes warm up for a performance by reciting tongue-twisters.

  29. AB: “Mokhtar is in fact an assembly-line worker who paints cars.”

  30. AB: “This is a kind of song: Although you, the worker, may come from darkness, try to be the light, even for what the factory makes of your labor. Don’t forget that, as a worker, you’re not forced to identify with the factory or your labor (hell), or even with the aspect of it that’s not hell (i.e., the parasols). ‘Hell’ and ‘parasols’ are two different aspects of the factory, but the worker has no part in either of them because they’re imposed on him in either case.”

  31. The use of the word “penultimate,” Badiou confirmed to me, intentionally evokes “Le Démon de l’analogie,” a well-known poem by Mallarmé containing the line “La Pénultième est morte” (The Penultimate is dead).

  32. AB: “I’m coming to you to get my conviction, I’m not coming to give you mine.”

  33. These are all poor, working-class suburbs of Paris.

  34. AB: “The factory as the fundamental place of politics. But whether the factory’s function is to appear or disappear is an unresolved issue.”

  35. Mokhtar is expressing the solidarity of the revolutionaries with three other uprisings or revolutions: that of June 1848 in France, the Paris Commune of March 1871, and the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia.

  36. AB: “That name is ‘revolution’ or ‘communism.’” This sentence might reasonably have been translated as “Hail on behalf of those who seek the meaning of your endurance,” but I opted, at the risk of a certain inelegance, to preserve the repetition of nom since the play lays great emphasis on names and naming. It should be noted that the title of Badiou’s book De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? was rendered in English as The Meaning of Sarkozy, a translation that came in for some criticism at the time the book was published.

  37. This is the rendering of the sentence that Badiou preferred. Maître (master, teacher, mentor) and particularly the term maître à penser implied here, is often left in French since its translation poses problems in English.

  38. An echo of Heidegger, who described Dasein’s thrownness in the world as a dispersion of being, may be heard here.

  39. AB: “Formalization, in other words.”

  40. A syllabary is a phonetic writing system consisting of symbols representing syllables. Lacan notably used the term in his text “On an ex post facto syllabary,” in which he claimed that there has never been any thought other than symbolic thought (Écrits, 608). Ken Reinhard deserves thanks for pointing out this connection to me.

  41. In his Plato seminar on June 16, 2010, Badiou read aloud this passage from the play (Paula’s “conversion”) to demonstrate what he called “the evental impact of the Idea” (la frappe événementielle de l’Idée). Paula’s posture, on the ground with arms outstretched, was inspired, he remarked, by the well-known Caravaggio portrait of Saint Paul’s conversion.

  42. AB: “At the very moment that chance strikes me, I unconsciously know what chance knows.”

  43. AB: “The obstacle that gives way is the obstacle to her conversion. Both the obstacle and the shrinking of desire collapse.” In the Plato seminar mentioned above, Badiou noted: “Something like the subject she might become is starting to appear.”

  44. AB: “She had not only what was purely sensible but what was multiple as well. The sensible is being used here as the opposite of the intelligible. ‘I had neither the intelligible nor the One.’ ‘Scattered’ implies: the multiple, diversity, the dispersed multiple, the idea of dissemination.”

  45. AB: “It’s almost as though she were complaining; it’s almost a sort of
violence she feels has been done her: ‘Who is forcing (that is, violating) me? Who is telling me now that there’s a kind of strategic direction, an order, a plan of action that has to be followed? I sense, I’m being told, that there’s a direction that needs to be found.’”

  46. The helmet and the owl are symbols of Athena, whom Badiou, in his Plato seminar, described as “the allegory of thought inseparable from combat.”

  47. AB: “She’s saying, ‘The process of my conversion has been taking far too long: I need the word, the name that encapsulates the process.’”

  48. AB: “‘So, without any emotion, I define a founding thought in order to escape from the process that has been taking too long. I emerge from emotion, from simple passivity, whereas you are the process that has been taking too long.’ She is saying, ‘I am what I am.’ ‘It is I who am here.’” This paroxystic declaration of subjectivity bears an obvious resemblance to Saint Paul’s conversion. As Tracy McNulty has observed, Paul’s discourse “ties salvation to the event wherein the subject is called forth as a subject: ‘by the grace of God I am who I am (I Cor 15:10)’ (18) [The embedded page references in this quotation are to Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism]. Badiou notes that after the conversion event of Damascus, Paul turns away from ‘any authority except that of the Voice that personally called him to become a subject’ (19)” (Philosophy and Its Conditions, 195).

  49. AB: “This is the definition of formalization.”

  50. AB: “‘There were chance encounters, and when I was young they were all I needed to be happy, to hold my own in life.’ Youth was all about chance encounters. But what’s needed now is formalization: language. With this conversion, that aspect of her youth is over: ‘Now I’m faced with the difficult labor of formalization, language.’ Determination or will vs. randomness.”

  51. “Throughout the whole passage,” Badiou remarked in his Plato seminar, “the subject is under the control of a hitherto unknown real.” See Kenneth Reinhard’s interpretation of this passage in his introduction.

  52. AB: “Giving up any idea of the Divine, giving up the ‘trappings’ of God: that’s what makes her spring back up—not for a new faith, a new prayer, but for a new beginning (a new axiom of life). It’s by giving up all those trappings that God represents, i.e., by becoming an atheist, that she’s reborn for a new rational beginning.”

  53. AB: “This text they quote is formalization transformed into recitation.” With this line begins an extended quotation, adapted from Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology. In the standard English translation, the line reads: “The division between the personal and the class individual, the accidental nature of the conditions of life for the individual, appears only with the emergence of the class, which is itself a product of the bourgeoisie” (84). The quotation represents the beginning of the process of incorporation into a body-of-truth that follows the evental impact of the Idea (Plato seminar, June 16, 2010). For purposes of comparison, the relevant lines from the standard English translation of The German Ideology (84–85) are given in italics in the notes below.

  54. “This accidental character is only engendered and developed by competition and the struggle of individuals among themselves. Individuals seem freer under the dominance of the bourgeoisie than before, because their conditions of life seem accidental …”

  55. “… in reality, of course, they are less free, because they are more subjected to the violence of things.”

  56. “The contradiction between the individuality of each separate proletarian and labour, the condition of life forced upon him, becomes evident to him himself, for he is sacrificed from youth upwards and, within his own class, has no chance of arriving at the conditions which would place him in the other class.”

  57. “… the proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individuals, will have to abolish the very condition of their existence hitherto…”

  58. “… (which has, moreover, been that of all society up to the present), namely, labour.”

  59. “Thus they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression …”

  60. “… that is, the State. In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State.”

  61. AB: “The first words of the new language.”

  62. Of the names cited here by Paula, I have given brief biographical notes only for those that might be unfamiliar to some readers:

  Louise Michel: A revolutionary, active in the Paris Commune of 1871, who was frequently imprisoned for her radical opposition to the State.

  Hypatia: A fourth-century Neo-platonist philosopher and the first notable woman mathematician.

  Elisabeth Dmitrieff: A Russian-born feminist and Communard who organized the Women’s Union for the Defense of Paris and for Aid to the Wounded.

  Sappho: A great lyric poet of Antiquity whose subjects were passion and love, often for women.

  Marie Curie: A Polish-born French physicist and chemist (1867–1934) who was a pioneer in the field of radioactivity. She won two Nobel Prizes and was also the first woman professor at the University of Paris.

  Camille Claudel: A talented sculptor, the sister of Paul Claudel, who died in 1943 in a mental asylum where she had been interned for thirty years.

  Sophie Germain: A French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher, born in 1776, whose work on Fermat’s Last Theorem provided a foundation for mathematicians exploring the subject for two centuries thereafter.

  Emmy Nœther: A German mathematician (1882–1935) known for her groundbreaking contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics.

  Vera Zassulitch: A Russian Marxist who, along with Plekhanov, founded the Emancipation of Labor, the first Marxist group in the Russian workers movement.

  Louise Labé: One of the few female French Renaissance poets.

  Bettina von Arnim: A multitalented German writer, publisher, composer, and social activist (1785–1859).

  Djuna Barnes: The American author of Nightwood, who played an important part in the development of early twentieth-century modernist writing.

  Madame de La Fayette: A seventeenth-century French author whose masterpiece La Princesse de Clèves was one of the first novels in Western literature.

  Madame du Châtelet: An eighteenth-century mathematician, physicist, and author whose translation of Newton’s Principia Mathematica is still considered the standard translation in French.

  Catherine the Second: Catherine the Great of Russia (1729–1796).

  Saint Teresa of Ávila: A prominent sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, Carmelite nun, and writer of the Counter Reformation.

  Zenobia: A Syrian queen (240–after 274) who led a famous revolt against the Roman Empire.

  Alexandra Kollontaï: A Russian revolutionary feminist, best known for founding the Women’s Department, an organization that worked to improve the conditions of women’s lives in the Soviet Union.

  Theodora of Byzantium: The wife of Emperor Justinian I and perhaps the most powerful woman in the history of the Byzantine Empire.

  Anna Seghers: A notable German intellectual and active antifascist who chronicled many of the twentieth century’s major events in her writing.

  Zivia Lubetkin: One of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1944 and the only woman on the High Command of the Jewish resistance group ŻOB.

  Lady Murasaki: The author (c.973–c.1020) of the classic work of Japanese literature The Tale of Genji, regarded as the first modern novel in world literature.

  Jiang Qing: The wife of Mao Zedong and a prominent Chinese Communist Party figure who played a major role in the Cultural Revolution. She was subsequently imprisoned as a founding member of the “Gang of Four” that was branded as counter-revolutionary by Mao’s successors.

  Rosa Luxembourg: A Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist, and activist who was among the founders of the antiwar Spartacus League,
which later became the Communist Party of Germany. After the Spartacist uprising in 1919 was crushed she was executed.

  63. Virginia Woolf and Catherine Mansfield, Badiou told me.

  64. AB: “When formalization has been achieved.”

  65. AB: “‘Do Athena’s life journey over! Renounce your renunciation!’ What is meant here is Athena’s life conceived of as all the different things she did throughout it, i.e., a woman’s life not just as the itinerary of love, or of being a wife, but the possibility of thinking for women. Athena is the symbol of the woman who assumes responsibility for thinking. She’s the woman who seems to be most in competition with men: she was born from the head of Zeus, etc.”

  66. This is an allusion to the end of Goethe’s Faust, Part Two. A literal translation of the Mystic Chorus’s lines reads: “Everything transient/Is but a symbol;/The Unattainable/Here is realized;/The Indescribable/Here is accomplished;/The Eternal Feminine/Draws us upward.”

  67. Concerning the use of this phrase both here and in Act III, see the introduction.

  ACT II

  1. In Greek mythology, the Danaides, the fifty daughters of Danaus, married the fifty sons of Aegyptus, whom they murdered on their wedding night. They were punished in Hades by having to carry water in jugs with holes, so that the water always leaked out.

  2. AB: “This is the state of mind of the obscure subject. It is a way of thinking that lacks clarity, an obscure disposition of the mind, a sort of disturbance that precedes violence.” See Logics of Worlds for a fuller discussion of the obscure subject.

  3. The ox was originally chewing on a yellow cork, but Badiou decided to change the line to accord with Villembray’s fishing activity. The image, reminiscent of the peaceful bull Ferdinand, the eponymous character of the 1936 children’s book who prefers sitting beneath a cork tree smelling the flowers to bullfighting, had probably been in the back of Badiou’s mind, he confirmed to me, since he’d read the book as a child.