The Incident at Antioch

by Alain Badiou

  4. This line is an obvious echo of Richard III’s “Now is the winter of our discontent,” which is usually translated in French as Voici l’hiver de notre mécontentement. “The Other” here may be the Lacanian “big Other.”

  5. Badiou told me he imagined these buses as the old green ones that used to run in Paris.

  6. The French combines literal and figurative meanings, in that raser les murs can mean both “hug the walls” and “slink around, keep a low profile,” while à la recherche de son ombre can mean both “looking for one’s lost shadow” (à la Peter Pan) and something like “seeking one’s lost identity, or purpose, in life.”

  7. In Germany: Revolution and Counter Revolution, Engels, in collaboration with Marx, wrote: “Now, insurrection is an art quite as much as war or any other, and subject to certain rules of proceeding, which, when neglected, will produce the ruin of the party neglecting them” (100). Lenin used the phrase in “The Lessons of the Moscow Uprising” (1906) and elsewhere.

  8. “Factory-based politics” is a form of collective action in the factory, based on what the workers, organized in small groups, or noyaux, think and on their relationship with one other.

  9. AB: “Cephas is being conceited here. It’s as if he were saying: ‘I, more than any of the rest of you, am the representative of the Idea.’”

  10. The implication is that, in the dark, an enemy soldier can be spotted when he lights a cigarette.

  11. “Man, the most precious capital” was a slogan in the Soviet constitution of 1936 and the title of a speech given by Stalin that same year.

  12. The joke has to do with the play on the expression se noyer dans un verre d’eau (“to drown in a glass of water”), which means “to be easily overwhelmed; to make a mountain out of a molehill.” Villembray, emphasizing the literalness of the expression, has also made the glass insultingly smaller.

  13. “The quiet force” (la force tranquille) was a reassuring slogan used by the Socialist candidate François Mitterrand during his third run for president of France in 1981.

  14. La volonté bonne is the French translation of Kant’s notion of the good will. It plays off la bonne volonté mentioned a moment before in Pierre Maury’s phrase “gens de bonne volonté” (“people of good will”). The placement of the adjective in French allows for a distinction that cannot be perceived in English other than by capitalizing Good Will.

  15. AB: “Long, floaty hair”

  16. Vection is the sensation of movement of the body in space produced purely by visual stimulation.

  17. AB: “This is an expression of exaltation: ‘I’ve wedged my foot in the door and no one will be able to shut it now!’ It’s also an allusion to all the colorful political posters that cover the walls during the uprising.”

  18. With a population of over a half million people, Antioch was actually the third-largest city in the Roman Empire, after Rome and Alexandria. Indeed, Badiou mentions these facts in his Saint Paul book. But, in the play, Antioch is always referred to as a “village.” Later in this scene Cephas calls it a “paltry little village” and “a little beet-growing burg.”

  19. AB: “‘Needs’ and ‘desires’ in the sense that Lacan uses such terms.”

  20. AB: “That is, withdrawals of light from the future.” Anxiety, as noted earlier, is one of the four fundamental affects that “signal the incorporation of a human animal into a subjective truth-process” (Logics of Worlds, 86); courage is another, and is the flip side of anxiety. In Theory of the Subject, courage is characterized as a “putting-to-work” of anxiety, notes Adrian Johnston, “with the latter depicted (using Lacan’s vocabulary) as an effect of the disruption of the Symbolic by the Real” (“Courage Before the Event: The Force of Affects,” 128).

  21. AB: “This has to do with something that, when achieved, preserves no trace of their desire. Your very desire will disappear in a science of this sort, unlike, for example, the desire of a male artist for the naked woman he’s painting, which will remain even after he has completed the painting.”

  22. AB: “‘Right where a desire for things to continue as usual might have been, I can find nothing but rage in myself.’”

  23. AB: “Our thinking of equality is not yet subsumed/dominated by a thinking of, or by the reality of, the relationship among people. Revolutions have been thus far unable to create a truly new relationship among people; hence true equality has not yet existed. There have been breaks with the past, certainly, but not true relationship.”

  24. The allusion here is to Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 7:19: “Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of God.”

  25. In an interview with Steven Sackur on the BBC, Badiou elaborated on this idea: “I don’t know what can be a revolution in France today. It was unclear in 1968. The word ‘revolution’ was here, but the revolution itself was not here, not at all. Nobody knows what is the signification of the word ‘revolution’ today. We have to begin by something else, not ‘revolution,’ and so on, but by an abstract Idea first, an abstract conviction concerning communism as such, [which] is the possibility of something else than the world as it is. And when we speak of the possibility of something else than the world as it is, we are in the philosophical field.”

  26. AB: “This image signifies the need to have assurances about the future.”

  27. AB: “This has to do with how the sheer brutality of the event can be simultaneously a construction. The decision cuts into the fabric of time. The durée here stands for all the consequences of the decision. It is being asked to be compatible with, to be able to withstand, the tear in the fabric.”

  28. The importance of the wager in Badiou’s thought cannot be overestimated. Since the event from which a truth proceeds is undecidable, a decision must be made in the form of a wager. Mallarmé’s famous “dice throw,” one of the persistent references in Badiou’s work, represents the moment of decision that defines the situation, which will be forever altered after the throw of the dice. “A subject,” Badiou writes, “is a throw of the dice which does not abolish chance but accomplishes it as the verification of the axiom which founds it” (Conditions, 124).

  29. “L’action restreinte” is an essay in Mallarmé’s Divagations from which Badiou draws his notion of a “militancy” of restricted (or restrained) action: “Restricted action is the ineluctable contemporary form of the little political truth of which we are capable” (Logics of Worlds, 528).

  30. Heraclitus, fragment XCIV, D52: “Lifetime is a child at play, moving pieces in a game. Kingship belongs to the child.”

  ACT III

  1. See the Introduction. In the last act of Claudel’s La Ville, the poet-turned-bishop Cœuvre recites, in substance, the Nicene Creed’s orthodox profession of faith; in Act III, scene 5 of Badiou’s play Paula articulates an atheistic “creed.”

  2. Cf. Mao Zedong: “On a blank sheet of paper free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written, the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted” (“Introducing a Co-operative”).

  3. AB: “This has to do with the theme of the social bond, the relationship with others, with not destroying everything.”

  4. This is a translation of the Anaximander fragment, notably quoted from Goethe’s Faust Part I, scene 3 by Hegel in The Dialectics of Nature (20). Engels, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, among others, also discussed the fragment in their works. Badiou’s own fondness for it is clear. He quotes the phrase in at least three other places: in “Politique et vérité,” in Ahmed philosophe, and in La République de Platon.

  5. The model of Cephas’s insurrection is that of the Leninist avant-garde party, which Badiou regards as being saturated today. “With regard to the question of the State and power, of the duration of the power of the State, the model of the Party-State ended up showing serious limitations, whether it be what the Trotskyists called the tendency to bureaucratization, what the anarchists identified wi
th State terrorism or the Maoists with revisionism. . . . From the point of view of taking power, the Party was victorious. But not from the perspective of exercising power” (“We Need a Popular Discipline,” 649). What is needed for emancipatory politics is the popular discipline, the capacity of the masses to act together, that Paula will propose instead below.

  6. Paula’s use of the phrase “entre toutes les femmes” (“among women”) echoes the description of Mary, who is said in the New Testament to be bénie entre toutes les femmes (“blessed among women”). The religious tonality of descriptions of Paula is evident, too, in her characterization as a “visitation.” See note 20.

  7. A well-known French proverb L’habit ne fait pas le moine (“The habit doesn’t make the monk.”) is usually translated as “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” But the proverb also exists in a positive formulation, L’habit fait le moine, or “Clothes make the man,” and it is on this one that Badiou is playing. Mokhtar’s question, translated literally, would read “So the bishop’s purple robe does in fact make the monk?”

  8. In Lafontaine’s Fables, it’s actually the dog who drops his prey on seeing his reflection in the water (“The Dog and his Shadow”). In “The Fox and the Crow,” on the other hand, the crow drops the morsel from his beak when the fox flatters him about his singing.

  9. This notion that what is required for a correct politics is a commitment to what happens, as opposed to any imposition of our own will on it, is expanded upon in The Century. As Peter Hallward puts it, “It is only by remaining aloof from all that is likely to happen (all that is predictable, established, settled, comfortable) that it is possible to throw oneself entirely into what actually does happen” (Badiou: A Subject to Truth, 40).

  10. The Nicene Creed proclaimed that the Son was “one in being with the Father,” expressed by the Greek word homoousius, meaning “consubstantial,” or “of one substance.”

  11. After World War II, when many of its resistance fighters had been executed by German firing squads, the French Communist Party called itself “Le Parti des fusillés” (“the Party of the executed”).

  12. This notion was already present in Sartre’s play Les Mains sales, where the young Communist Hugo reproaches the leader Hoederer for betraying those who died for the ideas promulgated by the Party. Hoederer replies: “I don’t give a damn for the dead. They died for the party, and the party can decide as it sees fit about them. I pursue a policy of the living for the living” (217). The play is discussed in Logics of Worlds.

  13. Badiou thinks that negation, in its destructive and properly negative dimension, must be surpassed today: “Contrary to Hegel, for whom the negation of the negation produces a new affirmation, I think we must assert that today negativity, properly speaking, does not create anything new. It destroys the old, of course, but does not give rise to a new creation” (“We Need a Popular Discipline,” 652).

  14. The Beast of the Apocalypse, described in Revelations, is said to represent imperial Rome, whose seven hills are recalled in the Beast’s seven heads.

  15. This concern about the destruction of the social bond is elaborated on in Metapolitics: “We have too often wished that justice would act as the foundation for the consistency of the social bond, when it can only name the most extreme moments of inconsistency; for the effect of the egalitarian axiom is to undo bonds, to desocialize thought, and to affirm the rights of the infinite and the immortal against finitude, against being-for-death” (104, my emphasis).

  16. Every event has a site to which it is attached, a place or point “in which the historicity of the situation is concentrated” (Being and Event, 178–79). In “The Factory as Event Site,” Badiou called the factory “the event-site par excellence” (172).

  17. See the Introduction for a fuller account of this notion.

  18. Badiou distinguishes sharply between belief and confidence, as Peter Hallward has observed. Confidence, as opposed to mere belief, is a subjective attribute, indifferent (as belief is not) to all contrary evidence (Badiou: A Subject to Truth, 39). As Badiou expressed it in Theory of the Subject, “As far as I am concerned, I have confidence in the people and in the working class in direct proportion to my lack of belief in them” (322).

  19. David’s resolution recalls Mao’s championing of patience as the cardinal virtue during the revolutionary war in China. Courage, however, is the chief virtue required of us today, Badiou claims (“The Courage of the Present”).

  20. Already in scene 4 of this act, Mokhtar had declared “Visitation of the pure Idea!” with regard to Paula.

  21. David’s response to René’s anxious query introduces a new conception of the use of violence, one that appears, as Badiou described it elsewhere, “in the form of a protective force, capable of defending something created through a movement of subtraction.” (“We Need a Popular Discipline,” 652)

  22. This definition of the event as something less than miraculous, as a naturally occurring phenomenon, expresses Badiou’s conviction that the event is “nothing but a part of a given situation, nothing but a fragment of Being” (Theoretical Writings, 97).

  23. AB: “That is, suck up to them just because, before, it was the big shots whom people sucked up to.” Like Paula’s earlier advice about sticking close to the people, this recalls Lenin: “Do not flatter the masses and do not break away from them” (quoted in Kostantinov et al, The Fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy, 573).

  A DISCUSSION OF AND AROUND THE INCIDENT AT ANTIOCH

  AN INTERVIEW WITH ALAIN BADIOU

  Ward Blanton and Susan Spitzer1

  SUSAN SPITZER: In your introduction to your 1997 book Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism, you stated: “Fifteen years ago I wrote a play whose heroine was named Paula.”2 This would suggest that the play was written in 1982, the same year that Theory of the Subject came out. Can you situate the play for us and comment on the difference in perspective between Theory of the Subject and The Incident at Antioch.

  ALAIN BADIOU: There are actually three drafts of the play. The first was finished in 1982, the second in 1984, and the third—written just for the first public reading of the play in Lyon, France, by the great French director, Antoine Vitez, who was also a friend of mine—in 1989. I should point out that, now, twenty years later, we are having only the second public reading of this play. So it’s genuinely an emotional moment for me, and I’m really grateful for the organization of all this, and also for being able to hear my play in English, which is a wonderful surprise.

  Now, just a very brief remark about the difference between the first draft, from 1982, and the second, from 1984. First of all, I think the second draft refers less explicitly to the French situation. It’s much more metaphorical, if you like, and it also refers much less explicitly to Marxism and the whole political conception of the ’60s and the ’70s in France. It’s more general, more universal—more poetic, perhaps, too. That’s the first difference. The second difference involves the play’s construction, which is simpler. The first version had lots of characters, a great number of voices, and so on. So, simplification and generalization: that’s the difference between 1982 and 1984. We were at the beginning of a new political sequence, I think, and so the transformation of the play is also in keeping with the movement of that new situation—a new situation that we can regard as a bad situation, unfortunately. It was not real progress, but it was the birth of something new.

  Concerning Theory of the Subject, which came out in1982: it was my first important philosophical work, before Being and Event and before Logics of Worlds, but it’s composed of seminars from the ’70s, so the content of the book does not reflect the beginning of the ’80s at all. The seminar took place between 1974 and 1978, something like that. And so it’s a book of the ’70s really, a book of the first sequence and not, like the play, the beginning of the new sequence. It does not really have the same political background or the same ideological battle. So, in fact, in order to go from Theory
of the Subject, which is really a revolutionary philosophical book, to the play, we have to go from 1978 to 1984, six years, in other words. But during those six years the situation became very different, there was a very important transformation of the situation: from the “Red Years,” so to speak—the end of the ’60s, May ’68, and so on—to the “Black Years,” something very different. That’s why, to conclude my answer to your question, we have to regard the play as much more like a meditation about the end of the preceding years rather than as something that’s part of the first sequence. And that’s why there’s something creative and affirmative in the play, but why—as you have it here, perhaps—there’s something that’s also melancholic.

  Certainly the play is a search for a new politics, but it’s also the embodiment of the idea that something is finished. The last century, if you like, is finished, really, in the political field, so we need to do something really new, but we don’t know precisely what. And this is exactly what Paula expresses at the end of the play. I can suggest some principles: for example, politics without the obsession of power, political activity that’s not obsessed with power, but Paula doesn’t know what the details of this politics will be. . . . So there’s a combination of radicalism with respect to the question—we must find a new mode of political action—and something like nostalgia, or melancholy, with respect to the end of the previous sequence.

  SS: In 1979 your play The Red Scarf, which also deals with a revolutionary movement, was published. Indeed, some of the issues raised in it, especially the internal struggles of the revolutionaries, seem to prefigure those in The Incident. What is the connection between the two plays? And what, more generally speaking, is the relationship between your theater and your more properly theoretical works?