The Incident at Antioch

by Alain Badiou

AB: The Red Scarf was finished for all intents and purposes in 1975. It’s a play of the ’70s, so the answer’s the same. The Incident is a play of the ’80s and the earlier play is a play of the ’70s. The Red Scarf is much more affirmative, much more in terms of classical Marxism; it’s much more of a revolutionary play in an epic sense. The plays have two points in common, the main difference between them being a political one. The Red Scarf is really a play of the history, the narrative of a victorious revolution. It was possible to think of the victorious revolution at the beginning of the ’70s, but it was absolutely impossible to think of something like that in the middle of the ’80s. So it’s really a transformation.

  But the two points the plays have in common are as follows. First of all, like The Incident, The Red Scarf is also based on a play by Claudel (The Satin Slipper). Secondly, the subject of the play is the relationship between personal subjectivity and a revolutionary movement. There are big differences between the two plays as regards the presentation of revolutionary movement, but in any case the problem in both plays is: What exactly is the construction of subjectivity in a political context? What is, so to speak, something like the new political subject? In the earlier play, the new political subject is very close to the classical revolutionary subject, with organization, heroism, sacrifice, and so on, while in the later play this form of subjectivity is problematic. So, first, we have different possibilities and something like a question: The new political subject is unclear. In The Red Scarf there are also many discussions among the revolutionaries, and so on, but there is ultimately something like a political line. We can describe the later play as a play in which the question of the true line, the correct line, becomes obscure. Probably all of this can be summed up by saying that in the earlier play, The Red Scarf, the central problem is the revolutionary organization, the Party in its classical sense, in its Leninist sense, the Party, which is, if you like, the Church of the revolution, the established Church of the revolution. In the later play, naturally, the question is also the question of the Church but in a negative sense. So we go from the foundation of the Church as the representation of the working class, of the revolutionary movement, and so on, to the question of the Church as maybe not only a new means for revolution but a new obstacle, a new difficulty.

  For the last part of your question, the relationship between my theater and all my philosophical activity, a couple of short answers. First, when I was a very young man I was a Sartrean philosopher. Jean-Paul Sartre was really my master. As you know, Sartre wrote many plays, so maybe it’s really only a question of my imitation of the master. Sartre wrote a few novels, and so did I; Sartre was a politically engaged philosopher, and so am I; and so on. The difference lies in our philosophical concepts, which are very, very different. So everything is different between us but not the forms, the image of what a true philosopher is. This is in the tradition of our eighteenth century in France. Throughout the entire eighteenth century in France we called some writers, like Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, et al., “philosophers.” In fact, many writers were philosophers but they were more fundamentally writers; they wrote novels, plays, and so on, exactly like Sartre. So I can say something like: Sartre and I are the last two eighteenth-century philosophers!

  SS: The Incident at Antioch is based on Claudel’s play The City. Your decision to stay very close to this play, even to the point of including quite a number of lines written by Claudel in what we might today call a kind of musical sampling, leads me to ask about the deep connection between the two works and what made you decide to write a play unabashedly based on another. And now we know that The Red Scarf was also based on Claudel’s writings.

  AB: It’s really a problem because Claudel was a really reactionary writer. So it’s another form of imitation, the imitation of someone who was very different from me. He was a Catholic, he was a reactionary, he was also a very “official” man, in the Académie, in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and so on, something completely different from me. Maybe there are three answers to your question. First, a tradition: We know that in our classical French theater—Racine, Corneille, Molière, and so on—there have always been imitations of plays of the past, usually Greek or Latin plays, but there are sometimes imitations that are very precise, imitations that go into the details, so to speak. My attempt is to do the same thing today; that is, to take a play that already exists and to write something based on that play but to take it in another direction. I did that first with Claudel twice, with The Red Scarf and The Incident, but I also did it with one of Molière’s plays, Les Fourberies de Scapin, which is a comedy, and therefore very different, in the style of the two Maurys in The Incident. It’s something like a classical gesture: OK, there are many excellent plays, classical plays, so I can write the same play but do so in another direction.

  The second reason is that, specifically in Claudel, we have the question of the relationship between subjective determination and something like a general movement or a general ideological framework. This is at the very heart of Claudel’s plays. Naturally, for Claudel, it’s the question of religious faith, not at all the question of political adventure. But perhaps in French theater, not classical French theater, Claudel was the most important writer, I think, who organized plays around this question: the becoming of subjectivity across ideological and religious questions. So it’s still the question of how we can do something that’s greater than ourselves, that’s more important than what we can ordinarily do. This is closely related to my theory of the subject because what I name as subject is not the individual but what the individual is capable of, hence the new possibility that can open the individual up to a new subjectivity. So this problem of the creation of the new form of the subject is naturally Claudel’s question, in a religious framework: how can we become a new religious man or woman? That’s Claudel’s question. And it’s very important that, in Claudel, we find the idea that it’s really a movement, it’s not something natural, it’s not something that’s a necessity, it’s really a struggle, a struggle to accept the new possibility. Opposed to the acceptance of the new possibility there’s the whole conservative dimension of the individual. The individual is also like an animal; he or she wants to go on with his or her usual life.

  For Claudel the question is about accepting grace, actually, because grace is a proposition, it’s not a determination, in Claudel’s Catholic vision, which is not a Calvinist one. The vision of Claudel’s grace is a pure proposition. We have to do something with this proposition. We can refuse the proposition, we can continue in the same way as before. And in my vision, too, for the political subject, for example, but similarly for the subject of love, or the artist, there’s something like a proposition. There’s an event, an encounter, something that’s outside the individual and that’s like a proposition. And we can accept the proposition, or we can refuse the proposition; we can be faithful to the proposition of the event, or we can on the contrary continue in the same way. This is the problem of all Claudel’s plays, including the problem of accepting love, for example, and it’s my problem as well. And that’s why I chose to rewrite Claudel’s plays, in a revolutionary, not a Catholic, framework but one with the same problematic vision of what a subject is.

  The third and final answer has to do with the question of how it’s possible to write about problems like this, which are in some sense abstract or theoretical, how it’s possible to write something that’s really a play, that’s really a piece of writing, not a proof, not an abstract text. In Claudel there can be found some poetical means concerning this very difficult question, how we can write something about the destiny of individuals, the becoming-subject of individuals in a new framework, without being completely abstract. So the answer is of a poetical nature, not a theoretical one. And in Claudel we have a new language, truly a new language in French, a language with new images and with an immanent relationship between abstraction and images, something like a new metaphorical way to examine the most important
problem of human life. So, first of all, there’s tradition, my Classical nature, if you like—I am not a moderne. Second of all, a shared question, the same question, in a sense. And third of all, a poetic aspect, a new relationship between poetic language and abstraction.

  WARD BLANTON: I want to pick up on this question of transforming Claudel, on the one hand, and also this issue of the Party and the connection to questions of the Church. I’m interested in the way also in which you radically subvert Claudel, in a certain sense. For example, as sites from which to think, or as theater aesthetics, I can hardly imagine a sharper contrast between your Paula, who, among other things, is a figure of ungrounded split subjectivity, a political herald of the renunciation of power, and the triumphalist Christianity of the church bishop in the third act of Claudel’s play The City. And, for those who haven’t read it, in the end, in the third act, the young Claudel allows, as one character says, “the truth and reality of that which is, to replace the place of dreams,” with ecclesiastical reality essentially replacing the city of dreaming, misguided revolutionaries in the ruined city. So in all of this, Claudel’s final act is almost the antithesis of the call of Paula at the end of The Incident at Antioch, and how should we understand this? For example, have you confronted Claudel’s triumphalist Christendom with a kind of hyper-Protestant, or perhaps even atheistic, Paula?

  AB: It’s a difficult question, but I’ll try and answer. You know my play is very close to Claudel in its construction, in its generality, but its true origin is not in fact Claudel. Its true origin is much more Paul, the Apostle Paul. The play is something like a new dialectics between the Catholic interpretation of Paul and Paul himself, between a Catholic interpretation of Paul along the lines of the construction of the Church (because Paul is often said to be the first clear proposition of the construction of the Church) and another possible interpretation of Paul, which is not at all Paul as the foundation of the Church but Paul as the foundation of a new conception of universality, of universalism, and the Church is only something like a technical restriction, a technical organization of this new possibility concerning universalism. So in Claudel’s play we have something like the old Paul—that is, as you say, the victory of the Church, because at the end of the play there’s the priest who comes and says “the Truth.” There’s a conflict between that sort of image of Paul and another image, which is that of Paula—not Paul but Paula—who is completely different from that.

  Finally, the play is the presentation of a fundamental conflict, which is not at all the same as in Claudel, because in Claudel the most important conflict is between nihilism and the Church. Ultimately, if we are not organized in the Church (or maybe in the Party as well), we are reduced to pure individualism, and individualism is ultimately always of a nihilist nature: that’s the Claudelian affirmation. The individual alone is not able to be free, to be a real human being, so salvation can only be through the Church. That’s what’s said at the end of The City. My idea was completely different and maybe even the opposite of that, because at the end of The Incident, Paula says that it’s impossible to reduce emancipation, or revolutionary vision, to something like a Church or a Party or a State. It’s always through the fundamental critiques of any stable institution that the possibility of the novelty of thinking, of existence, and so on is created. And so Claudel’s play is a play that says we must exist in the Church to be saved, while my play says we are saved, or we are free, only when we go beyond that sort of closure, beyond the Church, therefore, but also beyond revolutionary organization.

  And so the difficulty is not the same in Claudel and in my play. For Claudel, the difficulty has to do with how we can go to the Church, why the Church is really the organization of man’s salvation, while for me the difficulty has to do with how we can go beyond that sort of institution. In Claudel’s case, the difficulty is how to go from disorder to order—that’s the movement of his play—from a terrible disorder, violence, and nihilism, to a new order, which is in fact the old order of the Church. And in my plays, the movement is how to go from order to disorder, how to find a new disorder, if you like. Because it’s always when the most important question is a question of an order, of the State, of an institution, that we have violence. So it can also be said that the question of violence is a subject for Claudel and for me as well. For Claudel, violence is a result of disorder, while I propose to say that, finally, violence is the result of order, not disorder. But the play organizes an understanding of the difficulties of this movement. In Claudel we have the difficulty of the movement from disorder to order, and in my play the difficulty is that of the movement from order to disorder. So it can be said that my play is the New Testament, Paul revisited in Claudelian form, because the apostle is not in Claudel’s play at all. And maybe, as you suggest, my play is a Protestant play in a Catholic form.

  SS: To return to your Saint Paul book, in the introduction you had this to say about Paula, the heroine in The Incident: “The change of sex probably prevented too explicit an identification.”3 Why did you make a woman the protagonist? And can you elaborate a bit on what you meant about needing to prevent too explicit an identification with Paul?

  AB: To go from Claudel’s Paul to my Paul, it’s simpler to go from Paul to Paula, because it was absolutely impossible for Claudel that the apostle could be a woman. So that’s a clear difference. In fact, the change of sex, from Paul to Paula, is a metaphorical gesture, a poetical gesture, because the old vision of the difference between the sexes casts religious or philosophical theory and political action in masculine terms, always, whereas my gesture, Paula, not Paul, signifies that this vision—in which we have, on the masculine side, globally, not only philosophy, not only religious direction, but political action and political forms of power as well—I think that vision is a thing of the past. There have been struggles, and we have to continue, but this is fundamentally a thing of the past. And so the problem is much more: Isn’t the feminine an essential part of a new politics today if a new politics is not based on power? If we have the idea of a new politics that’s not based on power but that finds a new way of action to seize power at any price, I suppose that, in that case, women are of a new importance. For the time being, I have no real proof of this point, because we’ve seen many women who have a great taste for power, so I have no proof, but it’s something like an intuition, which is naturally related to the great feminist movements of the past decades.

  And I think that Paula, too, has no proof of this point. She says only that she is Paula, so she says that we have to find something in the political field that’s not absolutely organized around power. She doesn’t say that it’s a question involving women, but my intuition is that it is, that there’s a new relationship between sexual difference and the political field, not when the political field is organized around power but when we have something beyond the question of power—related to the question of power, perhaps, but finally beyond the question of power. And that was after all the vision of Marx himself, of Communism, which is the vision of the end of the State; with communism we have no State at all in the end. But if we have that sort of political vision, certainly the subject of politics is not the State; it is not, precisely, a subject for power. So the political subject, if you like, is not a politician if we define a politician, which is possible, as somebody who wants a share of power. That’s the simplest definition of the politician. So the political subject is not a politician. If his own subjectivity is not organized by the question of power, that’s a big change, which can sometimes be tested out as a change in the political process, and this change is perhaps related to the question of the difference between the sexes. That’s my hypothesis—without any proof.

  WB: I want to put a question now of Paul as a figure of critique of a particular sort of religion, to think of Paul also in your work as a form of critique of religion wholesale. I’ll start by flagging up one of your great philosophical interlocutors and say that, since Hegel, of course, but als
o closer to our own time, with theologians like Mark C. Taylor or philosophers like Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida, and others, some aspect of early Christianity has been taken up as an indication of religion’s negation, religion’s destruction or its overcoming, and of course the classic example is the early theological writings of Hegel, where God dies in early Christianity and is reborn rather as community spirit. Paul has been in this tradition, ironically but nevertheless a profound source of critique against religious establishments and their traditions. In your own book about Paul, you urge audiences not to allow Paul to be subsumed within an economy of thought that is religious or theological. A politically useful Paulinism, it would seem, needs to remain atheistic in a fairly precise sense. Can you say what it is about the religious or theological appropriation of Paul that one must reject? And what is it that we must save Paul from in order to preserve this name as a bearer of a significant political legacy?

  AB: I don’t write, I don’t say exactly that to have a positive view of Paul, to interpret Paul in another manner, we must suppress all religious aspects of Paul. That’s not exactly my thinking. That’s clearly impossible because, for Paul, the original event, the birth of the truth, is of a religious nature, of a supernatural nature, because that event is the resurrection of Christ. So I have to assume, I must assume that in Paul the beginning of the whole process is directly of a religious nature, not reducible to any human activity. What I say is that we can find in Paul a very complete theory of the construction of a new truth. Why the theory of the construction of a new truth? The beginning of a truth is not a structure or a fact but an event. So it’s something that’s not predictable, something that can’t be calculated, something that’s not reducible to necessity. At the beginning of all new creation we have something like that, which I name an event. After that, we have a subjective process, the process of creation, of construction, which is defined by faithfulness to the event itself. Or, if you like, the subjective construction involves organizing the consequences of the event in the world, the ordinary world. The event is like a rupture and afterwards we have to organize the consequences of that rupture, and that is the subjective process of the creation of a new truth. And, finally, the result is a new form of universality.