Reading Alain Badiou’s wonderful play, The Incident at Antioch or L’incident D’antioche, is like stepping into a suspension of thought enzymes. I’m not really sure how that comes off, so I’ll just let you know it’s invigorating. Something I love about reading Badiou is… he’s a contemporary philosopher! You know, that discipline that is riddled with old <dead> men? Well, here is yet another old man we call a philosopher, but look! He’s living! So, we don’t have to dig through obscure cultural space-time events with this guy.
L’incident is the latest installment in the very cool Columbia University Press series INSURECTIONS: CRITICAL STUDIES IN RELIGION, POLITICS, AND CULTURE. The play, a three-act tragedy modeled from Paul Claudel’s play The City, is very innovative in both its language and structure (creation). Badiou uses a technique that is best left in the words of Susan Spitzer <via the translator’s preface> when she says:
Rather than being “based on” Claudel’s play, The Incident could be said to enact a sort of musical “sampling” of one playwright by another. Many of Claudel’s lines are lifted intact, or only minimally changed, and set down in The Incident where they function as often as not to invert Claudel’s conservative, religious message. In standing Claudel on his head, so to speak, Badiou freely appropriates the earlier playwright’s lyricism for his own purposes.
I like this “sampling” terminology. It is very modern in the sense of a lot of our music <#glitch #dubstep #electro #beats #KatyPerry #etc.> and it also brings to mind Jonathan Safran Foers’s Tree of Codes, but a great deal less stilted craft-art and a lot easier to physically manipulate. But, know that this is no foreign construction either, as it is in the same vein as many of the ancient playwrights, who would take a piece and rework it in the same way Badiou does here.
It is not only Paul Claudel that Badiou borrows from but another Paul, viz. Saint Paul. The title of this play recalls the incident at Antioch where Paul and Peter clash over the status of the law. The main character in L’incident is a feminized Paul <Paula> who takes on the role of political revolutionary. Paula fittingly has a Pauline conversion experience from {revolutionary} to {one whom seeks to not take hold of power once they are in position to do so}. This is dubbed on the back cover of the book as a “transition from classical Marxism to a ‘politics of subtraction’ far removed from party and state.”
Here is the play in superflash:
This play is political. The dialogue is wholly concerned with politics and the characters are political figures. Two brothers Jean and Pierre Maury represent right and left-wing politicians, respectively. Cephas (Peter) is a classical Marxist revolutionary who overthrows the government with the help of the working class. Claude Villembray, Paula’s brother, is the only “hope” for the current system to sustain itself, though he refuses and falls into a nihilistic spiral until he is murdered by the revolutionaries as a symbol of the overthrown state. Cephas, after attaining his violent ruin of the city, realizes he no longer has purpose and abdicates his leadership over to David, the son of Paula and Mokhtar (an Arab factory worker). It is in the final act that Paula the converted is able to “convert” her son David into this politics of withdrawal. There are a few other characters that I did not mention though they are important.
The plotline is less the point than normal with this play. What I mean is the plot, which in most things, is like a sexy sports car, carrying us along with its fancy story and its sex factor, or maybe an economy class something or other, but with this story, though the story is good, the plotline acts more like a utility vehicle, something that is solid and will get us to our destination, it won’t break down on us mid trip, but it wont be so flashy as an Acura TL or, whatever. So, with this utility vehicle, we get lots of scenery, and plenty of time to look at it. The meat of this play is its political dialogue, which I’m not going to delve into here; you will just have to read it yourself (so worth it).
Jumping to the end of L’incident, we are left with Badiou’s answer, which is to take this ‘politics of subtraction,’ but we are left questioning: how do we realize this? In this sense, Badiou has no answer, but only some vague direction and his ‘politics of subtraction’ becomes more of a ‘politics of abstraction.’ The play, at this point, may look to you like a truncated cone – it will never reach its point. But Badiou has some really great ideas. This play is not made to give us a clear answer on how to get where he is thinking, but asks us to come together and answer this as a people and not a person.
One thing I cannot get behind Badiou on is a violent revolution. If anything in the future is to work, any new politics, it must be based on pacifist principles. Revolution is great, but it must be nonviolent. If we do not come to see this, then, well, we will kill this world with smart-bombs. The technology of warfare is getting so efficient at killing, that (everyone, think ender’s game here) your children playing video games, those kids are going to be the most valuable recruits for the next forever. Killing is no longer an intimate thing – killing has become so abstracted from reality that a child in the military can guide a missile with a joystick and melt millions of living, breathing, children, women, men, good and bad, without ever having to face it. We have dehumanized the enemy, and if we stand here without doing anything about it, Hitler will have been just the tip of the iceberg.
L’incident D’antioche may not be where you stand politically, morally, or anywhere, but it will make you face those things, which is so necessary right now.
L’incident D’antioche is Badiou’s first literary work translated into English. Exciting times, y’all.
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