by Alain Badiou
2. As an experimental activity, a theatrical performance is not intended to produce knowledge (or for that matter catharsis), but aims primarily at truth. For Badiou “truths” are not especially certain types of “knowledge,” statements that correspond to something in the external world or are coherent within a given system of statements, but the emergence of something new in a world or discourse through subtraction or decompletion, and the procedures for evaluation and expansion developed around the void suddenly laid bare. Badiou calls such a punctual and vanishing hole or excess in knowledge an event, and the four types of truth procedures Badiou describes (art, politics, science, and love) are new ways of linking and grouping the previously unrecognizable and unaccountable elements that have become perceptible in the wake of an event. In the world of tragic theater a key example of such an event goes under the name of “Aeschylus”; but every theatrical performance is potentially a small-scale event, as well as a truth procedure that explores its consequences. Theatrical truths are not everyday occurrences of going to see a play; we probably experience much less Theater than what Badiou refers to (using scare quotes) as “theater,” mere entertainment that offers not truth but only “opinions.” Theater, however, is the condition of possibility for a kind of truth to which we would otherwise have no access. Philosophy, for its part, does not produce truth at all; it is in no position either to judge art (the project of aesthetics or art history) or to theorize politics (the claim of political theory), but depends on the truths produced by each for its work.
3. Theater, as we suggested earlier, occurs as the exceptional intimacy of the distinct truth procedures of art and politics. Badiou argues, “of all the arts, theatre is the one that most insistently stands next to (or supposes) politics” (“Rhapsody,” 200). Theater can only break from the endless repetition of “theater” insofar as it appears in a world in which both artistic and political truth procedures are vigorously pursued. Theater is the space in which art and politics come into contact, without either politicizing art or aestheticizing politics. Theater is art and politics in solidarity with each other—art offering its experimental resources for political thinking, and politics lending art the possibility of collectivization—but each retaining its own distinctive methods, materials, and kinds of truths. Such a close relationship between fundamentally different truth procedures is possible because of what Badiou calls the “theater-politics isomorphism”: the three conditions essential to theater (audience, actors, textual or traditional referent) correspond to the three factors whose knot is the political (masses, multiple subject-effects or positions, a thought or conceptual referent). And just as true Theater is “rare,” so too politics for Badiou is not the daily business of state administration, but its occasional interruption. Moreover, theater is intrinsically “an affair of the State,” according to Badiou; unlike film, which can unspool just as well in an empty auditorium as in a full one, theater necessarily occurs in a public place before a group of spectators and in the shadow of an existing state: “theatre alone is tied to the State, cinema belongs only to Capital” (“Rhapsody,” 188). And just as the state keeps a watchful eye on political activities that might disturb its administrative work, so it is also concerned with the ideological threat posed by theater, at times censoring or even closing it down entirely. In turn, theater observes the state with suspicion and tries to insert some moral distance into this uncomfortable proximity. And the fates of politics and theater are bound up with each other; when politics becomes entombed in the state, theater becomes “indecisive” and weak: “Theater,” Badiou writes, “is sick of parliaments and cared for by unions of all kinds as one is cared for onstage by Molière’s doctors” (“Rhapsody,” 195). Theater is imperiled not only by state censure, but also by state support, which may turn it, we might say, into an “imaginary invalid,” rendered impotent by the subsidies that prop it up. This isomorphism of theater and politics does not, however, imply reciprocity: If theater approaches the condition of politics in its relationship to the state, politics is not essentially theatrical (although it may of course involve demonstrations and other theatrical techniques). Theater is not political when it discusses political ideas, or even when it has social or political repercussions (as it occasionally does), but in its production of its audience as a new collective subjectivity—even if only in the person of a single spectator.
4. Theater’s truth procedures are always addressed to the present, to “our situation in history,” and as such they produce a new type of temporality. In “Théâtre et philosophie,” Badiou elaborates on the particular historical present of theater: “Theater indicates where we are in historical time, but it does it with a kind of readable amplification that is proper to it. It clarifies our situation” (13). Whenever a play was written or in whatever period it may be set, theater reflects and inflects the historical moment of its performance. Its proximity to the State gives it special access to the language and structure of the current situation, which it makes readable in order to criticize (or in the case of “theater,” merely reproduce), but insofar as theater is a truth procedure it also modifies its moment by supplementing the available experiences of time. Like politics, theater has a double temporal structure, involving both the long work of preparation that is broken by a singular performative act and the retroactive assertion of a relationship between this act and a previous Event whose truth it expands. Theater, Badiou writes, proposes an “artificial temporality” that arises from the encounter between the “eternity” of a dramatic text, character, or idea and the “instants” of each embodied performance (“Théâtre et philosophie,” 12–13). This is not the temporality of belatedness in which modern performances struggle against and thereby reassert the eternal authority of a past text, but the production of an experience of eternity in the present moment as an anticipation of its potentially infinite future expansion. Theater-truth involves a temporality “out of joint” with chronological history, like the messianic materialism described by Walter Benjamin, in which the string of present moments, “like the beads of a rosary,” are shattered by the irruption of eternal “splinters of Messianic time,” producing a revolutionary Jetztzeit or “now-time” redeemed from the constraints of historicism (397). This is a structure of both retroaction and anticipation, insofar as the theatrical performance not only contributes to and reconfigures a pre-existing idea, but also, in Paul Cohen’s term, forces the future extensions of its truth to exist in the present moment. Finally, the question of such intervention is linked to Saint Paul’s messianism in The Incident at Antioch: What can be done to bring about authentic change? If an “event” cannot be scripted or directed but must be awaited and responded to in its evanescence, what active strategies of transformation are available to the subject of politics or theater?
As we read The Incident at Antioch, it will be helpful to keep in mind these four aspects of Badiou’s definition of theater, which we might reassemble as follows: Theater is an experimental procedure for the production of an infinite and eternal truth in the present at the cusp of art and politics by finite, transient means. We must not forget, however, that the text of the play by itself is only one of the several elements that contribute to a theatrical truth. Although Antoine Vitez’s originary solo performance of the play actualized the possibility of The Incident at Antioch as a dramatic truth procedure, future performances will be the condition of its continuing expansion.1 Nevertheless, Badiou’s play as a text brings resources to the table of political and experimental theater, suggests strategies for performative realization, and deploys techniques in its orientation towards its sources, which we will now consider in more detail. My hope here is to provide background on these sources that may be helpful in reading Badiou’s admittedly difficult play, and some ideas about ways to understand the relationships the play proposes among these three Pauls.
SAINT PAUL AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE INCIDENT AT ANTIOCH
The three acts of The Incident at Antioc
h are named after three ancient cities—Damascus, Antioch, and Nicea—associated with events in early Christianity of major significance for the play, as well as frequent points of reference elsewhere in Badiou’s work. Each act, moreover, is divided into a sequence of scenes that reflects the logic of the Christian episode it is named for as a movement through one or more of five allegorical places, or lieux: “The Official Place of Politics” (a big empty room), “The Place of the War Reserves” (a military port), “The Place of Truths” (the gates of a factory), “The Place of Choices” (a country road), and “The Place of Foundations” (a city in ruins). Act I, “The Road to Damascus,” refers to the legendary conversion event reported in the Book of Acts where the Pharisee Saul, previously a zealous persecutor of the heretical cult of Jesus, encounters the risen Christ on the road from Jerusalem to Damascus sometime around 35 CE. Falling from his horse, he is temporarily blinded by the vision, but arises with eyes opened as “Paul”: ex post facto Apostle of Christ to the gentile nations. For Badiou, the “road to Damascus” emblematizes the kind of evental break that is the condition for the emergence of a new subject; in his 1975 Théorie de la contradiction, he writes, “I admit, without any hesitation, that May ’68 for me was … a veritable road to Damascus” (9). Paul’s “conversion” on the road to Damascus is not for Badiou a “turning around” from some false idea or “turning toward” a new doctrine, but a “thunderbolt, a caesura” that shatters his very being and subjectivizes him as part of the collective known as the Body of Christ.2 The experience will lead to new ideas, but in itself it involves no concepts, and requires nothing more than the faithful investigation and expansion of the event’s consequences. Paul’s model for this subjective reorientation is the faith of Abraham, and the Road to Damascus extends the unidirectional vector of Abraham’s path out of Haran, when he heeds God’s call to “go out from yourself” (lekh lekha) and unhesitatingly leaves his family, land, and his very self. This trajectory of departure or moving “out” seems reflected in the procession of scenes in Act I from one allegorical “place” to the next, without return: beginning in the Official Place of Politics, it moves to the Place of the War Reserves, from there to the Place of Truths, and ends in the Place of Choices—stopping short of the Place of Foundations, where the play will conclude. This sequence of scenes in Act I establishes a linear order in its continuous movement from one new Place to the next, a simple trajectory of Change that Acts II and III will complicate and modify.
Act II is “The Incident at Antioch” proper, named after the dispute between Paul and Peter in about 50 CE over the status of Jewish law in the Messianic era—an episode whose importance, Badiou writes in his book on Saint Paul, “it is impossible to overestimate” (26). The controversy arises at the famous Jerusalem Conference where Paul receives his mission to the gentiles and comes to a head when Peter later visits Paul’s congregation in Antioch. The Christians centered in Jerusalem under the leadership of Peter (“Cephas,” in Hellenized Aramaic) and Jesus’s brother James insisted that Jewish Christians must continue to follow Jewish ritual law, including circumcision and the dietary rules of kashrut, and that gentiles too must become practicing Jews as part of their conversion to the messianic sect. For Paul such observation of the law fails to grasp the essential implication of faith in Jesus, because—at least according to one tradition of Jewish messianic speculation—all previous ritual law will be suspended when the Messiah comes. According to Paul’s account of the “incident” in Galatians, when Peter first visited the Pauline church in Antioch, he ate freely with non-Jewish Christians, unconcerned about the laws of kashrut; but with the arrival of members of the Jerusalem church, Peter again observes the dietary regulations, and many members of the Antioch congregation follow his example, infuriating Paul, and opening a deep schism within emergent Christianity about the law. Paul argues not only that Peter’s action is hypocritical, but more significantly that it denies the absolute sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice by implying that obedience to the law is still an effective means of “justification”: Fidelity and lawfulness, Paul insists, are mutually exclusive relationships to the world historical transformations inaugurated by the Messiah’s advent. In his book on Saint Paul, Badiou argues that Paul’s position is not on behalf of Faith contra Law, but cuts a path diagonal to that opposition: “It is not that communitarian marking (circumcision, rites, the meticulous observance of the Law) is indefensible or erroneous. It is that the postevental imperative of truth renders the latter indifferent (which is worse). It has no signification, whether positive or negative” (23). For Paul, the “indifference” of the law means that one may indeed observe the law but only, as he writes in 1 Corinthians 7, hōs mē, “as if not,” as if it were without force, not truly binding. The reciprocal implication would be that one may decline to practice the law, but only if nonobservance is not seen as an antinomian act of liberation, which would grant the law negative efficacy.
In The Incident at Antioch, this idea will be transferred to the controversy between proponents of revolutionary destruction and reformist reconstruction, and will allow Badiou’s heroine Paula to articulate a new proposition incommensurate with conventional political discourses. The movement among scenic places in Act II describes a kind of static oscillation among opposed positions or irreconcilable interpretations of the events in Act I, like the conflict between Peter and Paul at Antioch. Skipping the Official Place of Politics, it begins in the militant Place of the War Reserves and moves in Scene 2 one step forward (according to the sequence established in Act I) to the Place of Truths, only to return in Scene 3 to the Place of the War Reserves; Scene 4 sets out again, this time short-circuiting the Place of Truths and leaping directly to the Place of Choices, before again returning in Scene 5 to the initial Place of the War Reserves. Each movement out and back proceeds either to “truths” or “choices,” but neither passes through both, and each ends where it begins, in the Place of the War Reserves. These paths, however, do not describe the conflict of simple positions, one of which is more correct than the other, but the poles of a situation in relation to which a new path, diagonal to that opposition, is proposed.
Act III is titled “The Council of Nicea,” after what we might call the “first international” of the Christian church convened by the Emperor Constantine in 325 CE, where fundamental doctrine was debated, including the vexed question of the substance of Christ’s divinity, and the principles of a universal, or “catholic,” Christian church were declared. The results of the Nicene Council and the Empire established by Constantine’s merger of Rome and Christianity might seem to be the institutional closure of the radical subjective sequence opened by Saint Paul. For Badiou, however, the First Council of Nicea represents a radical new mode of dialectical thinking, one continued in the work of Hegel, Marx, and Mao, and still with resources to offer. In Theory of the Subject Badiou discusses the Nicene Council as exemplary of the dialectics of “one divides into two.” The debate at Nicea that produces Trinitarian theology involves the conflict between two positions that are both finally declared heretical: the “deviations to the right and left” of Arianism, which argues that Christ is God’s finite creation, nondivine, fully human; and Docetism, which claims that the Son is absolutely divine, infinite, merely an extension or expression of God the Father. Badiou reformulates the results of the Nicene debate as the Hegelian dialectics of “force” and “place” (terms that anticipate his later concepts of “event” and “situation”): One God divides into two as the “force” of God is “placed” in historical time and space as Christ. The Nicene creed, Badiou argues, does not declare the mystical synthesis of Father and Son via the mediation of the Holy Spirit, but a rational dialectics of self-division, a spiraling “torsion” and periodizing “scission” from which novelty emerges, as “the pure passage from one sequence to the other” (19).
In Act III of The Incident at Antioch, set entirely in the Place of Foundations, the passage into a radically new s
equence abandons spatial movement entirely. Instead its scenes are divided into a series of hours of the day, advancing from “dusk” in Scene 1 to “the middle of the night” in Scene 2, to “around 4 AM” in Scene 3, to a gray “dawn” in Scene 4, “10 AM” in Scene 5, and concluding at the philosophical hour of “noon” in Scene 6—the moment in Claudel’s play Partage de midi (Break of Noon), Badiou argues, of “the highest decision … the real event.”3 This cycle of hours, however, is not the abandonment of spatiality for a more fundamental or authentic experience of temporality—there is no mention of time or its passing in the act—but involves a kind of fold or twist of space and time, in which movement is no longer measurable in terms of either. We recall Parsifal’s comment when he arrives at the Temple of the Grail: “I scarcely tread, yet seem already to have come far,” to which Gurnemanz replies: “time here becomes space.” Similarly, in Badiou’s play traversing Nicea seems to require a new type of movement, unlike those in Antioch or along the road to Damascus. Here what appears to be a revolutionary putsch may be no more than treading water, and refusing state power may be a kind of act with unexpected force. Hence the Nicene Place of Foundations in Act III is not the resolution of the dialectics of Damascus and Antioch, but the “place outside of place,” the “outplace” (horlieu), in Badiou’s coinage in Theory of the Subject, from which a new political subject and sequence may commence. Nicea is the “foundation” for the possible emergence of an “impossible” political thinking, like a fragile flower, easily crushed and its longevity uncertain—nevertheless for the moment it is eternal, universal, and true.
