by Alain Badiou
We can diagram the movement of scenes in the three acts of The Incident at Antioch as follows:
PAUL COHEN: FORCING AND THE GENERIC
Every reader of Badiou’s philosophy knows that his thinking is profoundly based in set theory and other modes of contemporary mathematics. The suggestion that his drama also reflects mathematical ideas may be more surprising, but perhaps is not too outlandish. After all, when Paul Cohen sent his proof of the undecidability of the continuum hypothesis (which Badiou considers an “event”) to Kurt Gödel in 1963, Gödel wrote back that “reading your proof had a similarly pleasant effect on me as seeing a really good play.”4 Although we might speculate whether seeing Badiou’s play might have a pleasant effect similar to that produced by the demonstration of a really good mathematical proof, we can in any case find suggestions in The Incident at Antioch of Badiou’s extension of Cohen’s ideas into the realms of politics and art. Cohen’s work goes back to Georg Cantor’s 1877 “continuum hypothesis,” which argues that the next largest infinity after the “smallest” infinity of whole numbers is the set of all real numbers, the continuum of points on the number line. Because this is the next biggest infinity, Cantor’s hypothesis opened the door to perhaps infinitely more types of larger infinities than had previously been conceivable. In 1938 Kurt Gödel proved that the continuum hypothesis is indeed consistent with the standard Zermelo–Fraenkel axiomatization of Cantorian set theory (abbreviated ZF), a common foundation for modern mathematics; in 1963, however, Paul Cohen produced a model of ZF in which the continuum hypothesis is false. This led Gödel and Cohen to conclude that the continuum hypothesis is “independent” from ZF, part of a small group of statements in set theory that are “undecidable.” The importance of this discovery is matched by the remarkable technique that Cohen developed to produce the new model of ZF, which he called forcing, and which continues to be enormously generative of mathematical innovation. Forcing involves adjoining to a fundamental model of ZF a “generic” set, one that, Cohen writes, “enjoys no ‘specific’ property” of the model it is added to, and that in a sense is hypothetical or “imaginary,” insofar as it is an only partly known infinite set. Whereas the members of a “constructible” set are determined by particular conditions that they all satisfy, a “generic” set is a collection of elements that are not unified by any such condition, but determined merely by its members. By adding even one such unmarked subset to a given model, Cohen writes, “one would have a method to adjoin many and thus create many different models with various properties,” new models that are “weakly forced” (as opposed to the “stronger” and more familiar function of implication), based on the promised future extension of the generic set.5 The supplementation of a given set-theoretical model with such a barely discernible generic set forces the reevaluation of every statement in that model, with indeterminate and infinitely expanding consequences, leading, perhaps, to an entirely new mathematical world.
Badiou writes in the introduction to Being and Event that Cohen’s concepts “resonate well beyond their technical validity, which has confined them up till now to the academic arena of the high specialists of set theory” (16). And this is precisely his project: to extend Cohen’s concepts of forcing and the generic to other realms, including politics and art. Already in Theory of the Subject (based on seminars delivered between 1975 and 1979, and written more or less simultaneously with The Incident at Antioch), Badiou develops the distinction between constructible sets and logical implication, on the one hand, and generic sets and forcing, on the other, into the political question of how “immigrant workers” who “inexist” or are “internally excluded” in the larger political world can come into “existence” or (in his later terminology) appear. Is it a question of extending to undocumented workers the rights of “the documented”—that is, of “constructing” them as proper members of the nation according to well-defined criteria of citizenship? Perhaps this would be a welcome development, but the real political issue here, according to Badiou, goes beyond the project of increasing the number of recognized members of the state: “those who undergo the most important modification are not so much the immigrant workers themselves, even if they snatch up the right to vote, so much as the French: the French workers for whom the subversion of their national identity, provided they are swept up in the process, subjectivizes another vision and another practice of politics” (TS, 265–66). If we think of the immigrant workers as a generic set, not defined by any unifying characteristics, but as an infinite group of heterogeneous singularities, their addition as such a set forces the transformation of the entire nation, which can no longer be defined by the same “axioms” of identity. Such a transformation is not the function of historical necessity or logical implication; Badiou writes, “The ‘no!’ of the revolt is not implied by the local conditions. It is forced by the inexistence of an absolute constraint that would force submission to the immediate condition in a transcendent way” (TS, 273).6 Forcing in this sense involves a subjective attitude, being “swept up in the process” and wagering that the generic set “will have been” completed. This is not exactly “blind faith,” but what Badiou calls “confidence”: a new form of verifiable knowledge with immediate consequences in the world.7 If forcing seems “weak” compared with the “strength” of logical implication, this is precisely its strength: Forcing does not argue, for example, that social contradiction implies the necessity of revolution, but rather that there is nothing that requires the continuing dominance of the local conditions, nothing preventing that generic set from extending into the conditions of a radically new political world.
In his 1997 book on Saint Paul, Badiou suggests a link between Cohen’s concepts and Saint Paul’s messianism. Explaining his affinity for Paul’s thinking, despite his frank disbelief in the content of Paul’s revelation, Badiou writes that Paul’s “fabulous forcing of the real provides us with mediation when it is a question of restoring the universal to its pure secularity, here and now” (Saint Paul, 5, emphasis added). Paul’s discourse is “fabulous” for Badiou, merely a fable, but nevertheless it forces the production of new knowledge about the universal, outside of any religious conviction. Badiou’s characterization of Saint Paul’s project as “forcing the real” links him with the controversial Jewish concept of “hastening” or “forcing” the advent of the messianic era, in effect compelling God to act through human agency. Such “forcing” was a plausible accusation against all Messianists, including the early Christians: Wasn’t the declaration that Jesus was the Messiah precipitous and demonstrably erroneous, since, for one thing, he had lived and died without effecting the radical social and political transformations traditionally associated with the Messiah?8 In Badiou’s reading, Paul’s response is that Jesus will have been the Messiah, through the confidence of those like himself who pursue the “generic” universalism implied by his resurrection. That is, just as Paul Cohen “forces” the future perfect production of myriad new set theoretical worlds by the minor addition of a generic set, so Saint Paul “forces” Jesus to have been the Messiah by the addition of the generic set of “Christians,” a set, we recall, that is not determined by outward markings such as circumcision or uncircumcision. And just as Cohen enables the creation of strong new models for mathematics through the “weak” technique of forcing, so Paul’s “militant discourse of weakness” has had the strength to invent several new worlds (53).9 We recall Walter Benjamin’s discussion of Kafka, for whom, he writes, the Messiah “will not wish to change the world by force but will merely make a slight adjustment in it” (Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 811). This is the messianism not of force but of forcing, in which the “slight adjustment” produced by the addition of the almost nothing of a generic set is enough to change almost everything. And this is the possibility of transformation that Paula will obscurely invoke in The Incident at Antioch.
PAUL CLAUDEL AND THE MATERIALS OF THE INCIDENT AT ANTIOCH
If Paul Cohen seems an u
nlikely resource for drama, Paul Claudel—political and religious conservative, career diplomat, perhaps even apologist for Pétain—might seem to be an unlikely literary ally for Badiou. Although Claudel is less read and performed today than he once was, Badiou is not alone in considering him to be the most important modern French dramatist before the war.10 Claudel’s theater was unlike anything before it in France, and it is still singularly demanding: linguistically dense, nonpsychological, often drenched in Catholicism, and sometimes enormously long, it is a symbolist theater of passionate ideas. In a letter from 1894 to the dramatist Maurice Pottecher, Claudel speculates on the possibility of “a theater of thought,” and this above all is what Badiou finds essential in him: a drama in which ideas are not only represented but also constituted by what happens on stage.11 In The Century, Badiou makes the unexpected comparison of Claudel with Brecht, arguing that for both dramatists “what touches the real is never either knowledgeable wisdom or ordinary morality. What is required instead is a definitive and deracinating encounter, together with an absolute stubbornness in pursuing the consequences of this encounter to the very end” (fn. 15, p. 207). This could just as well describe Badiou’s own dramatic practice, which aims to produce an evental encounter with a “real” exceptional to the horizon of reality, and vigorously pursues its unpredictable consequences, wherever they may lead. What this suggests, moreover, is that for Badiou Claudel is not so much a literary auctoritas, an imitable source of poetic ideas or moral intelligence, as a text to be “encountered.” Hence we find that a remarkable quantity of Claudel’s language passes directly into Badiou’s play, often untouched or only lightly modified. Moreover The Incident at Antioch closely follows much of the plot of La Ville: Both plays begin with an obscure political crisis and a vacuum in leadership, a dire situation without evident solution. Both plays are written in the aftermath of a great French political event that seems to have run its course: for Claudel, the Paris Commune, for Badiou, May ’68. Both plays confront the question of how to recover some part of these events beyond their apparent termination; how, that is, to force the current situation through our confidence that the barely discernible traces of those events do indeed constitute elements of a new and expanding generic set.
Because Claudel’s play is so constitutive of Badiou’s, some familiarity at least with the plot and texture of La Ville will be helpful for reading The Incident. Claudel wrote a first version of La Ville in 1890 (published in 1893), and in 1897, while a diplomat in China, significantly revised it. It is this second version, published in 1901, that is the primary model for The Incident at Antioch. The first act of Claudel’s revised text is set in a garden above the unnamed city, where the world-weary former politician, Lambert de Besme, expects to be called to return to government to lead the city’s recovery from economic collapse and to quell the growing social and political chaos. He is cynical about politics and fatalistic about the city, however, and plans to marry his young ward, the beautiful Lâla (her very name a song of the feminine) and to retire with her in domestic tranquility. With him is the misanthropic Avare, who scoffs at Lambert’s romantic aspirations and the desperate attempts to restore order to the city, and calls instead for its fiery destruction. Lambert’s wealthy brother, Isidore de Besme, the engineer, plutarch, and “Father of the City,” enters along with the alienated and disillusioned poet Cœuvre (usually taken as something of a proxy for Claudel himself). Lâla taunts and flirts with Cœuvre, her onetime teacher, and it becomes clear that she has not yet decided to marry the much older Lambert. When deputies enter and plead with Lambert to accept the offer of leadership, he leaves the decision with Lâla: If she agrees to marry him he will return to politics, even though he has little faith that anything can be done. Lâla, however, throws herself at Cœuvre’s feet and begs him to marry her. Cœuvre seems contemptuous of her self-abasement but claims her as his own, derisively summoning her to follow him as the curtain falls.
Act II takes place in a cemetery overlooking the city, where Lambert digs graves for the victims of Avare’s purge. Lâla has had a son with Cœuvre, but she has left them to reside with Avare, and she now returns to tell Lambert that “inequality among men exists no more” and to urge him to join her and the rebels. Lâla doesn’t seem to be describing a political reality as much as expressing her own inexplicable prophetic ecstasy and a feminine knowledge that remains mysterious to the men. For Avare, however, “equality” means that all men are equally worthless, and to realize this nihilistic vision he relentlessly burns the city and murders its citizens. Most of Act II involves complicated political discussion among Avare and Lâla, more or less on the “left,” and Besme and Cœuvre, apparently defending the state, while Lambert witnesses from a grave. But the rioters are approaching, and the act concludes with the murder of Besme, his head carried by the mob on a pike.
Act III is set fourteen years later, when Avare has fulfilled his political vision of destruction: The city is in ruins, “millions” were killed, and through military force he has established “peace.” He has no further desires but to let “this devastation have authority,” and so he suddenly departs. He passes his command to Ivors, the son of Lâla and Cœuvre, who joined the clergy and has now returned to the city as a Bishop. Cœuvre calls for an end to the “strife and litigation” and tells the people to prepare for peace. At first Ivors is suspicious of his father’s religious turn, seeing little value in his inexplicable vision of “absolute happiness,” and seems more concerned with reconstructing the government. The poet-turned-priest Cœuvre urges him not to stop there, but to look for a deeper satisfaction and a more profound transformation of both the city and its subjects: “Happiness is not some luxurious ornament,” he argues, “it is in us like ourselves, it is blent with the subject of our consciousness” (103). Ivors declares his faith in God, and asks his father for advice in founding a new society. Cœuvre replies in a familiar Platonic metaphor that, although there is no “sovereign recipe” for politics, the “incomprehensible Truth,” like the “sun” from which all things “derive their form and life,” will guide him. The king is “the sacred being, the one among all men” and the “heart” of the body politic; society in turn “absorbs the leader” and then “restores again his image” to him. Suddenly, in the last moments of the play, Lâla returns, her hair gray but her beauty strangely undimmed with time; at first Ivors denounces her as “the Queen of Madness, the mother of the aberrant multitude,” a “witch,” but Lâla pleads that she has been misunderstood: No one knows, she says, “the secret of my joy.” She salutes Ivors as king, the fruit of his father’s poetic religiosity and his mother’s joyful liberation. Like a holy spirit who will dwell among them, Lâla enigmatically proclaims herself “the promise that cannot be kept,” “the sweetness of that which is with the regret of that which is not,” and “truth with the face of error,” even as she leaves to die (114). It is noon, and Ivors announces that he will constitute the city’s new laws.
In the original version of his well-known poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” Auden wrote that “Time … will pardon Paul Claudel”—“pardon” him, presumably, for his politics and possibly for his Catholicism. But even though he is an atheist and considerably to the left of Auden politically, Badiou seems to feel no need to forgive or apologize for Claudel in The Incident at Antioch. For Badiou, Claudel’s personal religious or political “opinions” are irrelevant compared with his conceptual and aesthetic struggles in La Ville: his attempt to invent a new dramaturgical language, a language for the production of new ideas concerning how we shall live. The particular content of those ideas is finally not as important as the confidence in the possibility of the new that they signal. For Badiou, Lâla is the central figure in Claudel’s play, and the role of Paula in The Incident greatly expands her function, especially in the third act, while shifting the inflection of her revelation from religion to politics. For Claudel, Lâla’s return at the end of the play symbolizes the promise of renewed po
litical-theological life, under the auspices of her spiritual joy. There is, however, no indication that Ivors or Cœuvre has been affected by her final ecstatic utterance, or that their plans for the City will be influenced by it. As Ivors tells her, “Woman, your place is not with us”—and this is precisely her point as well: Lâla has no place in the renascent City. She does not represent a particular position among the various voices on stage; she is, in Badiou’s sense, “outside of place,” and her strange appearing and disappearing signals the evental nature of the truth she announces. Lâla is the cause of the desire for change, without specification or limitation. As she says, “he who hears me is cured of repose forever and of the thought that he has found it”: She offers no solutions, only restless confidence in the possibility of transformation. As “the promise that cannot be kept,” she is not a promise that will be broken, but an impossible promise—indeed, the promise of the impossible, the index of a path not limited to the pragmatic questions of “what is possible” that the city’s new leaders will no doubt need to confront. Badiou understands this line, “the promise that cannot be kept,” as Claudel’s definition of woman (The Century, 24). This does not mean, however, that Lâla is a “typical” woman or the type of Woman; rather, we might say that Lâla is “unconstructible,” in Paul Cohen’s sense: Lâla is woman precisely insofar as she is both singular and generic. As she says in her final speech, “I am truth with the face of error and he who loves me is not concerned with dividing the one from the other.” Lâla is indifferent to the oppositions and categories that organize the world of The City as it is; she has no place there, but instead points to another world, as yet obscure, but undetermined by existing political categories. Lâla’s final ecstatic annunciation, before she turns to greet death, concludes with a compelling image: “He who sets himself to follow me will not know how to stop.” Whether the new City will indeed follow her remains uncertain, an open question. There is nothing that implies that it must, but perhaps we will be able to say, through the intervention of The Incident at Antioch, that the knowledge of its possibility will have been forced.
