Alain Badiou - Rhapsody for the Theatre

This English-language edition published by Verso 2013
Translation Bruno Bosteels 2013
first published as Rhapsodie pour le thtre:
Court trait philosophique
LImprimerie Nationale 1990
first published as Thtre et philosophie
Noria 1998
first published as Destin politique du thtre, hier, maintenant, the preface to Au temps de lanarchie, un thtre de combat, 18801914, Jonny Ebstein, Philippe Ivernel, Monique
Surel-Tupin, and Sylvie Thomas, eds
Sguier-Archimbaud 2001
first published as Notes sur Les Squestrs dAltona in Revue internationale de philosophie 2005
first published as the preface to Alain Badious
La Ttralogie dAhmed
Actes Sud 2009
Introduction Bruno Bosteels 2013
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The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

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v3.1

INTRODUCTION

This volume, following closely on the heels of The Adventure of French Philosophy, gathers most of Alain Badious writings on theatre, including in the last two texts reflections on his own art as a playwright and its relation to his work as a philosopher. The core of the volume is made up of the translation of Rhapsodie pour le thtre: Court trait philosophique (Rhapsody for the Theatre: A Short Philosophical Treatise), much of which was first published in French between 1986 and 1989 as a series of short interventions in the journal LArt du Thtre, linked to the project of the important theatre director and Badious long-time collaborator, Antoine Vitez; and then, in 1990, in the form of a book.

one of the most intriguing aspects of this treatise is the way in which it too already moves between philosophy and theatre to the point of opening up a space of indiscernibility between the two.

With the intermittent and hilarious dialogue between the Empiricist and Me in Rhapsody for the Theatre, for instance, we seem to be on the verge of becoming privy to the rehearsals for an actual theatre event, whose essence it is the treatises aim to define and defend against its rivaling forms, if not its simulacra, that would be theatre, cinema, and the religious mass. It is almost as though, by some strange inner force, the philosophical reflection on theatre in turn develops its own theatrical potential and, in a process of tempting fits and starts, is about to become a play in its own right. No great leap of the imagination or change in style would be required, for example, to allow portions of Rhapsody for the Theatre to pass over into something along the lines of Les Citrouilles, a rewriting of Aristophanes comedy The Frogs and the last of the Ahmed plays in which Badiou has his main character descend into Theatre Hell and argue it out with an unforgiving Chorus over who is the greater playwright of the twentieth century, Bertold Brecht or Paul Claudel, in terms of what each of them might contribute to an overcoming of the crisis of theatre today.

Much of Badious conceptual proposition in Rhapsody for the Theatre centres on a bold analogy between theatre and politics. In fact, after having started his career as a most promising novelist, author of the

Badiou specifically sees the connection to politics as being mediated in turn through the privileged relation of theatre to the State. In his major philosophical book, Being and Event, Badiou defines the latter by playing on both the strictly political meaning of the term (the State) and its everyday usage (a state of affairs). What enables this play is a common representational operation, that is, ways of re-presenting or counting a second time that which already is taken to define what counts in the original situation or presentation of things. On this point, concrete analysis converges with the philosophical theme: all situations are structured twice. This also means: there is always both presentation and representation, postulates Badiou. I will hereinafter term state of the situation that by means of which the structure of a situation of any structured presentation whatsoever is counted as one, which is to say the one of the one-effect itself.political significance, according to an argument that Badiou develops throughout Rhapsody for the Theatre, consists in adding a further twist to this dialectic of presentation and representation, of situation and state of the situation. Thus, whereas for Badiou at least after his Maoist years all emancipatory politics already places the State at a distance by rendering visible and putting some measure on its intrinsically excessive force, theatre introduces an additional figurative distance into this operation by way of a passage through the fiction of a past without which no play seems able to relate to its own present. Theatre not only renders visible the State; it does so by presenting that which cannot but remain invisible and unrepresentable in the existing state of affairs.

Badiou further develops the analogy between theatre and politics to suggest a strict isomorphism between the combinatory of elements that would be constitutive of each of the two. The ensemble of the parts of theatre (and, by extension, the parts of politics) becomes activated only in the event of an actual theatre performance (or a militant political intervention), which, as it were, passes through and sublates the analytic of constitutive elements (place, text, director, actors, decor, costumes, and public) into the concepts of a dialectic (involving a spectator-subject, an ethics of play, and a double distancing from the State). This move from the analytic to the dialectic corresponds to the passage from a theatre text to the event of its performance. (In French, Badiou systematically refers to this performative aspect as reprsentation, which I have chosen to translate literally as representation, in part because there is no intended dialogue with the field of performance studies in the English-speaking world and in part so as to retain the play on presentation and representation.) No new elements are added in this process but everything is renamed and lifted to a higher level of intensity if and when a theatre event actually takes place.

In addition to the analogy between theatre and politics, elaborated by way of the interplay between the analytical and the dialectical views, Badiou structures much of Rhapsody for the Theatre around a number of other conceptual pairs. The most significant of these are as follows: true theatre (or Theatre) and the simulacrum of theatre; theatre and cinema; theatre and the religious mass; actors and actresses, including a sexuated inquiry into the formulas of imitation without a substance; text and event, or what happens exactly in the move from the analytic to the dialectic; desire and the idea, or theatre as the psychoanalysts accomplice and as the philosophers rival; comedy and tragedy, with specific reference to their modern impossibility; and time and eternity, including the idea that theatre produces as it were a history of eternity of its own.