Translator’s Introduction
For their help with this introduction and translation, I would like to thank Alain Badiou, Cécile Winter, Kenneth Reinhard, Martin Puchner, Stephen Barker, Wendy Lochner, and, as always, Lee Edelman. I would not have been able to do this work without the extraordinary contribution of Susan Spitzer, a veritable translator’s translator. As students of French know, it is especially treacherous for those approaching it from English because of its many faux amis—“false friends”—words (the classic example being librairie, which means “bookstore,” not “library”) that cannot be translated into their seeming English counterparts. I cannot thank Susan enough for having warned me away from more than a few false friends—or for any of the other countless acts of brilliant generosity that have made her a true friend and a great teacher.
1. Alain Badiou, “Trois jours heureux,” in
Autour d’
Alain Badiou, ed. Isabelle Vodoz and Fabien Tarby (Paris: Germina, 2011), 11.
2. The title
Les Citrouilles plays on
Les Grenouilles, the French title of Aristophanes’
The Frogs, on which
The Pumpkins is based.
3. Alain Badiou with Nicolas Truong,
Éloge de l’
amour (Paris: Flammarion, 2009), 77.
5. “Philosophie, oui: comme gai savoir” (“Yes, philosophy: as gay science”). Alain Badiou, “Préface,” in
La Tétralogie d’
Ahmed: Ahmed le subtil—
Ahmed philosophe—
Ahmed se fâche—
Les Citrouilles (Arles: Actes Sud, 2010), 25. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text; all translations are mine.
6. On the possible end of the post-1976 reactionary sequence, see Alain Badiou,
The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2012).
7. See, to begin with, Alain Badiou,
Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005).
8. “Bodies and languages,” according to Badiou, are the fetishes of “democratic materialism.” In Badiou’s “materialist dialectic” there are bodies and languages, but “there are also truths.” See Alain Badiou,
Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum, 2009), 1–9.
9. Alain Badiou, “Rhapsody for the Theatre,” trans. Bruno Bosteels,
Theatre Survey 49, no. 2 (November 2008), 227. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text.
10. Alain Badiou,
La République de Platon (Paris: Fayard, 2012).
11. Another instructive point of reference here would be Badiou’s brief but important book
Beckett: L’
increvable désir (Paris: Hachette, 1995), which belongs to the same period as the second, third, and fourth Ahmed plays and whose view of Beckett as a comic writer—a writer of unquenchable or inexhaustible desire—influences and is influenced by Badiou’s own comic writing for the theater. A version of this book has been translated into English under the title
On Beckett, ed. and trans. Nina Power and Alberto Toscano (Manchester: Clinamen, 2003).
12. On the “faithful” or “active subject” as the unconscious of the “reactive subject,” see Badiou,
Logics of Worlds, 54–58.
13. Badiou explains the “reactionary novelties” purveyed by the
nouveaux philosophes: “In order to resist the call of the new, it is still necessary to create arguments of resistance appropriate to the novelty itself. From this point of view, every reactive disposition is the contemporary of the present to which it reacts.”
Logics of Worlds, 54.
14. Kenneth Reinhard, “Badiou’s Theater: A Laboratory for Thinking,” introduction to Alain Badiou,
L’
Incident d’
Antioche/The Incident at Antioch, trans. Susan Spitzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). My understanding of
The Incident at Antioch has also been enriched by Susan Spitzer’s “
The Incident at Antioch: A Play of Subtraction,” an unpublished paper presented at the Modern Language Association Convention in Los Angeles in 2011.
15. Ward Blanton and Susan Spitzer, “A Discussion of and Around
Incident at Antioch: An Interview with Alain Badiou,”
The Incident at Antioch, 144.
16. On the importance of the theme of betrayal in Badiou’s philosophy, see Nina Power and Alberto Toscano, “The Philosophy of Restoration: Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May,”
boundary 2 (Spring 2009): 27–46.
17. “Professional traitors”: communication with the author, July 1, 2012. Another scathing critique of the renegade left in the age of Mitterrand may be found in Guy Hocquenghem,
Lettre ouverte à ceux qui sont passés du col Mao au Rotary (Marseilles: Agone, 2003).
18. Alain Badiou, “Les Échecs de Mitterrand,” an interview with Lucien Piti conducted in 1995, in
Entretiens 1, 1981–1996 (Paris: Nous, 2011), 210.
19. Kenneth Reinhard, “Introduction: Badiou’s Sublime Translation of the Republic,” in Alain Badiou,
The Republic of Plato, trans. Susan Spitzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
20. Although the other three Ahmed plays were performed in their entirety at Reims, Schiaretti’s troupe has performed only selections from
Ahmed the Philosopher, at various times and in various combinations of six or seven sketches. Thus far, there has been one complete production of the play, presented, for one evening only, by a workshop for theater students directed by Laurence Voreux in Brussels. There have been partial productions of the play in Bologna, Italy, and in Cordoba, Argentina. At the time of this writing (July 2012), Patrick Zuzalla, the director of theater at the Maison de la Poésie in Paris, is preparing a complete production of the play, with one actor and a group of puppets. On several occasions the French troupe headed by Grégoire Ingold has gone on tour with versions of the play, each time performing five or six of its sketches. I have already discussed the history of
Ahmed le subtil. As for the other two plays: since its premiere,
Ahmed se fâche has been performed by the Reims company in various locations, most notably at the Théâtre d’Aubervilliers (just outside Paris); the play has also been performed—excellently, according to Badiou—by a group of students in Montpellier, under the direction of Marie-José Malis. Since its premiere in Reims,
Les Citrouilles has been reprised by Schiaretti’s troupe in Lille and in Paris at the Théâtre d’Ivry. Abridged versions of the play have been performed in Athens, Buenos Aires, and Montpellier.
21. Badiou has most recently discussed the mainstream left’s complicity with the right in
Sarkozy: Pire que prévu; Les autres: prévoir le pire, Circonstances 7 (Paris: Lignes, 2012).
22. “Seductive hostility” alludes to the following passage in Badiou’s “Philosophy as Biography,”
www.lacan.com/symptom9_articles/badiou19.html: “We can thus understand the Socratic function of the corruption of the youth. Corrupting youth means being seductively hostile to the normal regime of seduction.”
23. In the preface to the Ahmed tetralogy, Badiou writes of how Ahmed is a philosopher in his uncovering of the supposedly necessary world-as-we-know-it as nothing more than an effect of “le vide des discours, de leur pompe obscène” (19). It is hard not to hear in “pompe obscène” an echo of “Pompestan,” particularly since Madame Pompestan, after all, is the character in the play who embodies the obscene pomp of power in France and other Western “democracies.” (A monster of the Mitterrand era, Madame Pompestan also evokes, in her name as well as in her politics, Mitterrand’s more overtly conservative predecessor Georges Pompidou, who was president of France from 1969 until 1974.) Madame Pompestan’s name itself has an obscene connotation: one of the slang meanings of the verb
pomper is “to perform fellatio.”
24. Alain Badiou,
Second Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Louise Burchill (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).
25.
Ahmed philosophe was published by Actes Sud, along with
Ahmed se fâche, in 1997; this volume contains all thirty-four sketches, and it is this version of the play that I have used for the present translation. The play was republished by Actes Sud in 2010, along with the other three Ahmed plays, under the title
La Tétralogie d’Ahmed in the edition I cite; in this edition the play includes only the first twenty-two sketches. According to Badiou, the omission of the twelve additional sketches was a mere editorial mistake.
26. Communication with the author, July 1, 2012.
27. On the soft
pétainisme that resulted in the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as the president of France in 2007, and which Badiou provocatively identifies as the “transcendental” or default position of French society in general, see Alain Badiou,
De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? Circonstances 4 (Paris: Lignes, 2007), translated by David Fernback as
The Meaning of Sarkozy (London: Verso, 2010).
Ahmed the Philosopher
1. That the first sketch is devoted to the concept of nothing is not surprising, given the importance in Badiou’s philosophy of related concepts such as the void, the empty set, and zero.
2. The name Sarges-les-Corneilles, which designates the fictional
banlieue or low-income suburb in which Ahmed lives, suggests the predatory dreariness and boredom of its real-world counterparts, in whose housing projects Arab and black workers find themselves segregated and brutally policed. A
corneille is a small gray crow, sometimes called a carrion crow; the idiomatic expression,
bayer aux corneilles—literally, to gape at the little crows—means to daydream or to waste one’s time staring off into space with one’s mouth hanging open.
3. Events break open and “initiate a transformation of the situation in which they occur.” Oliver Feltham, “Translator’s Preface,” Badiou,
Being and Event (New York: Continuum, 2005), p. xxvi
4. Here, as in all of his scenes, Rhubarb personifies the degradation of the mainstream French left in the period during and after the presidency (1981–1995) of François Mitterrand, whose “socialism,” for Badiou, represents a betrayal of authentic revolutionary politics. Rhubarb’s language—his jargon of ethical responsibility, dynamic citizenship, human rights, etc.—reveals the vacuity of a “postideological” left, content to play the corrupt game of what Badiou calls capitalo-parliamentarism.
5. A
député (masculine) or a
députeé (feminine) in France is the equivalent of a congressperson in the United States or of a member of parliament in Great Britain. Ahmed calls Madame Pompestan a
député-e, grotesquely emphasizing not only the feminine grammatical form but also the
pute, or female prostitute, in
députée. This politically incorrect pun is untranslatable;
deputay captures some of its impudence without its specific sexual meaning.
6. A joking reference to the fact that the role of Madame Pompestan, in the original production of the play, was performed by a male actor in drag.
7. Another fundamental Badiousian concept, the multiple, insisting on a radically materialist approach to the question of being, exemplifies the importance of mathematics and mathematical terms in Badiou’s philosophy.
8. Charles Baudelaire,
Complete Poems, trans. Walter Martin (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 273.
9. In the original text, Ahmed’s punchline is “Je panse, donc j’essuie”: translated literally, “I bandage, therefore I wipe (or wipe down).” Playing on Descartes’s “je pense, donc je suis,” this punning joke is attributed to the nineteenth-century French writer Alphonse Allais. More recently, it has been put to use by Jacques Lacan (to whom Ahmed refers later in this sketch; see the following note) in his 1976 seminar on
le sinthome.
10. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) is an important interlocutor for Badiou the philosopher. The revision of Descartes to which Badiou is referring occurs in different forms in Lacan. For example: “I think about what I am where I do not think I am thinking.” “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud,” in Jacques Lacan,
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 430.
11.
Péter plus haut que son cul is an idiom meaning “to behave pretentiously,” “to put on airs.” I have chosen to translate it literally as “to fart higher than one’s ass,” since the action of the scene depends upon this literal reading.
12. Rhubarb’s abject moderation and pragmatism reveal the subservience of the Mitterrand-era French left to the
nouveaux philosophes and other media intellectuals who had stigmatized systematic political thinking (e.g., Marxism) as totalitarian. On the
nouveaux philosophes, see the “Translator’s Introduction.”
13. A fictitious rock group (in the French text, “Majestuous Brown Egg”), mentioned in
Ahmed the Subtle as well.
14. Badiou is echoing Victor Hugo’s tragic play,
Ruy Blas, whose protagonist, a commoner in love with a queen, describes himself as “un ver de terre amoureux d’une étoile.”
15. An allusion to Eugene Ionesco’s
The Bald Soprano: “take a circle, caress it, and it will turn vicious.”
16. “Celui qui est ici est d’ici.” Badiou uses this phrase as a slogan in his polemical writings against the anti-immigrant demagoguery that, not only on the far right, looms so large in French political discourse. See, for example, “The Law on the Islamic Headscarf,” in his
Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006).
17. The philosopher is Spinoza, and Badiou is paraphrasing this line from Spinoza’s
Ethics: “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death.”
18. Explicitly attacking sociology as a whole, Badiou is implicitly attacking the work of Pierre Bourdieu in particular. At the height of his influence when Badiou was writing
Ahmed philosophe, Bourdieu (1930–2002) was known for his analyses of taste and class. See, for example, his
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
19. Badiou is mocking the ethics of “difference,” derived from the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, that had become fashionable among postideological French intellectuals in the 1980s and 1990s. See Badiou’s discussion of Lévinas in
Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2002).
20. “Hey, you dead people: get up!”: in French, “Debout, les morts!” This famous phrase is attributed to the writer Jacques Péricard, who, as an officer in World War I, uttered it to rouse the exhausted troops on the battlefield in 1915 and used it as the title of one of his books in 1918.
21. This Ahmed is not the same person as Ahmed the philosopher, although the latter will pretend to be the former (and although the philosopher’s father, we will learn in a later sketch, was named Malhouf). The Ahmed whom the Demon is denouncing is a “quiet” immigrant who has been in France for thirty-three years, while Ahmed the philosopher, in addition to being unabashedly and cunningly verbal, is between twenty-five and thirty years old, as he is introduced in the first Ahmed play. Nonetheless, if only from the sketch on “The Same and the Other,” we know that Badiou is interested in the tricky interplay of identity and difference. I discuss the shiftiness of Ahmed’s identity in the “Translator’s Introduction.”
22. “Une répétition, c’est quand on répète.” Badiou is playing here on the fact that
répétition means both “repetition” and “rehearsal.” Since this double meaning does not exist in English, the wordplay gets lost along with its evocation of the theatricality itself at play within the apparently abstract concept of repetition.