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TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION: STAGING BADIOU
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2008
Extract
Rhapsody for the Theatre: A Short Philosophical Treatise, first published in French in 1990, occupies a unique spot in Alain Badiou's oeuvre. Part theory and part theatre, or at least prototheatre, it certainly can be read alongside other books from the same period, especially Handbook of Inaesthetics and Metapolitics, devoted respectively to the truth procedures of art and politics that function as two of the four conditions of philosophy according to Badiou. Of the other two conditions, mathematics is treated in Number and Numbers and Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, whereas love is the only truth procedure not to receive a book-length investigation. Even in the case of Badiou's treatment of love, a text such as “The Scene of the Two” resonates with the present text due to the importance given to the production of a “scene” for the amorous couple. In addition to opening up a fascinating dialogue with this theoretical treatment of the four conditions of philosophy, Rhapsody for the Theatre also and at the same time can serve as the ideal accompanying piece for Badiou's work as a playwright, most notably the Ahmed tetralogy that comprises Ahmed le subtil, Ahmed philosophe, Ahmed se fâche, and Les Citrouilles and that was staged in a quick creative sequence starting just four years after Rhapsody for the Theatre was published. In fact, one of the most intriguing aspects of this treatise is the way in which it moves between philosophy and theatre to the point of opening up a space of indiscernibility between the two.
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- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2008
References
Endnotes
1. Badiou, Alain, Rhapsodie pour le théâtre: Court traité philosophique (Paris: L'Imprimerie Nationale, 1990)Google Scholar. Currently out of print, the book is part of a series called “Le Spectateur français.”
2. Badiou, Alain, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Toscano, Alberto (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London and New York: Verso, 2005). Earlier, Badiou also discusses politics in Peut-on penser la politique? (Paris: Seuil, 1985).
3. Badiou, Alain, Number and Numbers, trans. Mackay, Robin (New York: Polity Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006); and “The Scene of Two,” trans. Barbara P. Fulks, lacanian ink 21 (2003): 42–55. See also Badiou, “What Is Love?” trans. Justin Clemens, in Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 263–81.
4. Badiou, Alain, Ahmed le Subtil: Farce en trois actes (Arles: Actes Sud, 1994)Google Scholar; Ahmed philosophe: Vingt-deux petites pièces pour les enfants et pour les autres, suivi de Ahmed se fâche: Comédie en quatre mouvements (Arles: Actes Sud, 1997); Les Citrouilles (Arles: Actes Sud, 1996).
5. Badiou, Alain, Being and Event, trans. Feltham, Oliver (London: Continuum, 2005), Meditation 8Google Scholar.
6. See in particular Stéphane Mallarmé, Igitur, ed. Robert Greer Cohn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981) and Divagations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).
7. An overview of Badiou's lifelong critical engagement with Mallarmé would have to include the long chapter “Le Sujet sous les signifiants de l'exception” in Théorie du sujet (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 69–128; “La Méthode de Mallarmé: Soustraction et isolement,” in Conditions (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 108–28; Meditation 19 in Being and Event; “A Poetic Dialectic: Labîd ben Rabi'a and Mallarmé” and “Philosophy of the Faun,” both in Handbook of Inaesthetics, 46–56 and 122–41; and “First Provisional Theses on Logic,” in Briefings on Existence, 119–24.
8. Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Nicholson-Smith, Donald (New York: Zone Books, 1994)Google Scholar.