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Theatre and Politics

Janelle Reinelt
Published online: 06 Aug 2014.

To cite this article: Janelle Reinelt (2004) Theatre and Politics, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing
Arts, 9:4, 87-94, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2004.10872058

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 Theatre and Politics
Encountering Badiou
JANELLE REINELT
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So how does' theatre' meet Alain Badiou? Not
necessarily at the entry point of his discourse
on Art, but perhaps more easily through
reference to his ideas about Truth Events and
Ethics. Although Badiou seems at first glance to
offer a bridge to theatre scholars through his
own writings on theatre and his plays, these are
not necessarily the most accessible points of
entry. Rather, a philosophy that separates Being
from Event and privileges the power of the latter
seems to offer a useful paradigm for an art form
like theatre that may lack substance but always
takes place. An ethics that does not base itself
on rules or moral principles but rather describes
a process of fidelity to an event seems well
suited to the exigencies of performances.
Before pursuing these possible compatibili-
ties further, however, I must first stake out what
'theatre' should signify here: in the context of
the Civic Centre dialogue, it is more properly
'political theatre,' a theatre not only concerned
with the interior operations of the art form but
also with the relations between various theatres
and the situation in which they exist. We are
concerned not only with an 'administered'
theatre (part of the state, after all), but also a
theatre of resistance in various unlikely
locations, of various unlikely imports; further-
more, not only a theatre of the institution, but
also cultural performances in public- a wide
range recently defined by performance studies
as falling somewhere between the political rally
and the sacred ritual, as well as, more familiarly,
87
Performance Research 914). pp.B?-94 Taylor & Francis Ltd 2004
between proscenium arches. This should not be
construed as a neutral theatre, but a politically
conscious and interested theatre -what Sartre
would have called in his day, 'engage'. What does
this theatre have to do with Badiou?
First of all, 'political theatre' may not fit com-
fortably with Badiou's conception of Art (or
theatre as a subset), since he insists on the uni-
versality of Art. Many theatre scholars have
spent good portions of their lives fighting the
lingua franca of a theatre studies that con-
stantly characterized great theatre as
'universal.' For many of us, nevermore will
theatre be confused with the universal. If
Badiou insists, we will resist. The irony is that
in some senses, this has been an ethico-political
commitment on the part of theatre theorists: the
presumptions of previous ages' conception of
art as universal, when it was clearly particular
and limited by that particularity, are no longer
acceptable. One of Badiou's 'Fifteen theses on
contemporary art' proclaims: 'Art cannot merely
be the expression of a particularity (be it ethnic
or personal). Art is the impersonal production of
a truth that is addressed to everyone.' One must
reply, 'A truth that is addressed to everyone: yes;
an impersonal production: no such thing.'
In its standard usage, Universal might mean
'refers to, entails, or applies to everybody.' Thus
Art that is deemed universal is supposed to have
captured eternal truths. However, the pro-
nouncement of universality covers up unac-
knowledged exclusions. As Slavoj Zizek, one of
 1
When using Badiou's tech-
nical vocabulary, I will try
Badiou's interpreters and targets of critique, has someone like Herb Blau who describes theatre's
to provide a guide to his put it, 'all positive content of the Universal is the unique function as 'blooded thought' (Blau 1982).
meanings. I have capital- ::::J
contingent result of hegemonic struggle' (:Zizek Then, too, Badiou's formalism is and is not rt>
ized these words both for
emphasis and to signal 1999: 101). Since this concept's historical legacy appropriate to the messy materialism of the
special usage. While Situ- to the present is precisely a narrow, Western, theatre. 'Badiou affirms,' writes Peter Hallward,
ation is straightforward in
its meaning in most Europeanized, white and male notion of 'Great 'the production of contemporary works of art ...
instances, it is Badiou's Art,' we will not be placated by being told that, as so many exceptional attempts "to formalize
basic category of Being: an
infinite set of distinct really, the Universal need not be a suspect the formless" or "to purify the impure." The sole
components. The structure category. A Truth gone wrong by hiding its limi- task of an exclusively affirmative art is the
of the situation is, he
writes, 'the existing tations and exclusions is not corrected simply effort to render visible all that which, from the
mechanism of the count- by reiterating it. Badiou might consider one of perspective of the establishment, is invisible or
ing-for-one that qualifies
his own explanations of Evil and say that a false nonexistent' (Hallward 2003: 195). This
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the situation as being this

particular situation'
(quoted in Hallward 2003:
94). The State refers both to
the state of things and to
the state as a political insti-
tution. It is the law of the
situation in question, the
regime regulating what is
counted as One in the situ-
ation. The Event, in Badiou,
comes from outside the
situation and is not appar-
ent until we experience it. It
is what interrupts and
supplements being, the
multiplicity of a given situ-
ation; it erupts, in that
sense. It cannot be
accounted for in terms of
thesituation,butitisnever-
the less immanent to it- see
'Void'below.AstheEventis
the truth of the situation,
the Truth Process is what
unfolds through time after
the Event, as a result of its
pursuit by Subjects. The
individual who encounters
an event then moves from
being an animal who gets
by, acting in terms of its
own self-preservation and
the opinions of his/her
everyday life, to being
constituted as a Subject
through deciding to follow
the truth of the Event, and
following this path will
constitute subjectivity.
Badiou sums up his 'ethic
of a truth' as 'the principle
that enables the continu-
ation of a truth-process- or,
to be more precise and
complex, that which lends
consistency to the presence
of some-one in the composi-
tion of the subject induced
by the process of this truth'
(Badiou 2002a: 44).
Universal is really only a simulacrum of truth
that covertly imposes a closed particularity
(Badiou 2002a: 72-74). We would reply that this
cannot be corrected by continuing to use the
term because the weight of its historical usage
prohibits redeployment ... at least for now.
Thus off to a rocky start, this band of theatre
scholars I characterize as 'we' (certainly not all
theatre scholars, but those who perhaps profess
a certain 'fidelity' to the idea of political
theatre) is similarly uncomfortable with
Badiou's insistence on the abstract character of
politically progressive art. According to Badiou,
'Non-imperial art is necessarily abstract art.' He
also writes about the real of art as being 'ideal
impurity conceived through the immanent
process of its purification.' In a time wary of
the historical record of the concept of purity,
and leery of the cloak of abstraction over the
face of the concrete, this is a hard selL Badiou
often uses the language of cognition in a way
that suspiciously sounds like an attempt to
isolate thought from the complications of
materiality. Theatre scholars like me will want
to resist a seeming Cartesianism privileging
the mind at play in Badiou's language; we have
fought too long to acknowledge the body, the
impure, the always concrete gestures of per-
formers en _,o,itu. The theatre is always particu-
lar, always for the moment, always embodied,
always corrupt. This is its strength as well as its
weakness. In Badiou's condemnation of the
antiphilosophical and his emphasis on
cognitive processes, he is seemingly far from
emphasis on bringing into visibility (intelligibil-
ity) something novel or heretofore ungraspable
is the labor of creativity proper to art- and to
theatrical art- but the visibility in question may
be possible through only the most mixed con-
glomeration of elements, and may involve
combinations, collages, and hybrids that utilize
aspects of the administered realm of opinion
and the state. In addition, while literal vis ability
may be secured through the materiality of
objects on a stage, the kind of visability/intelli-
gibility Badiou has in mind entails the whole
network of contextual relationships surround-
ing any public performance.
Rather than seeking out some reconciliation
of these early warnings of incompatibility, I
propose to link the theatre to Badiou's Ethics
and Ontology, suggesting that theatre perform-
ances take place within a Situation and most
often a State, and that to the extent that these
performances are performative (in an Austinian
sense), they are potential Events that can lead to
Truth Processes and constitute Subjects. 1 While
we will have to stretch the limits of Badiou's
thought to permit these inclusions, they may
prove useful for a theatre seeking novel ways to
intervene in political life. As Badiou 1s fond of
providing a series of theses, so this essay will
now take up a similar strategy.
1. A THEATRE EVENT MAY BE AN EVENT
Theater, inasmuch as it thinks, is not a matter of
culture, but of art. People don't come to the
theater to be cultivated. They are not

88
 cabbages .... They come to be struck. Struck by
theater ideas. They leave not cultivated but
stunned, tired, thoughtful. (Quoted in Hallward
2003: 205-l
This pronouncement by Badiou on the function
of theatre acknowledges that theatre is an event
u
in which particular demonstrations take place-
+-
., the audience is struck by theatre ideas. If we
understand this striking to be an action which
0
a... takes place- not a representation of an action
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""0 but a true action belonging to the theatre itself-
c::
rn we understand in what sense a performance
QJ
may be but is not necessarily performative.
c... There is a capacity to strike which belongs to
+-
rn the theater, but just as often it cultivates
QJ
.s::: instead, treats people as cabbages, and thus re-
I-
presents the state, leaving its spectators
unchanged, and performing nothing more than
ordinary, run-of-the-mill mimesis of empire or
the imperial.
The possibilities for theatre to strike a blow
are infinite, and yet they are rare because, as
Badiou says of events, they are unconditioned
and unpredictable. 'Whereas the "structure" of a
situation never provides us with anything other
than repetition,' every event is unprecedented
and unexpected. Only the event enables the
assertion that there can be genuine 'novelty in
being.' It is its evental origin that ensures that
true innovation is indeed a kind of creation ex
nihilo, a chance to begin again from scratch,
interrupt the order of continuity and inevitabil-
ity' (Hallward 2003: 114). Badiou says this occur-
rence is felt as a kind of grace - a 'laicized grace.'
Nevertheless, an event comes from within a
Situation, and its site is 'that element of the
situation which is located "at the edge of its
void"' (Hallward: 2003: 117). 2 It does not come
from outside, like 'a foreign invasion,' and yet it
cannot be visible unless it is recognizable: 'A
truth always begins by naming this void.' The
event and the process of its naming sets in
motion the truth procedure through which
subjects are constituted, and to which they must
remain faithful: such are Badiou's ethics of
fidelity to a truth.
8g
In the four arenas that Badiou designates as
'generic procedures' (love, science, art, and
politics), this interplay of situation and emergent
event on a site at the edge of the void entails
different sorts of occurrences: for politics,
exemplary events such as May 1968 or the French
Revolution involved a change of scale in which
people became caught up in what exceeded their
own actions, while in art, Wagner's Tri..Man,
'composed at the edge of what is recognizable as
"music" challenged the intelligibility of classical
composition by straining it beyond its situational
limits'. (Hallward 2003:117, 123).
In the case of a theatrical event, we can treat
it as a hybrid of politics and art: not only does it
involve a collectivity in both its address and its
activity, it also pushes formally at the edges of
intelligibility in terms of its own aesthetic struc-
tures. Performances claiming the status of an
event both demonstrate radical fraternity and
give rise to novel presentations of reality.
2. A THEATRE EVENT IS A
DEMONSTRATION OF THE REAL THAT
CONSTRUCTS TIME
For any fraternity whatever, and so for a we-
subject being constituted, to demonstrate is to be
visible. The being of the we is displayed, but also
exhausted, in the demonstration. There is a great 2
Void is a term Badiou
dialectic confidence in this monstration. This is uses in connection with
his ontology, and Hall-
because the 'we' is, in the end, nothing else than
ward calls it 'the most
the set of its demonstrations. crucial- and most elusive
(Badiou 2002b: u) -term in Badiou's
system.' The void is for
our purposes the incon
Badiou offers a reformulation of certain sistency at the heart of a
perennial shibboleths about theatre. The situation which is
included in, while never
assertion that theatre is communal, or builds being known or
community, or more complexly, constitutes a presented within that
possible community through the power of the situation. 'For what is
encountered through an
experience of spectatorship- all of these ways of event is precisely the void
speaking about what happens and what is of the situation, that
aspect of the situation
possible at public performances have seemingly that has absolutely no
been saturated. As Herb Blau writes, 'As for the interest in preserving the
status quo as such. The
scholarship that takes for granted that theater event reveals "the inad-
is the site of the social, or an affirmation of missible empty point in
which nothing is
community, that appears to me now- though I presented" ' (Hallward
believed it when I was younger- an academic 2003: 114-15).
 ceremony of innocence, assuming as a reality
what is, perhaps, the theater's primary illusion'
{Blau 2002: 137). Blau's title for this essay is 'The
Dubious Spectacle of Collective Identity.'
The problems associated with these notions of
collectivity are many. Perhaps we can
summarize them by simply saying that an
ephemeral event- a performance- does not and
cannot bind together a radically heterogenous
group of artists and spectators even when they
are approximately aligned with each other in
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terms of culture, values, and/or 'good inten-
tions.' But what if we take the being together
and radical consititution of the 'we' in the
course of an event as being no more and no less
than 'for a time'? Badiou thinks that radical
fraternity belongs to a practical present in
which this we 'manifests itself, constructs itself,
but never represents itself' {quoted in Hallward
2003: 223). What this means is that reality is
discontinuous. 'A demonstration, an insurrec-
tion, more broadly a political sequence, or an
artistic creation seized in the violence of its
gesture, can in no way be represented. Fraternity
cannot be represented .... In my lexicon: there
are only multiple procedures of truth, multiple
creative sequences, and nothing that disposes a
continuity between these. Fraternity itself is a
discontinuous passion. Only "moments" of
fraternity truly exist' {Badiou 2002b: 12). This is
another way of saying about a theatrical event,
'you had to "have been there.'
Part of the problem with the language of
theatre as community has always been the
question of efficacy: if a group of performers
and spectators come together and are overtaken
by the strength of the performance, and forge a
community of some sort, what does it mean,
amount to, result in? Nothing substantial is
often the conclusion drawn by those who would
wish it were otherwise -those who wish theatre
to have some revolutionary potential of its own.
Here Badiou shows us that there is a sequence
in politics and art {as well as the other two
genres) that organizes things. An event happens
to individuals who heretofore have not been
subjects, and as a result of the event, face a
ro
decision to relate henceforward to the situation -'
from the perspective of the event. Following the
decision, the individual is constructed as a
subject through her fidelity to the event, and
'this compels the subject to invent [Badiou's
italics] a new way of being and acting in the
situation' {Badiou 2002a: 42). The new subject
embarks on a fidelity to the consequences of the
event, and these include persistence or consist
ency of the new way of being in the future
heterogeneous and disconnected moments that
constitute reality.
As an artistic project, then, the subject must
not go back on her encounter with the novelty of
the event. As a political project, the subject must
pursue the collectivity of the we, constructed in
the event but not inevitably continuing beyond
it. This we is only present through the set of its
demonstrations, and it cannot be represented
{as the party, the nation, or any other group).
'Keep going!' says Badiou. 'We might put it like
this: "Never forget what you have encountered.''
But we can say this only if we understand that
not-forgetting is not a memory,' but rather a
following through on the consequences and
implications of the event that henceforward con-
structs you as a subject {Badiou 2002a: 52).
In his discussion of the concept of the
temporal in the twentieth century, Badiou
validates the insistence on the primacy of the
will in constructing time and re-interprets it
against a postmodern concept of time he sees as
'an inaccessible mixture of agitation and
sterility, the paradox of a stagnant febrility'
{frantic alternations between speed and stasis, a
contemporary imperative to 'hurry up' and a
belief there is nothing to be done). Seen from the
perspective of his own sequencing of
event/truth process/fidelity, we must fight
against a "modernizing" temporality that
annuls any subjectivation ... If we wish to
attain the real of time, it must be constructed,
and this construction finally only depends on
the care taken in becoming the agent of the pro-
cedures of truth' {Badiou 2002b: 9).
go
 A theatrical event, then, can become the
departure point in the truth process. From the
standpoint of temporality, it is no more than the
time it takes, but it is enough and sufficient in
its ephemeral passing to evoke the prospect of a
VI series of moments in which fidelity to the event
w
carries the truth procedures forward, construct-
ing in retrospect a temporal sequence that can
be identified and named as a watershed but also,
0
0.. through fideiity, as a duration. Insofar as it is an
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""C artistic event, the fidelity is to the further
c
development of the novel aspects of the perform-
"' ance; to the extent that it is a political artistic
IV
'--
.._ event, the fidelity is to the further demon-
stration of the radical fraternity of the we,
"'
IV
grasped during the event but needing to find
other demonstrations, other occasions of visi-
bility in order to persist.
A theatrical event never takes place in a
vacuum. It may become the catalyst for future
events, or it may link up with other political (or
for that matter scientific) events, or it may
sometimes, rarely, become an Event which will
begin its own truth procedures. There is no
efficacy beyond the time of the performance
unless it achieves the status of an event through
the constitution of subjects in commitment to a
truth procedure.
3. FOR THE THEATRE, THE PERFORM-
ANCE OF ETHICS IS A PERFORMANCE
IN PUBLIC
'Some-one' can thus be thu spectator whose
thinking has been set in motion, who has been
seized and bewildered by a burst of theatrical
fire, and who thus enters into the complex con-
figuration of a moment of art .... Or this
militant who manages, at the end of a compli-
cated meeting, to find simple words to express
the hitherto elusive statement which, everyone
agrees, declares what must be pursued in the
situation.
(Badiou zooza: 45)
Both the theatre and politics demand life in
public. Mixed in with what Badiou calls
'opinion,' that circulating world of communi-
cations about the state of things that he
91
acknowledges as the 'cement of sociality'
'beneath the true and the false' (Badiou zooza:
51), theatre and politics most often belong to the
merely ordinary. Any Events possible in both
arenas arise in the public sector. From the
situation, stale and full of repetitions and
excessive force (whether this force is of the state
or the prevailing artistic hegemony), comes the
occasional possibility for a true Event. The
problem, of course, is how to recognize one and
how to then be faithful to it. As both theatrical
art and politics demand a constructed we, they
both must appeal to the public domain. Just as
the French Revolution or May 1968 depended on
a spontaneous recognition that 'something [was)
taking its course'- to paraphrase Beckett,
Badiou's favorite playwright- so political
theatre worthy of an event depends on specta-
tors and artists who seize the possibility of the
performance and make out of it a demonstration
of a we as well as an artistic invention. The role
of political theatre in the fight against
apartheid, the emergence of Chicano theatre in
the vineyards and lettuce fields of California,
the legendary performance of Waiting for Godot
at the prison known as Alcatraz - all of these
events were in their time linked to a political
Event worthy of the capital E. They had their
own aesthetic inventions: the township musical,
the political actoA, the invention of Beckett's
dramaturgy ('theatre of the absurd' being inade-
quate and incommensurate to his actual
achievement). The adjacency of theatrical and
political events produced the possibility and in
retrospect the actuality of 'political theatre.'
Even though Badiou might not embrace these
examples as Events (because of his complete
rejection of identity politics due to what he sees
as its exclusions and its ultimately domesticat-
ing claim of victimization), I offer them as
examples of the types of conjunctions between
the theatre and the political arena that provide
opportunities for linking theatre and politics in
productive, radical ways.
We might say that political theatre prac-
titioners, those who are committed to forging a
 link between their artistic work and political
activity, are always engaged in trying, from
their stages, to create an event worthy of being
called an Event. It is a hit or miss affair; that is,
since there is no guarantee of grace, no prep-
aration in advance that is adequate, no determi-
nate path of success, all theatre artists can do
is keep on experimenting at the limits of the
ordinary, searching for the extraordinary. That
they may find it will only be a first step - the
public needs to see and comprehend, in a sense
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to affirm, their creation. This, in turn, depends
on the historical conjecture that chance
provides- these spectators, at this perform-
ance, willing to affirm this event and be faithful
to it in unsecured future eventualities (to pun a
bit on Badiou). Theatre academics and pro-
fessionals know it is only rarely, perhaps once
in fifty times, that a performance is truly excep-
tional. Yet we continue to go to the theatre in
search of those experiences. In politics, many
initiatives are stillborn, or immediately incor-
porated into the realm of the state. Still, for
those committed to a political project, one must
be vigilant and ready in order not to miss the
opportunity that could turn into a larger inter-
vention. Badiou's Events are borne on the backs
of many non-events in both realms. And
sometimes, I would argue there are little events
of merit as well as big Events of huge historical
consequence.
Artists perform in public. Sometimes they
achieve what might be called celebrity; in other
words they become well enough known that
their names attract public attention to their
actions. When these actions are their skilled
performances, we celebrate their artistic skill.
But sometimes their actions break through the
limits of art and become exemplary acts in their
own right: this sometimes surprises the
performer, who might not have been aware of
the power of this very celebrity to transform the
conditions of performance. Artists sometimes
have no choice in this matter: they are publicly
exposed whether they like it or not. However,
how they choose to respond to the exposure can
sometimes be a moral question - especially
m
when artistic and political effects dovetail. I -'
would like to conclude this essay by examining a
case of this kind. It concerns both art and
-+
politics, although Badiou may shudder at this
statement. Nevertheless, not only monumental
figures like St. Paul travel the road to
Damascus.
THE DIXIE CHICKS' FIDELITY TO THE
EVENT AS AN ETHICAL DECISION
There was a point where I felt sick. But now I feel
proud and empowered. I'm glad it happened.
(Williamson 2003: 7)
Three days before the United States and Britain
went to war against Iraq, three young women
who sing Country and Western songs were
playing a concert in London. Natalie Maines, the
lead singer of the Dixie Chicks, told the
audience the trio was 'ashamed that the
president of the United States of America is
from Texas,' since the Chicks are identified with
Texas. The audience applauded. The American
ambassador to Britain had his photograph
taken with the three women after the concert.
Their group had been very successful and
famous, and six weeks before they had been
picked to sing the national anthem at the
Superbowl, America's huge football-cum-
national game of the year. However when The
Guardian reported the incident (the only
newspaper to report Maines' comment), news of
the criticism spread.. Two huge media conglom-
erates (Clear Channel and Cumulus Media)
immediately banned Dixie Chicks records from
being played on the air, and suddenly right-wing
press commentators called them sluts and
traitors. Fans stopped buying their records. In
Louisiana a steamroller crushed piles of their
records and elsewhere burning parties were
held. There were death threats against Maines
as well. The Dixie Chicks, and Maines in particu-
lar, became an overnight lightning rod for oppo-
sition to the war and its opposite, extreme
so-called patriotism. This controversy also made
publicly visible the tendency of the Bush
92
 administration to create a repressive
atmosphere in terms of first amendment rights
as a direct link to its foreign policy.
This 'chick' was not a committed leftist
activist artist who knowingly tried to use her art
to provide a platform for her criticism. Maines
u
was disturbed about the upcoming war, and
feeling like she had to say something, spoke off
the cuff. At the beginning, right after the initial
0
a.. event, she tried to smooth it over and offered a
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""CJ
c::
rtl
OJ
+-
rtl
OJ
..c::
I-
qualified apology of sorts. But then the three
chicks pulled together and became angry at the
President all over again. They have been defiant
and outspoken ever since. Throughout the
summer of 2003, the Dixie Chicks were touring
through southern and Midwestern states. Their
show included a video with footage of civil
rights protests and archival footage of Nazi
book burning folded into shots of the burning of
their records. When some in the audience
heckled them, Maines responded: 'If you're
booing that's OK, because we love freed'om of
expression. But just remember. We've got your
65 dollars' (Williamson 2003: 7). The 'Top of the
World Tour Live' is now available as a double CD
93
set and a DVD, and they have been nominated
for several awards including Country Artist of
the Year. In late November, Natalie Maines
appeared on NBC's Today show and continued to
criticize the war: 'I think people were misled and
I think people are fighting a war that they didn't
know they were going to be fighting. And I think
they were misled by people who should have
been asking questions and weren't' (Associated
Press 2003).
The Dixie Chicks (with
Natalie Maines at the
microphone) during the
NFL SuperBowl
-as found at
http:ffdtle.home.comcast.
netfdixiel.jpg
Arguably, the void in the situation of the war
had to do in part with the crackdown on freedom
of speech that has produced support for the war.
It had to do with the blindness of people who
like the Dixie Chicks' kind of music but usually
support Bush. Getting close to that situation
and naming it, Maines was able to trigger an
event, even without originally conceptualizing
her action as directly political. Once it became
clear, she decided to be faithful to the event and
follow out its implications. She is using her
celebrity to widely disseminate her political
criticisms forged through her groups' musical
accomplishments, thereby transforming their
music into a political protest. They could have
 backed off, acquiesced to being 'only entertain- REFERENCES
rD
ers,' but instead they took up the challenge and Associated Press. 'Dixie Chicks singer sounds off on -'
::::J
have continued it throughout the course of the war.' Online. Available at http://www.cnn.com/interac- rD

following months up to the present. tive_legal.htmlnAP>www.cnn.com//interactive_legal.h

Now, country music is not lofty classical
music of the sort that Badiou writes about. And
the messy celebrity of pop stars engaged in
concerts, and talk shows, and media madness
may seem very far from the kind of radical
politics or art that Badiou theorizes. Yet I would
argue that his ideas are shown to have merit
here in this unlikely example. An event
happened that ruptured the status quo. The
Downloaded by [Royal Holloway, University of London] at 09:25 05 September 2015
-+
tmlnAP> (accessed 8 December 2003).
Badiou, Alain (2002a) 8thic.1>: An e.1>.1>ay on the Under
.1>tanding of evil, trans!. Peter Hallward, London:
Verso.
Badiou, Alain (2002b) 'Seven Variations on the
Century' Ms.
Badiou, Alain (2002c) 'Fifteen theses on contem
porary art' Ms.
Blau, Herbert (2002) The Dubiou;, Spectacle:

extremetie.ll of the Theater, 1976-2000, Minneapolis:

original London concert and comment turned
University of Minnesota Press.
into an Event beyond its original limited scope
Hallward, Peter (2003) Badiou: A Subject to Truth,
as a musical event. The Dixie Chicks had to face
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
the decision of whether or not to embrace this
Williamson, Nigel (2003) 'Free the Dixie Three,' The
event and stay faithful to its consequences and
Guardian. 22 August, p. 7
its implications. Their willingness to do this
ZE~ek, Slavoj (2ooo) The Tickluh Subject: The Ab.1>ent
made an important political intervention at a
Center of Political Ontology, London: Verso.
time when almost no antiwar criticism could be
heard in popular culture. Their celebrity and
their artistry allowed them to do this- to unfold
in public as subjects faithful to the truth
process of an event.
One of the paradoxes of Badiou's thought is
that although it is aimed at affirming radical
possibilities for militant action that can change
the world, the terms in which he describes them
often seem to limit these possibilities to huge
historical events in the case of politics, and
geniuses in the case of art. St. Paul, Abelard and
Eloise, Schoenberg, and Beckett are his
exemplars. It seems essential to expand the
applications of his system to everyone- in the
name of the Universal address which he himself
desires. My own view is that the artistic or
political act will in fact be 'the expression of a
particularity' but that its truth is addressed to
everyone. Thus even the Dixie Chicks can be
moral exemplars and their work, their art, can
create a political theatre.

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