SubStance

"We have made thee . . . neither mortal nor immortal . . ."

-Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man

The thought that politics is a comedy might be a thought so untimely that, for the moment, we cannot imagine it. With his usual talent for exposing the complacency of our age, Alain Badiou, a playwright and novelist as well as a philosopher, has remarked that what our times lack most is a taste for genuine comedy. In a chapter of Handbook of Inaesthetics entitled "Theses on Theater," Badiou writes,

I do not believe the main question of our time to be that of horror, suffering, destiny, or dereliction. We are saturated by these notions, and besides, their fragmentation into theater ideas is truly incessant. On all sides, we are surrounded by a choral and compassionate theater. Our question instead is that of affirmative courage, of local energy. To seize a point and hold it. Consequently, our question is less concerned with the conditions for a modern tragedy than with those of a modern comedy. Beckett—whose theater, when "completed" correctly, is truly hilarious—was well aware of this.

(75)

Now of course the comedy Badiou has in mind here is not that reassuring romantic comedy in which all's well that ends well. It is the grotesque and mineral comedy of Beckett. This is a comedy of the buffoon, the clown, and the writer of doggerel. It is the comedy of errors that finds nothing funnier than sadness, the comedy that evokes the uncanny persistence of humanity as grimace, cry, and protesting laughter in the face of the absence of meaning, the deterioration of the body, and the silence of God.

Badiou's proposition, that such comedy--and the political will that it manifests--is absent today, is a striking claim in the context of contemporary continental political philosophy.1 This valorization of comedy as political expression is at odds with hermeneutic, deconstructive, and phenomenological approaches to politics, which tend to articulate political demands in the voice of a tragic and melodramatic pathos.² Judith Butler, for example, has consistently insisted upon performing philosophy as an [End Page 131] act of mourning, partly for the purpose of foregrounding the inherently tragic nature of politics.³ In Antigone's Claim, Butler reads Antigone's gender-bending defiance as the impossible performance of an unnameable desire to identify, and takes Antigone's fate as paradigmatic for all politics as a tragic enterprise in false identification, scapegoat ritual, and oppressive exclusions. Insofar as it specifies the sacrificial and exclusionary logic of political organization, tragedy has seemed to a number of thinkers in the continental tradition to create the appropriate conceptual terrain for approaching the aporias of politics. The almost continuous attention paid to Antigone, from Hegel to Lacan to contemporary feminism, seems to confirm that for continental philosophy, the stakes of politics must be envisioned on a tragic rather than a comic stage.

We will return to the claims of this tradition in a moment. But it is interesting to note that since the publication of Badiou's remarks (made in the early 1990s) clowns have been making a comeback.⁴ Rainpan 43's all wear bowlers, a show that has played to rave reviews in London, New York, Sydney, Seoul, and elsewhere, features two Chaplinesque tramps mysteriously ejected from their home in a black-and-white film reel onto a cold, harshly lit stage. At first they enjoy their displacement into "live" theater, expertly crossing back and forth between the film and the stage, even playing a baseball game in which the ball is hit from the theater into the film, and bases are run into the movie and back out again to score. The fun and games stop when the movie suddenly decides not to let them re-enter its membrane. The tramps panic. Desperate for a way out of the theatre, they improvise a series of increasingly bizarre and life-threatening gags to distract the audience while they search for a way back home. At one point, Earnest even goes so far as to turn his sidekick, Wyatt, into a...