Reading Alain Badiou’s wonderful play, The Incident at Antioch or L’incident D’antioche, is like stepping into a suspension of thought enzymes. I’m not really sure how that comes off, so I’ll just let you know it’s invigorating. Something I love about reading Badiou is… he’s a contemporary philosopher! You know, that discipline that is riddled with old <dead> men? Well, here is yet another old man we call a philosopher, but look! He’s living! So, we don’t have to dig through obscure cultural space-time events with this guy.

L’incident is the latest installment in the very cool Columbia University Press series INSURECTIONS: CRITICAL STUDIES IN RELIGION, POLITICS, AND CULTURE. The play, a three-act tragedy modeled from Paul Claudel’s play The City, is very innovative in both its language and structure (creation). Badiou uses a technique that is best left in the words of Susan Spitzer <via the translator’s preface> when she says:

Rather than being “based on” Claudel’s play, The Incident could be said to enact a sort of musical “sampling” of one playwright by another. Many of Claudel’s lines are lifted intact, or only minimally changed, and set down in The Incident where they function as often as not to invert Claudel’s conservative, religious message. In standing Claudel on his head, so to speak, Badiou freely appropriates the earlier playwright’s lyricism for his own purposes.

I like this “sampling” terminology. It is very modern in the sense of a lot of our music <#glitch #dubstep #electro #beats #KatyPerry #etc.> and it also brings to mind Jonathan Safran Foers’s Tree of Codes, but a great deal less stilted craft-art and a lot easier to physically manipulate. But, know that this is no foreign construction either, as it is in the same vein as many of the ancient playwrights, who would take a piece and rework it in the same way Badiou does here.

It is not only Paul Claudel that Badiou borrows from but another Paul, viz. Saint Paul. The title of this play recalls the incident at Antioch where Paul and Peter clash over the status of the law. The main character in L’incident is a feminized Paul <Paula> who takes on the role of political revolutionary. Paula fittingly has a Pauline conversion experience from {revolutionary} to {one whom seeks to not take hold of power once they are in position to do so}. This is dubbed on the back cover of the book as a “transition from classical Marxism to a ‘politics of subtraction’ far removed from party and state.”

Here is the play in superflash:

This play is political. The dialogue is wholly concerned with politics and the characters are political figures. Two brothers Jean and Pierre Maury represent right and left-wing politicians, respectively. Cephas (Peter) is a classical Marxist revolutionary who overthrows the government with the help of the working class. Claude Villembray, Paula’s brother, is the only “hope” for the current system to sustain itself, though he refuses and falls into a nihilistic spiral until he is murdered by the revolutionaries as a symbol of the overthrown state. Cephas, after attaining his violent ruin of the city, realizes he no longer has purpose and abdicates his leadership over to David, the son of Paula and Mokhtar (an Arab factory worker). It is in the final act that Paula the converted is able to “convert” her son David into this politics of withdrawal. There are a few other characters that I did not mention though they are important.

The plotline is less the point than normal with this play. What I mean is the plot, which in most things, is like a sexy sports car, carrying us along with its fancy story and its sex factor, or maybe an economy class something or other, but with this story, though the story is good, the plotline acts more like a utility vehicle, something that is solid and will get us to our destination, it won’t break down on us mid trip, but it wont be so flashy as an Acura TL or, whatever. So, with this utility vehicle, we get lots of scenery, and plenty of time to look at it. The meat of this play is its political dialogue, which I’m not going to delve into here; you will just have to read it yourself (so worth it).

Jumping to the end of L’incident, we are left with Badiou’s answer, which is to take this ‘politics of subtraction,’ but we are left questioning: how do we realize this? In this sense, Badiou has no answer, but only some vague direction and his ‘politics of subtraction’ becomes more of a ‘politics of abstraction.’ The play, at this point, may look to you like a truncated cone – it will never reach its point. But Badiou has some really great ideas. This play is not made to give us a clear answer on how to get where he is thinking, but asks us to come together and answer this as a people and not a person.

One thing I cannot get behind Badiou on is a violent revolution. If anything in the future is to work, any new politics, it must be based on pacifist principles. Revolution is great, but it must be nonviolent. If we do not come to see this, then, well, we will kill this world with smart-bombs. The technology of warfare is getting so efficient at killing, that (everyone, think ender’s game here) your children playing video games, those kids are going to be the most valuable recruits for the next forever. Killing is no longer an intimate thing – killing has become so abstracted from reality that a child in the military can guide a missile with a joystick and melt millions of living, breathing, children, women, men, good and bad, without ever having to face it. We have dehumanized the enemy, and if we stand here without doing anything about it, Hitler will have been just the tip of the iceberg.

L’incident D’antioche may not be where you stand politically, morally, or anywhere, but it will make you face those things, which is so necessary right now.

L’incident D’antioche is Badiou’s first literary work translated into English. Exciting times, y’all.

You meet this wonderful man and marry him.  You then move to a very small town in the Adirondack Mountains of New York where he grew up but you just don’t ever seem to fit in.  You start a business where you are fixing up older houses and it is starting to really pick up.  You have a wonderfully romantic evening with you husband  and drink a little too much wine.  You sleep late the next morning, wake up, and feel something is wrong.  You find your wonderful husband has hung himself but left no note. What do you do next?  You start asking questions.

Why would Brendan, who loved his job as a police officer, loved his hometown, and loved his wife and their future plans suddenly decide to end it all?

Nora decides to try and reconstruct her husband’s final days but has to contend with much resistance from his best friend and partner, his fellow police officers and other family members, mainly Brendan’s mother.  It soon becomes very clear that she is asking questions that no one wants to answer and will do whatever it takes to keep the answers hidden.

Check out this great debut mystery, Cover of Snow, and meet  Jenny Milchman at Lemuria on Tuesday, April 23.  Jenny will be signing at 5:00 and reading at 5:30.

We had a great reading with Jill McCorkle last evening. She had us all doubled over with laughter as she read from her new novel Life after Life. I love the opening quote:

“There is the land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” -Thornton Wilder

Our signed copies are dwindling quickly, so stop by and get one before they’re all gone!

The book Salt, Sugar, Fat was written by investigative reporter and Pulitzer prize winner, Michael Moss. The book is the result of Moss’ outrage and curiosity; why are Americans succumbing to diabetes (26 million Americans)? why are 1 in 5 children in the USA considered obese? why is the “health crisis” costing our country 300 billion dollars a year?

With his nose to the grindstone, his head buried beneath copious stacks of paper, and his ears buzzing from interviews with food industry higher-ups (to the likes of Coca-cola, Nabisco, Kraft, Kellogg, Nestle and more), Moss exposes the machinations of the industry that processes hard-to-resist foods and thus has bought bulging American bellies.

According to Moss, these companies use manipulative advertising as well as scientific research–hundreds of scientists are paid to study the mechanisms of digestion and food selection–in order to addict us to our food. He relates food addiction and people’s inability to stop eating to the powerlessness of drug addicts and alcoholics over drugs and alcohol.

Even after people fearing diseased bodies demanded healthier alternatives to many processed foods be made available, the food industry continued to produce harmful, processed. In fact, the industry began to manipulate foods by changing the ratios of fat, sugar, and salt. For instance, on the freezer-aisle of your local grocery store, you can happily pick what you think is a No Sugar ice cream and never realize that in the process of reaching the “bliss point”–the perfect balance of taste that makes us crave something–the fat and salt have been increased to make up the difference in the loss of sugar.

The “bliss point” is merely the highest delectibility of a food, the point at which we reach the highest pleasure. The term is one coined by the industry and is a very important point for sales. Taste buds are not isolated to the mouth; they go all the way down, through the esophagus and the stomach. That is a big audience for food to please, and by altering their products, the food industry seeks to sing to them all.

Toward the beginning of the book, we meet a young medical student John Harvey Kellogg in the 1890’s who recognized the relationship between food and health. He founded the Battle Creek Sanitarium near Detroit to provide health-treatments for health-conscious people. The facility was comprised of a gymnasium, a solarium, an exotic enclosed garden where a staff of 1000 per 400 “guests” provided purging enemas, exercise regimens, soaks and strict diets. No sugar was allowed in the sanitarium. Meat and fat were practically non-existent. “He served wheat gluten mush, oatmeal crackers, graham rolls and a tea made from a South African grass.” He crowned whole grains as the ultimate healthy prince of all foods. His intentions were good.

However, a Kellogg brother joined the business and things began to change. This Kellogg, Will, was the money maker and he dreamed up some new grain foods that were enticing. One day while John Harvey was in Europe minding his business, Will bought some sugar and threw it in a corn flake the two had created. The sanitarium guests went wild, their bliss points excited, and thus began Kellogg’s Toasted Cornflakes. Moss goes on to describe how the food industry progressed through the next century.

Fast forward to the now generation. In the 21st century our country is getting fatter and suffering from diabetes, clogged arteries, fluid retention, and is just, plain nutritionally sick. Moss relates a story of concerned parents in Philadelphia teaming-up on a cold, blustery day to detain schoolchildren going to buy their breakfast in the convenience stores lining the path to school. Rather than boycotting or coercing the students, the parents sought to educate the kids: nothing in those stores will substitute a nutritious, balanced breakfast at home.

Some of the kids were convinced not to go into the stores, but some went anyway. One of the men on the team saw his wife coming down the street with their two kids. She rushed into one of the stores in search of a healthy snack. They had been in such a rush to get to school on time, they had skipped their breakfast. She came out with fruit and yogurt breakfast bars, thinking they were a healthy alternative since the label claimed they were high in calcium. However, the so-called calcium enhanced bar “had more sugar, and less fiber, than an Oreo.”

Moss is such a superb writer. Much like Curtis Wilkie’s The Fall of the House of Zeus, this expose reads like a fast paced thriller. The book is eye-opening; peppered (not salted) with stories that are as vivid as those a parent tells a child before lights-out at bedtime.

Moss concludes that we need to become more conscious of what we put in our mouths, outraged that our diets can be manipulated by industry, and educated to make better choices of the food we eat. Perhaps with a big enough percentage of concerned people who want to live healthy, long lives, our choices will begin to turn the industry around, i.e. better products as well as a profit.

In the meantime, eat plenty of fruits and vegetables and stay away from the inner aisles of the grocery store.