ABSTRACT
The image is the murder of the pure present’, and in the play, it is the Chief of Police who engineers this murder. As Alain Badiou puts it in his novel terms, for us ‘any advance within the images of the present age is largely the attempt to grasp what has no image. As A. J. Bartlett and Clemens in their commentary remark, The Balcony displays the power of the image, ‘the image as the whole of the real, as what returns interminably, in which, finally, in an act of what Badiou laments as the “eternal return” of the tomb, Roger, the real figure of the Real of the revolt outside, bursts into the brothel and asks to play the role of Police Chief, the “prick of great stature”: to, in effect, as is his right of representation, take him to his limit.
