Five Lessons on Wagner

256 Pages·2015·0.93 MB·English

by  Alain Badiou

FIVE LESSONS ON WAGNER

FIVE LESSONS ON WAGNER
ALAIN BADIOU
Translated by Susan Spitzer
With an Afterword by Slavoj Žižek
First published by Verso 2010
© Verso 2010
Translation Susan Spitzer © 2010
Afterword Slavoj Žižek © 2010
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted
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ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-481-7 (pbk)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-465-5 (hbk)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the USA by Maple Vail
Contents
Translator’s Acknowledgements vii
Preface ix
Lesson 1
Contemporary Philosophy and the Question of Wagner:
The Anti-Wagnerian Position of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe 1
Lesson 2
Adorno’s Negative Dialectics 27
Lesson 3
Wagner as a Philosophical Question 55
Lesson 4
Reopening ‘The Case of Wagner’ 75
Lesson 5
The Enigma of Parsifal 135
Afterword
Wagner, Anti-Semitism and ‘German Ideology’
By Slavoj Zizek 161

Translator’s Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Alain Badiou, fi rst and foremost, for provid-
ing me with the opportunity to translate this work and for his
unstinting assistance with the taming of the text, the lectures on
which the book is based. We worked on the translation together
on several occasions in Los Angeles, and I always came away from
these sessions amazed at how cheerfully he would excise sentences
that seemed unclear to me, rewriting them without complaint.
I owe a debt of gratitude as well to a number of other people
whose help was indispensable. My husband, Patrick Coleman, not
only read the entire translation, offering invaluable suggestions,
but provided moral support on a daily basis. His colleague in the
UCLA Department of French and Francophone Studies, Eric
Gans, generously allowed me to draw on his extraordinary knowl-
edge of the French language as he read through the manuscript.
I am privileged to have in Ken Reinhard a perspicacious reader
and one of the best of friends, whose unfailing support was deeply
appreciated. Last but not least, I am grateful to Bruce Whiteman
for kindly assisting me with certain music terms.

Preface
As far back as I can remember, Wagner’s operas have always been
a part of my life. They were my mother’s great musical passion,
and we had these old black 78s at home on which, amid all the
scratches, I used to listen to the forest murmurs from Siegfried,
or the Ride of the Valkyries, or an orchestral version of the
death of Isolde. As early as the summer of 1952, my father, as the
Oberbürgmeister of Toulouse, was invited to the ‘New Bayreuth’
under the direction of Wieland Wagner. We travelled through a
defeated, dreary Germany that was still in ruins. The sight of these
big cities reduced to piles of rubble insidiously prepared us for
the disasters of the Ring or the derelictions of Tannhäuser that we
would be seeing on the stage. I was enthralled by Wieland’s quasi-
abstract productions, which were aimed at doing away with all the
‘Germanic’ particularism that for a time had associated Wagner
with the horrors of Nazism.
On the Concours Général des Lycées competitive exam I
devoted the conclusion of my essay, the topic of which was
something like ‘What is a genius?’, to Parsifal. When my father
brought to Toulouse’s Capitole Theatre a production of Tristan
und Isolde that was directly inspired by the work that had been
done in Bayreuth, I invited my high school friends to attend the
opera and sit in the Mayor’s box. Already at the age of 17 I was
a proponent and champion of this music that was often reviled.