Five Lessons on Wagner

by Alain Badiou, Susan Spitzer (Translator), Slavoj Žižek (Afterword)

For over a century, Richard Wagner’s music has been the subject of intense debate among philosophers, many of whom have attacked its ideological—some say racist and reactionary—underpinnings. In this major new work, Alain Badiou, radical philosopher and keen Wagner enthusiast, offers a detailed reading of the critical responses to the composer’s work, which include Adorno’s writings on the composer and Wagner’s recuperation by Nazism as well as more recent readings by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and others. Slavoj Žižek provides an afterword, and both philosophers make a passionate case for re-examining the relevance of Wagner to the contemporary world.

Genres: Philosophy, Music, Classical Music, Art, Nonfiction

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Alain Badiou, Ph.D., born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School EGS. Alain Badiou was a student at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1950s. He taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) from 1969 until 1999, when he returned to ENS as the Chair of the philosophy department. He continues to teach a popular seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie, on topics ranging from the great 'antiphilosophers' (Saint-Paul, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Lacan) to the major conceptual innovations of the twentieth century. Much of Badiou's life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris. Long a leading member of Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistes-léninistes), he remains with Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel at the center of L'Organisation Politique, a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues (including immigration, labor, and housing). He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works.

Trained as a mathematician, Alain Badiou is one of the most original French philosophers today. Influenced by Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, he is an outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as the postmodern schools of thoughts. His philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.

Reviews

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a brilliant philosophical introduction to Wagner and one of Badiou's most accessible and personable works. We get a lot of detail on Wagner's philosophical reception - Badiou discusses his importance to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, and Lacoue-Labarthe - which means pretty much anyone can pick up this book and immediately get a sense of Wagner's relevance and his place in philosophical history. It really goes some way to justifying Nietzsche's claim that the philosopher has to grapple with Wagner, and not just because the philosopher has to be the bad conscience of their time.

Adorno is probably the main touchstone in this book, and it's noteworthy that the second chapter is actually just a concise introduction to and précis of Negative Dialectics, which is interesting because I'm not sure this work of Adorno (which, as Badiou points out, does not actually mention Wagner - and yet, Wagner is silently central to it, as we discover) ever receives such sustained attention in other more philosophical works by Badiou. We have to assume here that one of Adorno's central aesthetic tenets is the necessity of art coming to terms with its own impossibility after Auschwitz. Badiou suggests that Wagner's works are Adornian insofar as they are negatively dialectical: they effect a formal critique of the identity principle, they produce a kind of endless, Beckettian waiting-in-vain that renders visible the immanent contradictions of the 'musical resolution,' a resolution whose history is surreptitiously substituted for the history of music in general. He asks,"Wasn't it Wagner who took this aspect of things [the fact that, for so much music, form is determined by resolution] to the limit by inventing an altogether unique musical figure whose purpose is to hold back resolution the better to affirm it? The question of negation in Wagner could then be approached as Hegelian negation" (37).

More fundamentally than this, though, Badiou offers the following: "The idea of music as redemption or relief must be absolutely abandoned, since anything of that sort is impossible in a present conceived of in this way [as the wasteland of modernity]. Nevertheless, could music express this dereliction, this universal guilt, this obscene character of all culture and all cultural critique?" (41). Whether this can be found in Wagner partly depends on whether the performers and the conductor are willing to go to the lengths represented by Pierre Boulez in 1976: the so-called French Ring represents a key moment in Wagner interpretation for Badiou and it's at that point that so many of the myths about Wagner - that his music consists only in endless melody, that it obsessively totalises and synthesises, that it is vulgarly mythological - fall away and we can grasp a genuinely modern Wagner incompatible with the culture industry.

One of the features of this book that makes it difficult to summarise satisfactorily is that it's quite short and yet it raises a host of different avenues into Wagner interpretation and revision. It could be the beginning of a considerably longer project. Depending on which opera you focus on you can draw quite varied philosophical and aesthetic conclusions, and hence the question of whether Wagner actually does do justice to the dereliction of culture remains an open one. However, in concluding Badiou neatly ties Wagner in with Mallarme, focusing on the late opera Parsifal, to argue that the composer represented a real turning point in the late nineteenth century, a genuine and surprising 'event' - and Badiou is a little bit cagey about whether this event that he speaks of is a Badiouian event, is compatible with Being and Event! - concerning the possibility of 'ceremony' and thus of political community. Fascism, therefore, represented the failure to take up this problem, the abandonment of a genuinely political community.

This brings us to the author of the afterword, Žižek, who is perhaps better at making strong sweeping claims about Wagner's oeuvre, useful for anyone seeking to orient themselves with respect to the future. This afterword is good because it draws widely on other opera composers and gives us a strong sense of how both continuity and culmination travel under Wagner's name. Žižek is skilled at imposing revealing schemata onto the different operas: sometimes the four members of the Ring cycle come out looking something like a Greimas square, or we might instead get the Wagnerian version of the three Kierkegaardian stages of existence.

Furthermore, and unlike Badiou, Žižek has written widely about Wagner throughout his career. He is probably one of the most prominent contemporary philosophers to have invested so heavily in the composer. He has several groundbreaking journal articles from the late 90s and early 2000s on the topic, plus a psychoanalytical history of opera, co-written with Mladen Dolar. This means that Badiou's book, while perhaps neater and sharper, works well as an introduction to a sprawling literature.

However, predictably, Žižek's afterword is heavily recycled from his foreword to the 2005 Verso edition of Adorno's In Search of Wagner. This means that it drags a little to read, especially if you've already read the Adorno foreword. Personally I think it could have been cut down a little and might have been better as a foreword to this book, but Badiou sort of has his own foreword and that's even better. Regardless, it's nice to have the two of them together, and it's interesting that Wagner is one of the things that so strongly binds them, "the two philosophers who are instigating the resurrection of the word 'communism' today" (xii).

[Anttoni · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great mass of different ideas and elements of thought that is at times boring and at times intriguing. As such a somewhat hard to approach tome which should be approached open mindedly, not with a specific goal in mind. Should the reader do so, this book can be a rewarding read which not only illuminates Wagner's operas but also the cultural elements they consist of and to which they point towards.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Badiou challenges Adorno's (though he claims, Lacoue-Labarthe's) reading of Wagner's opus via the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, arguing, via the death of the author, to disregard Wagner's conscious aims in the production of his works, and that formal elements (musical, narrative, etc.) belie a non-totalizability. But Badiou seems to be speaking out of both sides of his mouth, in a sort of "kettle logic": despite his preference for consistency over completeness ("worlds" are consistent if not complete), I don't think Badiou subscribes to Adorno's critique of totalizability in the first place, so his insistence on the non-totalizability of Wagner's works rings a little hollow. I also think Badiou's treatment of Wagner's "bourgeois anti-Semitism" is a bit undercooked, to say the least (the recourse to Žižek, of all people, on this count is rather telling).

[Peter Harrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short interesting analysis of Wagner, although I probably enjoyed the endnote by Zizek more - his analysis of the themes of the ring, although it has similarities to his introduction to Verso's translation of Adorno's In Search Wagner (Zizek has form for "self plagiarism") is superb.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Badiou deserves his reputation as a worthy contemporary philosopher. In this book, he attempts to "take back" Wagner's disgraced name: Wagner has become the fashionable fascist whipping-boy in modern times, and though this may have some merit, such a critique glosses over the aesthetic aspects of his work. By creating popular, emotive, thematic works, Wagner in some ways set the groundwork for pop music as we know it. He certainly pioneered new techniques of emotive-patriotic connection with the audience, for better or worse, while exploring the fusion of theater and music that is opera. Zizek's afterword is also notable here.

[Youssef · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read Five Lessons on Wagner over a long and interrupted period of time, I didn't get the full scale of Badiou's defence. Having re-read it while in parallel indulging in Wagner's plays and symphonies, I have to say it truly was a brilliant account of a collective body of philosophers that seek to redeem Wagner from the avalanche of criticism following the fascist/Nazi interpretation of his work. A gifted mind that, similar to other thinkers of his affiliation (friedrich nietzsche), had his history briefly tainted. Badiou's writing is complicated yet understandable. A Wagner enthusiast would find clarity in every lesson.

[Yuval · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent defense of Wagner in relation to 20th century philosophy. Badiou summarizes the arguments against Wagner as a proto-fascist in the first half of his study, and then lucidly and clearly combats them with some great insights. He also summarizes Adorno's Negative Dialectics as clearly as I've ever read. Slavoj Zizek's afterword is typically Zizek: fascinating, entertaining, rambling, unfocused, brilliant.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this. I don't know Wagner well enough (at all) to say whether I agree with it all, but it's fascinating. I love reading a deep thinker writing about a complicated body of artistic work as if it really matters. It helps to make it matter, and I think that's a good thing for all of us.

The Zizek afterword was fun, too, if you're into Zizek. It would have been fun to see him engage a bit more directly with what Badiou was putting forward, but you know Zizek. He's got his thing.

[Alex F. Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zizek's best book.