Five Lessons on Wagner PDF
Preview Five Lessons on Wagner
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 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG USA: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-481-7 (pbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-465-5 (hbk) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library 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.
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