9781844674817-five-lessons-on-wagner

Five Lessons on Wagner

by Alain Badiou

Afterword by Slavoj Žižek

Translated by Susan Spitzer

A leading radical intellectual tackles the many controversial interpretations of Wagner’s work.
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 Zizek provides an afterword, and both philosophers make a passionate case for re-examining the relevance of Wagner to the contemporary world.

Paperback, 256 pages

ISBN: 9781844674817

October 2010

$26.95 / £16.99

Blog

Hope in the Ring—Alain Badiou's Five Lessons on Wagner in the New Yorker

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross writes about Alain Badiou's Five Lessons on Wagner (mistakenly presented as co-authored with Slavoj Žižek, who wrote the lengthy afterword). In his substantial essay on Wagner's Ring in the New Yorker Ross agrees with both Badiou and Žižek that in Wagner's music can be found the possibilities of a different world and a new politics.  

Wagner's music is marked by a constant tension between a will to power and a willingness to surrender. The contradiction is not one that we should seek to resolve; rather it is integral to the survival of the composer's work. Because we can no longer idealize Wagner, he is more involving than ever. This idea animates Five Lessons on Wagner, a recent book of essays by the philosophers Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. The latest in a long line of thinkers who have tussled with Wagner, Badiou and Žižek try to revise the prevalent picture of the composer as a proto-Fascist - the phrase was "virtually invented to describe Wagner", Badiou says - by heightening his paradoxes. In Wotan's monologue, Badiou sees a pivotal moment in which "power and impotence are in equipoise"; that paralysis creates the possibility of a different world. He goes on to paint the "Ring" as a mythological tale that annuls, one by one, the consolations of mythology. Žižek sees in Brunnhilde's sacrifice the hope for a new kind of politics - a space of selfless action beyond the failed ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Wisely, Žižek does not spell out what these politics might be. The music offers hope, nothing more. 

Visit the New Yorker  to read the article in full (subscribers only). 

Also check out Alex Ross' excellent blog, The Rest is Noise. 

By Tamar Shlaim / 26 May 2011 / post comment

Verso Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement, the Evening Standard and the Sunday Express

The Times Literary Supplement asked sixty-five writers about their books of the year ...

Paul Griffiths:

Not wearily, but freshly and brightly, Alain Badiou takes up from Nietzsche, Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe the philosophers' debate with the old magician of Bayreuth in his Five Lessons on Wagner (Verso). Badiou's is an un-Wagnerian Wagner, a composer of ambiguities and silences, of suffering and (his own word) heartbreak a composer still with lessons for the music of today.

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By Sarah Shin / 08 December 2010 / 2 comments

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