Waiting for Wagner: Reluctant Musicology,

Radical Philosophy, and the Rescue of a Fraught

Legacy

n john deathridge o

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kings college london

I
Dieter Borchmeyer, a prominent academic not normally identified with left-wing
politics in Germany but nonetheless one with a long record of opposition to stulti-
fying conservative attitudes in that countrys university establishment, once pointed
out that Thrasybulos Georgiades, a powerful ordinarius of musicology at the
University of Munich in the 1960s, had declared Wagner unsuitable for scholarly
inquiry, successfully opposing the adoption of a proposal for a critical complete
edition of his works by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.1 Philosophers in the
postwar Anglo-American tradition, too, were for a long time skeptical or simply
ignorant about Wagner (often both) to such a degree that, until relatively recently,
studies of Friedrich Nietzsche, a major philosopher by any standard, routinely
either omitted or studiously sidelined the major role Wagner played in his life. In
1991, according to Borchmeyerno shrinking violet when challenging the wisdom
of overly rigid disciplinary boundariesresearch into Wagner among Germanists
was leading an extraterritorial existence: most readers of philological journals were
simply not interested in Wagner, and the few who were simply kept quiet. Anyone
who dared to publish an article on Wagner in a periodical specializing in German
studies was immediately destined professionally for a first-class burial (ein Begrbnis
erster Klasse).2
Change since has been slow. Borchmeyer forged his way through the embar-
rassing landscape of Wagner research in Germany with the forensic instincts of a
high court judge. A court of appeal would not have upheld all his verdicts, particu-
larly his blanket dismissal of writers daring to suggest a connection between
Wagners racism and his works. But his view that the tribal character of the academ-
ic world was playing its part in unwittingly encouraging blindness in Wagner
studies to issues that scholars would normally see as their duty to address was per-
fectly justified. And to an extent it still is.

The Opera Quarterly Vol. 30, No. 23, pp. 267285; doi: 10.1093/oq/kbu017
Advance Access publication on August 28, 2014
The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
268 john deathridge

The main trouble has not been a slowness to publish new or little-known docu-
ments. Many have already come to light in the documentary volumes and critical
reports of the nearly finished Smtliche Werke that was started in the 1960s by Carl
Dahlhaus and Martin Geck after weathering the storm whipped up by Professor
Georgiades. The jury is still out about whether the numerous musical sketches
Dahlhaus excluded from the planning of the edition are worth publishing in toto,3
despite the fact that some have come to light in isolated facsimiles.4 The Smtliche
Briefe, on the other hand, a new edition of the letters under way at the University of
Wrzburg, is not only gradually bringing order into Wagners correspondence but

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also revealing some of the most compelling evidenceor perhaps one should say
unvarnished statementsof Wagners aims and actions. A systematic critical
edition of Wagners numerous writings, one of the most sensitive and surprising
gaps in modern scholarship considering his historical status, has taken until 2013
even to get started.5
The real trouble is that a strong will to develop radically new critical engage-
ments with this extraordinary (new) material has been only intermittently in evi-
dence. Literary scholar extraordinaire Friedrich Kittler and his theories of modern
mass media have helped us to understand better the implications of Wagners truly
significant rethinking of music and theater technology. There is still no resilient
debate among musicologists, however, about how autograph sources can alter
the way we see his oeuvre, or the relation between his working methods and the
strange philosophy he developed about the closing of the European mind and the
supposedly impending catastrophes only effective antidote: Wagnerian drama. At
the level of editing and analysis alone, a reluctance to interpret the technical sophis-
tication and grandiose pretension of Wagners mission in either musicological or
literary terms extending beyond pure texts and compositional processes has been
a real hindrance to productive thought.6 Nor, in light of Hitlers proven enthusiasm
for the music, is it as simple as many would like to view Wagners artistic achieve-
ment in naive terms of genius or cultural greatness. In Wagner studies, archival re-
search and critical interpretation have been in tension with each other for some
time.

II
Theodor W. Adorno measured Wagner philosophically against Hegel-inspired
norms in Versuch ber Wagner (1952), found him wanting, and set out to rescue
him from the debris.7 The book still counts as an outstanding critical appraisal of
the composer in a field not exactly overflowing with sanity. One of the reasons is
Adornos enthusiasm for Ernest Newmans four-volume Wagner biography (1933
47) and the assiduous pursuit of the truth in those books about Wagners social
character. At heart Adornos text is grounded in Hegelian logic, a way of thought
 waiting for wagner 269

famously at loggerheads with fact-finding meticulousness. Yet in three positive

reviews of Newmans biography, he took the trouble to point out the importance of
empirical investigation to Wagner studies, from which he clearly profited in the
Versuch, balking at no unpleasant details, Wagners anti-Semitism and sadomaso-
chism included.
Adorno took his praise to the brink: [Newman] follows up the facts so passion-
ately that he ultimately becomes aware of the dubiousness of the concept of the
factual itself.8 He compared Newman to a gambler playing a high-stakes game
against his readers, forcing them out of convictions and convenience in their

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opinions about Wagner. Indeed, in the postWorld War II reception of the compos-
er, Adornos essay played its own role in countering the reluctance of musicology
and the human sciences in general to assess the implications of Wagners co-option
by the Nazis. That resistance held sway for a remarkably long time until it was
finally broken apart by Germanys struggle to come to terms with the past
(Vergangenheitsbewltigung) that began in the early 1960s. As Newmans biography
had already done, Adornos outline of a primeval landscape of fascism9 in the
nineteenth century pumped still more oxygen into the thesis, ultimately giving it
long life, that Wagner the human being crystallized to an amazing extent the
Fascist character long before Fascism was ever dreamt of.10
Adornos own gamble, however, took a surprising turn. When Andreas
Huyssen interpreted the Versuch against the grain in 1983, the journey backward to
the primeval landscape of fascism suddenly turned into a journey into yet
another time-space, and moreover one Adorno himself did not live to experi-
ence.11 Through Adornos eyes, for Huyssen, Wagners invention of a divine world
of gods and heroes was no longer just a deluded transcription of the banal world of
imperial Germany, but integral to the idea of the postmodern. All complaints about
Wagners mythology reflecting the iconic world of a crumbling empire with its
eclectic architecture, fake Gothic fortresses, and the aggressive dream symbols of
the New German boom were now interpreted as trenchant anticipations of the
theory of culture industry, Adornos sharp critique of mass culture that first ap-
peared, coauthored with Max Horkheimer, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).
Instead of rescuing Wagner from commodification and its false promesse du
bonheur, Huyssens Adorno suddenly turned him into an irreversible transforma-
tion of high culture into postmodernism, the freezing of the world into a static
space where art is pulverized into dead alluring surfaces. Indeed, the Master of
Bayreuth now seemed scarcely out of place in the environs of Jean Baudrillards
Simulacra and Simulation. The phrase illusion of the absolute reality of the
unreal, used by Adorno to evaluate Wagners virtual worlds, could even be mistak-
en for a phrase from Baudrillards book.12
Huysssen was on to something. But he drew too sharp a line around the phe-
nomenon of the so-called postmodern instead of broadening the debate, especially
270 john deathridge

in France, to take account of the general intellectual upheaval after 1968 that began
in earnest to challenge the fundamentals of Kant-inspired humanism. As planet
Wagner continues to orbit the nineteenth-century Germanic philosophical sun
with monotonous regularity, the parlous state of Wagner performance (when did
you last see a really convincing production of a work by Wagner?), not to mention
the field of musicology and even Borchmeyers damning critique of German
Wagner scholarship, appear as if still locked inside binary opposites familiar from
the Kantian tradition (subject/object, good/evil, truth/error, and so on). In contrast,
redirecting the planet toward the less predictable galaxy of the post-1968 Left with

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all its lively disagreements intact can bring to light less consistent (but prescient)
ideas, no longer as wedded to the humanist project as generations of commentators
have assumed.
Wagners journey from the great age of philology in German-speaking countries
in the first half of the nineteenth century to the boom and bust years of Germanys
Second Reich led him to question seriously not just the nature of the theater and a
host of issues about the status of language, expanding militarism, and the urgent
radical reform of institutionalized artistic and intellectual modes of thought, but
also to express a dogmatic faith in the ultimate redemption of humanity. Except for
the last sentiment, most poststructuralist intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s were
hardly a million miles from related concerns. When some of that generation at-
tempted to pull the rug of reason, as Kant had understood it, from under the dilapi-
dated epistemological furniture of Western philosophy, the move brought with it
in a way not dissimilar to responses to Wagners own projectimmediate accusa-
tions of protofascism.13 There are fault lines in the comparison with Wagner, to be
sure. The flight from normative thinking ingrained in Wagners worldview after
the 184849 revolution did indeed lead to some of the quasi-monarchical, protofas-
cistic traits in his character described by Newman and Adorno.14 (That Martin
Heidegger and Paul de Man, both powerful influences on poststructuralist think-
ing, were attracted by real fascism gives pause for thought in this context.) Newman
thought it would have been better if Wagner, in his later writings, instead of trying
to swing the world round to his sociological point of view . . . had simply hugged
his pet delusions all the more closely to his breast and made music out of them.15
Many advocates of poststructuralism, Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, and scien-
tific Marxism and other sundry thinkers who made up the motley crew of leftist
intellectuals in post-1968 Europe would have argued that Newmans wise and emi-
nently English pragmatic counsel made not the slightest difference. Wagners
racist program for the regeneration of humankind remained pernicious; and to
believe that his music was immune from his theory and social actions was in any
case mere delusion.
Still, considering Wagners reputation, and despite opponents such as Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, who remained implacable to the end, it is surprising how many
 waiting for wagner 271

ideas of post-1968 critical thought now appear less dissonant with Wagners project
than they once did. (In this context, even the massive influence of Schopenhauer on
Wagner begins to look less secure; that philosophers profound faith in the music of
Rossini, when spelled out in detail,16 is a startling reminder of the distance Wagner
traveled away from philosophers who took Kant as their starting point.) Not so sur-
prising, therefore, is the passion of radical left-wing thinkers who have recently
rallied unequivocally to Wagners side, among them Alain Badiou, former Maoist
sympathizer and doyen of Frances philosophical and political Left, whose book Five
Lessons on Wagner is an important confrontation with Adorno and a later focus of the

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present essay.17 The image of the gambler again comes to mind: Badiou goes to risky
lengths within the confines of his stringent communist and mathematically inspired
project to defend Wagner, as does Slavoj iek on his own terms in a lengthy after-
word. It is also worth noting ieks remarks elsewhere about Badiou as a thinker of
revelation, the last great author in the French tradition of Catholic dogmatists
from Pascal and Malebranche on.18 They suggest correctly that the project of his re-
markable friend is built not only on revolutionary politics and radical philosophy, but
alsoin a way not dissimilar to Wagnerson a leap of faith.

III
There is no better proof of Wagners wish to go beyond the imprisoning fixed
points of nineteenth-century humanism than his own statements. In an open letter
to Nietzsche in 1872 objecting to the entire enterprise of institutionalized philology,
he succinctly demonstrated his polemical objective with a single example:
Whats the point of taking trouble with the field of philology? What do we get out of
it? I once took an old German word Heilawac [water that cures] from a study by
Jacob Grimm. To make it more supple for what I wanted, I reshaped it into
Weiawaga (a coinage related to the word Weihwasser [holy water] in a way we
can still recognize). I then derived from this words with related roots like wogen
[billowing] and wiegen [cradling], and eventually wellen [waves] and wallen
[undulating]. In this way, analogous to the Eia popeia [lullaby] of our childrens
nursery rhymes, I created a linguistically grounded syllabic melody for my water
maidens.19

Wagner then relates how this virtuosic philological adventure created howls of
protest from everyone from gutter journalists to doctors of philosophy. No wonder.
The uproar ensuing from his Wigalaweia-Musik (a scornful label applied to the
whole of his oeuvre by skeptics from the 1869 premiere of Das Rheingold onward)
confirmed the puzzlement of all those trained in the niceties of humanistic scholar-
ship and the precise semantic identities of language, who were suddenly faced with
a provocative challenge in the form of a fluid concept of meaningnicely fitting
the aquatic environment of the Rhinemaidensinside playfully invented words
272 john deathridge

that apparently had no meaning, or were simply reduced to acoustics pure and
simple. Indeed, Wagners creatures of the deep, in the light of his explanation of
Weiawaga, seem surprisingly close to a modern work such as Luciano Berios
Visage (1961), a tape piece with electroacoustic images of vocal sounds, some of
them unprocessed, others comprising isolated phonetic units, sighs, screams,
laughter, and just plain gibberish.20 Only a single word is recognizableparole
Italian for words. And similar to the way in which Wagner integrates the sound of
the Rhinemaidens made-up language into the surrounding orchestral texture of
Das Rheingold, thus making vocal and instrumental utterance virtually indistin-

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guishable from each other, Berio also blurs the distinction between real voice and
(electronic) voice simulation.
The parallels between Wagners and Berios nonhierarchical concepts of lan-
guage in relation to music can be taken further. Suffice it to say that with their in-
vestment in seemingly indecipherable utterances that are in fact the result of astute
linguistic analysis and deliberate fragmentation, they were both anticipating a
deconstruction of language, perhaps not in the precise sense that Jacques Derrida
was to attribute to the phrase, but close to the internal process of mutation, of
opening a text out of itself to let it, in Derridas words, become independent of its
own grounds.21 Wagners caustic remark about the narrow field of philology of
his time, too, indicates clearly his intention to undermine the given determina-
tions of culture, of institutions that Derrida also saw as one of the essential tasks
of deconstruction.22 Before their famous falling out, the need to thwart the deter-
minations of culture and institutions was part of Wagners and Nietzsches shared
instinctive antipathy to official culture and approved norms of scholarship and po-
litical action.23
Wagners and Berios ideas are premonitions of poststructuralist thought that
especially in Wagners case have yet to be properly acknowledged. The very nature
of Wagners seemingly bottomless leitmotif system in the Ringa system of
extreme semantic fluidity, despite the age-old motif-naming haplessly dedicated to
containing itis itself an uncannily early model for the concept of the rhizome
that Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari introduced in A Thousand Plateaus, the
second volume of their groundbreaking Capitalism and Schizophrenia (197280).
The rhizome, in a botanical sense a horizontal stem that lies underground and is
constantly growing, is related as well to the vegetal imagery of the music of Tristan
und Isolde, the sweet perfume of high-arching plants vividly evoked in a song
from the Wesendonck Lieder (Im Treibhaus) that Wagner not only cites in the
music of Tristan but also translates metaphorically into an organic maze of wildly
proliferating harmonies, melodic tendrils, and a sense of permanently open-ended
musical growth covering the entire score, the seeds of which are planted in the
mind of the spectator at the very start of the prelude. For Deleuze and Guattari, any
point on a rhizome must be connected to something else, a definition that
 waiting for wagner 273

unlocked its potential as a map without a beginning or end, on which a nonhierar-

chical image of a metaphysics freed from constraining binary opposites can at last
emerge.24 Similarly, Tristan may seem at first hearing to be dominated by stark op-
posites (day/night, man/woman, honor/ deceit). Yet the music constantly curls its
way forward with endless melodic and harmonic connections to form an existential
universe that undermines in almost every phrase all the usual rallying points of hu-
manism. Even the concept of love is no longer secure. Tristans reputation as a
master of disguise in the medieval sources, for example, became in Wagners
hands a cipher for the idea that love is essentially a deception, moreover an utterly

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and completely devastating one, as he wrote to a colleague just before starting
serious work on his most daring creation.25 In a startling moment of clarity at the
end of act 1, Tristan himself puts it best of all: happiness in thrall to deceit (trugge-
weihtes Glcke).
Friedrich Kittler called Tristan Wagners most modern music drama.26 Taking
his cue from Deleuzes and Guattaris idea of the desiring-machine in Anti-
Oedipus, the first part of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the basic premise of which
is that everything is a machine and moreover that every machine is a machine of a
machine,27 Kittler saw music drama as a machine that works on three levels or in
three data fields:

First, verbal information; second, the invisible Bayreuth orchestra; third, the scenic
visuality with its tracking shots and spotlights avant la lettre. The text is fed into the
throat of the singer, the output of this throat is fed into an amplifier named orches-
tra, the output of this orchestra is fed into a light show, and the whole thing, finally,
is fed into the nervous system of the audience. At the very last, when the people are
crazy, every last trace of alphabet is eradicated. Data, rather than being encoded in
the alphabet of books and scores, are amplified by media, committed to memory,
and recalled. . . . Music drama defeats all literature.28

In the world of Wagner that Kittler conjures up, the composer sits at the center of a
spiders web of nineteenth-century materialism, the age that saw the invention of
the psychograph, the thought indicator, improvising machines, and no end of
mechanical devices related to music. In this new objectivist spirit, Kittler strongly
suggests, Wagner participated with gusto, almost as if he were a scientist of sound
intent on rejecting the rules of literacy.29 Kittler has no trouble ferreting out places
in the writings to support this startling assertion, including a striking moment in
the 1850 revolutionary essay Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Artwork of the Future),
where Wagner describes poetry as offering its readers the catalogue of an art gallery
but not the paintings themselves: The frosty branches of language in winter
denuded of sounds, their life-giving foliage and the adornment of summer, were
crippled into becoming soundless signs of writing.30 Kittler oddly refrains from
citing this last sentence, even though it confirms his view of culture since the dawn
274 john deathridge

of the nineteenth century as the banishment of individual investment in the

written word in favor of data technology. Wagner was the first to invent an artistic
machine to fill the technological gap: Munich, 10 June 1865, the world premire of
Tristan und Isolde, was the beginning of modern mass media.31 This time referring
specifically to Deleuze and Guattari, Kittler therefore concludes that the earth in
its materialitythis precondition that is unthinkable for the classical artsreigns
over the music drama as a whole.32

IV

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Not every radical philosopher in the last part of the twentieth century and the first
decade of the twenty-first was prepared to see Wagner enter Jimi Hendrixs
Electric Ladyland33 and the technological dream world of cinema. The interven-
tion in the Wagner debate by Badiou has brought a number of aspects to the fore
that still retain a connection to Wagners work in live theater. His Five Lessons on
Wagner is a robust recuperation of Wagner in the face of a string of serious charges
by philosophers over the years, starting with Nietzsche. This Wagner redux is inter-
esting not only because the issue of anti-Semitism has to be scrupulously sidelined
(though not ignored) for Badiou to make his case convincingly, but also because
the book attempts with great precision to refute six main charges that the hullaba-
loo about anti-Semitism in recent years has pushed into the background, namely
that Wagner

(1) is an exemplary figure of the superimposition of identity that has led to a

shrinking of difference;
(2) represents in his music an enforced unifying regime in collusion with a con-
ception of the mythological origins of Germanness;
(3) conceives difference merely as pathos that comes down to no more than waiting
for the finale, a closure all the more effective because of its long delay;
(4) constructs music that is theatricalised in its very make-up, its micro-structure
ultimately subordinated to the grand gesture that drains detail off like a polluted
river;
(5) places suffering at the centre of his work, but displays it instead of treating it as
genuine otherness, and therefore subjects it to the overall logic of mere spectacle;
(6) has made his music necessarily too long because time is blocked, with no
genuine creation of it, only signs artificially imposed on a duration subordinate
to its own result.34

In negotiating the hurdles of Wagners fraught legacy, Badious attempt to rescue

Wagner from that legacy assumes an almost theological and theatrical rigor that
reminds me of the three devices of such lethal cunning that Indiana Jones
 waiting for wagner 275

(Harrison Ford) manfully negotiates at the end of Steven Spielbergs film Indiana
Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). Indiana kneels to avoid being beheaded by a
razor-sharp triple pendulum (The penitent man is humble before God), treads
over a gaping void on crumbling stones marked by letters of the alphabet that spell
the name of God (Proceed in the footsteps of the word), and through blind faith
discovers a concealed pathway over an unbridgeable mountain gulf (Only in the
leap from the lions head will [the hero] prove his worth). After finding the Holy
Grail with the help of a book of esoteric symbols compiled by his father, Henry
Jones Sr., professor of medieval history (Sean Connery), he is persuaded by Henry

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not to reach for it, otherwise he may fall into a yawning abyss. Let it go, says
Henry.
The comparison is not trivial. For long stretches of Five Lessons, especially the
second chapter devoted almost entirely to Adornos negative dialectics, Badious
father is none other than Adorno himself. As in Spielbergs film, the relationship
with dad is uneasy, and indeed in the last lesson on Parsifal it ends with the son ig-
noring dads advice, or at least dads critical words about the work in Versuch ber
Wagner. (Later well see if Junior falls into the abyss or not.)
The book also gets off to a tense start with a first lesson mainly devoted to
Lacoue-Labarthe, who in his 1991 study Musica ficta adopted the extraordinary tactic
of accusing Adorno of not being anti-Wagnerian enough.35 Three of Lacoue-
Labarthes arguments are worth noting: first, Adorno, like Baudelaire, Mallarm,
Nietzsche, and Heidegger before him, was blind to the full implications of Wagner
as one of the first authors of mass art and his consequential transformation of
music into an ideological operator;36 second, Wagner was a protofascist who used
opera to outline a national destiny for Germany, consciously staging the political
function of aesthetics in the process; and third, Adornos blindness was due to a
sympathy with Wagners defense of high art and an unwillingness to see that in its
name the composer had resorted to extremely reactionary, even secretly criminal,
political configurations.
In true Indiana style, Badiou adroitly ducks out of the way of these three
devices of such lethal cunning (he prefers the phrase extreme theoretical vio-
lence37) with a few scattered facts that are not involved in his more fully
worked-out theory.38 In a wider context, in fact, they are. For one thing, they posi-
tion Five Lessons clearly in the vigorous post-1968 debate in France about antihu-
manist theory that attempted to rethink the main compass points of German
idealist philosophy and the binary opposites of its Freudian stepchild (father/
mother, phallus/no phallus, and so forth). For another, they more than hint at the
boldness of this relatively small group of intellectuals in continuing their some-
times radical disagreements with each other in public for well over forty years after
the turmoil of the late sixties had subsided. Adam Schatz, an editor at the London
Review of Books, reminded his readers in 2010 that in the early seventies Badiou,
276 john deathridge

then teaching philosophy at Vincennes and at the height of his support for Maoist
ideas, dispatched his followers to break up a lecture of his colleague Deleuze, who
had just published Anti-Oedipus with Flix Guattari. Deleuze calmly put his hat
back on and left.39
The point Badiou and his followers wanted to demonstrate was that Anti-
Oedipus had poured all the ingredients of the HegelMarxFreud tradition into an
intellectual food blender, so to speak, and liquefied them into a tasty postmodernist
pure about the ubiquity of desire. Badious complaint was that this had nothing
anymore to do with real revolutionary change. The Badiou of Five Lessons, however,

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is less than forthcoming about the clear influence of his old enemy. Not only does
he more than once try to free Wagner from constraining binary opposites in the
manner of Deleuze and Guattaris nonhierarchical metaphysical image of the
rhizome; the myriad implications of his claim that waiting in vain is a crucial
Wagnerian theme40 also owes something to Deleuzes influential 1992 essay on
Samuel Beckett and its distinction between tiredness and exhaustion.41 Badiou
found the idea of waiting in vain in Adornos Negative Dialectics, where it is related
to the music of Alban Bergs operas, not Wagners. The concept (it also takes its
cue from Beckett) is defined by bleakness: Waiting in vain does not guarantee
what expectation aims at, but reflects the condition that takes its measure from
refusal.42 Deleuzes waiting in vain, on the contrary, is an active process that
spurns refusal. If you are tired, you merely eliminate the possible until nothing is
left. But if you are exhausted you can exhaust the possible because you have re-
nounced all need, preference or signification . . . you are not passive: you press on,
but toward nothing.43 Surely, the idealong before Beckettis already close to
Tristans state of testy delirium and energetic decrepitude, leading three times to
collapse during the third act of Tristan. And to counter Adornos view of Wagners
supposed refusal to treat waiting as pure waiting because of the necessary salva-
tion of his characters in the end, Badiou resorts to a similar idea of nonpassivity.
Wagner is able to create such a scene: during the course of the third act, it is pre-
cisely Tristans exultation that brings him back to life utterly in vain each time
before he collapses.44

V
Part of Badious defense is not that the Wagnerian hero merely languishes wearily in
a cul-de-sac of denial, but that his very exhaustion enables him to press on, albeit with
the un-Deleuzian twist that pressing on to the void can at least uncover somethinga
happening by chance that could open up a path of pure conviction toward permanent
revolutionary change. This is perhaps why Badiou still complains a decade into the
twenty-first century about leftist thinkers who have perceived Wagner as devoid of
genuine revolutionary will. First in the firing line is Lacoue-Labarthe, whose supposedly
 waiting for wagner 277

fabricated antirevolutionary image of Wagner measures him unfavorably against

an early nineteenth-century Hlderlinian ideal of sobriety. (For Lacoue-Labarthe
the work of Hlderlin, his favorite poet, was a humble model of aesthetic humility
that contemporary art should emulate.) Lacoue-Labarthe insists that Wagner,
though he may have had revolutionary aspirations about art and society, is really a
mythological, technological, totalizing figure marking the end of high art, and
moreover one who created his own food blender that dissolved all the arts, all the
leitmotifs, and all the musical multiplicities of his scores into an undifferentiated
pure of endless melody. Did he eradicate difference and put an end to the idea

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of revolution while claiming to promote it? Is he no better than the kitsch of
waning empires that skillfully confuse gigantic size with content to persuade their
citizens that they still belong together, even though they have been alienated by
intense boredom and inertia?
At first sight it all looks like one of those refreshing anarchic moments typical of
post-1968 French philosophy that seem to move in endless circles. Badiou accuses
Deleuze and Guattari of a postmodernist liquefying of rigorous philosophical and
political logic and then accuses Lacoue-Labarthe of accusing Wagner of more or
less the same thing. And so on. But the whole debate is far more substantial than
that, especially when seen as a backdrop to the famous 1976 BoulezChreau
Bayreuth production of the Ring. Indeed, not unjustly Badiou practically claims for
France the privilege of being the very center of progressive thought about Wagner
in the 1970s and 1980s, if not for the past forty years. Boulez was personally ac-
quainted with many of the leading philosophical actors involved in the post-1968
debates, and a case could be made (as far as I know, it hasnt been yet) that the dis-
solving of conventional psychoanalytical reference points in Chreaus production
in relation to previous Bayreuth productions of the Ring by Wieland Wagner (which
transformed Wagners scenic rubble into clean-shaven quasi-psychoanalytical ar-
chetypes) is not dissimilar to the relation of Anti-Oedipus to Marx and Freud.
Badiou does not go this far, and indeed makes no mention of Anti-Oedipus. But
he does see the BoulezChreau Ring as decisive in successfully realigning Wagner
theatrically and musically in opposition to prevailing attempts to totalize him.
Boulezs conducting brought new insight to the relation between continuity and dis-
continuity in the music, while Chreau resolutely rejected any mythification of the
characters. Badiou uses the ugly word theatricalize to describe all this, by which I
think he means that Boulez and Chreau used theatrical means in a quasi-Brechtian
manner to make audiences acutely aware of the disparate reactionary forces that had
been (and still are) at work in presenting the Ring as bland, so-called universal myth.
The deliberate dismantling of the myth, in other words, instantly turned the Ring
into the work sharply critical of modern life that it really is.
This is nothing compared to what happens next. Steaming with indigna-
tion, Lacoue-Labarthe suddenly enters from stage left and roundly condemns the
278 john deathridge

demythologized, theatricalized Wagner of Boulez and Chreauto Badious

dismayas trumped-up window dressing, disguising the essential Wagner en-
crypted in all the old categories of mythology and nation. Also, the ingeniously de-
constructed alibi Boulez and Chreau created is really an illusion that makes
everyone all the more blind to the facthere Lacoue-Labarthe begins to sound like
Kittler, except with precisely converse value judgmentsthat the effects of
Wagners music are closely related to those of modern mass media. The swamping
of contemporary life with musicolatry (Lacoue-Labarthes term, suggesting that
music has taken up where idolatry left off ) is proof enoughagainst conventional

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wisdomthat music is more fundamental in the disciplinary organization of our
minds today than visual images are.45 In the name of egalitarian diversity, we are
bound to accept anything that calls itself music (rock, classical, heavy metal, blues),
but not in the spirit of a true democracy of taste that at least would allow the ques-
tion of whether David Bowie is better than Beethoven, or the other way around.
Rather, the new diversity marks the imposition of a pernicious universalism
whereby everyone is reduced to the same in the name of reconciliation, despite the
vicious antagonisms that continue unabated under the surface of modern society.
Media technology has mutated these tensions with sound amplification and kitsch
(among other means) into abstract neoreligious strivings for salvation, making
them at a deep subjective level effectively immune to ethical reason. Or to put it
another way: the effects of a Wagner music drama are no different from those of a
big rock concert.

VI
There are several intellectual gears working silently in the background of Badious
response in Five Lessons to the six main charges that philosophers have leveled
against Wagner. Unlike Nietzsches argument that Wagners music is theatricalized
in its very makeup, for example, Badiou prefers to regard theatrical speech in
Wagner, particularly his extended narrations, as the source of the possibility of a
new subjectivity.46 Yet to understand Badious line of thought fully, readers ideally
need to get acquainted with his difficult book Being and Event, which requires ad-
vanced knowledge of both philosophy and mathematics.47 In a world of easy-think,
he is happy to be uncompromising about the event in particular, defining it (this is
the simple version) as a subjective happening that blows a hole in the side of knowl-
edge, a chance encounter that occurs at a propitious moment in history, opening
up a path to the possibility of truth but not reducible to reasoned prediction or social
structure. The important point about, say, Wotans long narration in the second act
of Die Walkre is therefore not that it is a histrionic story we are bored with because
we already know it (including Brnnhilde, who listens with remarkable patience),
but that it reveals Wotans and the audiences subjective reactions to its retelling,
 waiting for wagner 279

the sudden appalling realization of the impossibility of acting on desire with

respect to its changing objects in the world of law, of creating freedom as a genuine
option, and above all the feeling of finding oneself in a void with no option but to
call up something that cannot be named out of nothing. It is a conundrum that goes
to the heart of the Badiou project.
The reason why the French and Russian Revolutions are each an event for
Badiou is not their devastating consequence, their Thermidor/Stalin moment, but
their respective origins in the chaos of the ancien rgime and feudal Russia, when
instinctive action was the only option. The event is essentially an aleatory moment,

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neither deducible outside a singular situation nor deducible from it without some-
thing unpredictable happening inside it. A helpful analogy provided by Daniel
Bensad is the Russian poet Osip Mandelstams remark that it is the hole at the
center of a ring of bread that matters, because that is what remains after the bread
is eaten.48 Badiou is a sworn enemy of Truth that treats, say, the French Revolution
as Kant did, as if it had universal relevance from the outside. He is more interested
in those of its participants who engender truths in the plural, each this time with a
first letter in lowercase, by their words and deeds. Even this is no guarantee.
Philosophy can be a tasting of truths, but it has to admit that its central category is
emptyand indeed has to be, in order for it to wait in vain for, and when it finally
arrives welcome, the event: the subjective chance happening of something that can
make a real difference in our lives.
Thus Wagner is an event for Badiou. Or is he? The question is possibly begged
in Five Lessons, because in The Logic of Worlds, the second installment of Being and
Event, Schoenbergs dodecaphony is declared by Badiou to be a moment of artistic
history that is truly the event that pronounces the truth of the post-Wagnerian
musical world.49 If we remain faithful to the Schoenberg-event, therefore, Wagner
is merely part of what one of Badious French colleagues, Quentin Meillassoux,
calls a retrospective genealogy of precursorsa precursor being something of
which we know only later that it came before.50 Meillassoux does not question
Badious Schoenberg-event. Nor does Kenneth Reinhard, who doubts that Badiou
sees Wagner as an event at all, reminding us that in The Logic of Worlds the evental
classicism of Haydn and the late romanticism of Mahler are added to the fore-
bears of the event that really matters: Schoenbergs serial sequence.51
The truth of Wagners sequence of harmonic music is apparent with the
advent of dodecaphony only after the fact. But once we begin to discard the old
model of music history relied on by Badiou and his cohorts, Wagner begins to
emerge as an event after all. Rather than reduce him to a musicological clich about
tonal instability, the Badiou of Five Lessons, to his credit, tends to focus more on the
new dramatic and theatrical possibilities created by Wagners music. Once the em-
phasis shifts from so-called harmonic music to drama and theater, the arguments
for the Schoenberg-eventat least for this readerbegin to weaken. The enormous
280 john deathridge

hope invested in dodecaphony by some composers and defenders of high art in the
1950s and 1960s has surely long since faded, and Schoenbergs impact on music
theater along with it. Wagners highly innovative coupling of music and immersive
theatrical experience, on the other hand, appears increasingly robust and relevant
to modern forms of drama, including cinema, though here Badiou enters an im-
portant caveat: on the cusp of a revival of high art, he writes, we must experience
Wagner uncoupled from totality,52 a kind of second coming beyond the total work
of art andpresumablyits myriad offshoots in the total stage (Bayreuth), the
total political state (Hitler and Riefenstahl), total worlds (Disney theme parks), and

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even total vacuums (Warhol).53 If this is possibleand here Badious faith is reso-
lutethen we are truly on the verge of the Wagner-event.
The only trouble is that to preserve Wagner as a fortuitous jewel of truth, as with
all the others in Badious formidable philosophical crown, he has to be separated
from real history, not to mention empirical research, which even Adorno integrated
into his Wagner study. Indeed, there could be no greater contrast between the two
philosophers than Badious determination to set fact-based knowledge to one
side versus Adornos willingness to make both peace and war with it, orput less
drasticallyto make empirical observation both a useful tool and a target of criti-
cism within his philosophical system.54 Meillassoux even speaks openly and one-
sidedly of the fact as evental change of the weakest scope, addingagain in
Badious spiritthat its consequences in this world are trivial and seen as null.55
Despite the gargoyles adorning Wagners legacy that any historically aware
person is bound to notice, the ripeness of the moment seems propitious for
Badiou: a consensus about Wagner currently does not exist, and the mostly circular
debates about him are indeed largely inchoate, leaving the space wide open for in-
tervention. Yet in the attempt to protect the integrity of the possible Wagner-event
from the facts, Badiou is unfortunately prone to needless overreaction. It is surely
wrongheadedly belligerent to claim to be fighting upstream against the opprobri-
um cast on Wagner as much by the majority of pro-Palestinian progressives as by
the state of Israel,56 when it is hardly difficult to understand how they feel about
him given what he wrote about the Jews and the ultimate victory of German art and
politics, among other things. Even on the supposedly esoteric level of music and
musicolatry (I agree with Lacoue-Labarthe and Badiou that it is not esoteric at all,
but central to an understanding of how we live), Badiou is willing to flatten history
and place Wagner tentatively in a kind of atemporal orbit of supposedly eternal
events that encircles philosophys empty category of Truth while also, paradoxi-
cally, remaining rooted in history. Having it both ways with Wagner has never really
worked, and it doesnt here. Surely it is an exaggeration to call Wagner truly the in-
ventor of a music of heartbreak57 and the creator of a music of waiting in vain58
when Mozart and Beethoven have greater claims. In terms of Badious own philoso-
phy, the skewed perception of historical precedence is puzzling. If a genealogy of
 waiting for wagner 281

precursors is integral to the emergence of the event, as Meillassoux argues, why is

there no mention of the Countesss arias from Le nozze di Figaro? Or of Florestans
dungeon ariamusic that Beethoven revised for the 1814 Fidelio to express still
more forcefully the dramatic power of the starving, exhausted hero waiting in vain
as he attempts to exhaust the possible by pressing on urgently toward sudden col-
lapse and nothingness at the scenes end?
Most problematic of all is the last lesson, during which Badiou stacks up many
objections of others to Parsifal with great clarity, but countermands them with the
unexpected question of whether a modern ceremony is possible,59 a new uncovering

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of the Grail, the ceremonys absolute crux.60 In an exasperatingly opaque passage,
he invokes a heterogenous multiplicity. . . composed of chance and nothingness,
which when exposed to material contingency. . . exposes the purity of the Idea pre-
cisely to nothingness, to disappearing beneath the contingency of its materials.61
All this means is that the inconvenient historical facts about Parsifal are a danger
but ultimately irrelevant to its subjective truth, a clear echo of ieks and
Mladen Dolars earlier and more robustly expressed claimalso tantamount to an
evasionthat the painful and tasteless details of Wagners ideological engage-
ments in the last years of his life merely distract from Parsifals true greatness.62
Set against all the historical evidence we now have concerning the genesis and in-
terpretation of the work, including Wagners racially inflected purity of the blood
that is effectively part of an ideological hotchpotch,63 as Badiou himself says, the
noble question about the failure or success of a modern ceremony in this divine
piece of late nineteenth-century schlock seems weak and irrelevant.
But that is probably the intention. After receiving advice from Henry Jones Sr.
about the Grail at the end of Spielbergs film, Indiana realizes that separating event
from history comes at too high a price and prefers not to fall over the edge of the
abyss on which the cup precariously rests, which he will certainly do if he takes
hold of it. Badiou makes a radically different decision. With Five Lessons, he grasps
the cup enthusiastically with both hands and falls with it headlong into the void,
the nothing, where his deep humanity feels most at home, waiting (in vain) for
something extraordinary to happen.

n OT ES
John Deathridge is King Edward Professor of
Music Emeritus at Kings College London.
This article began as a review of Alain Badious
book Five Lessons on Wagner in The Wagner Journal
(5, no. 1 [2011]: 1038) and provided the basis for a
more wide-ranging paper delivered at conferences
in Toronto, Leipzig, and Amsterdam in the
Wagner anniversary year 2013. The author thanks
all those who invited him to start and continue
this journey and who have responded in public
and private to its various stages. They include
David Trippett (who commissioned the original
review), Linda Hutcheon, Caryl Clark, Sherry Lee,
Helmut Loos, Maria Heyne (intrepid translator of
the conference papers German version in Richard
Wagner: Persnlichkeit, Werk und Wirkung [Leipzig:
Sax-Verlag, 2013], 31521), Krisztina Lajosi, Philip
Westbroek, and above all the editors of Opera
282 john deathridge
Quarterly, as well as the anonymous referee of the
article and the editor of this issue, Matthew
Wilson Smith, who encouraged revision and
expansion of the text still further into its present
form, providing astute comments and criticisms
on the way.
1. The role was eventually assumed by the
Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. Dieter
Borchmeyer, Wagner Literature A German
Embarrasment: New Light on the Case of
Wagner, trans. Stewart Spencer, Wagner [Journal
of the Wagner London Society] 12, nos. 2/3 (May/
September 1991): 55. The original German text
appeared two years later. See Wagner-Literatur
eine deutsche Misere. Neue Ansichten zum Fall
Wagner, in Internationales Archiv fr of Wagner in the 1960s and 1970s, Klein argues
Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 3.
Sonderheft (1993): 6.
2. Borchmeyer, Wagner Literature, 62;
Wagner-Literatur, 14.
3. See Ulrich Bartels, Werkgenetische
Wagnerforschung: Zur Bedeutung der Skizzen
und Entwrfe fr die Werkanalyse bei Richard
Wagner, in Der Komponist Richard Wagner im Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt:
Blick der aktuellen Musikwissenschaft, ed. Ulrich
Konrad and Egon Voss (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf und
Hrtel, 2003), 6580. Bartels criticizes me for
observing that many of the continuity sketches of
whole acts and works, which form the bulk of the
manuscripts, are reduced versions of the final
scores and hence not exactly useful in gaining
insight into the process of composition. Ironically,
the facsimiles reproduced in the rest of his article
tend to show, apart from important exceptions I
have always acknowledged, that this is indeed the
case, and moreover a sign of the machinelike
systematization behind Wagners concept of
musical theater I refer to later in this essay. See
also Alex Rehdings review of this problematic
book in Music and Letters 86 (2005): 14649.
4. For a full inventory of Wagners sketches and
drafts, together with lists of published facsimiles,
see John Deathridge, Martin Geck, and Egon Voss
eds., Wagner Werk-Verzeichnis(Mainz: B. Schotts
Shne, 1986).
5. Funded by the German Academy of Sciences
and Literature with Ulrich Konrad as general
editor, the project was inaugurated publicly on
November 14 and 15, 2013, at the University of
Wrzburg with a festive opening and symposium.
6. For a discussion of some of the issues, see
John Deathridge, Vollzugsbeamte oder
Interpreten? Zur Kritik der Quellenforschung bei
Byron und Wagner, in Der Text im musikalischen
Werk: Editionsprobleme aus musikwissenschaftlicher
und literaturwissenschaftlicher Sicht, ed. Walther
Drr, Helga Lhning, Norbert Oellers, and
Hartmut Steinecke (Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1998),
26374. See also Richard Klein, Carl Dahlhaus
oder Die Musikwissenschaft im Clinch mit dem
Musiktheater, in Richard Wagner und seine
Medien: Fr eine kritische Praxis des Musiktheaters,
ed. Johanna Dombois and Richard Klein
(Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2012), 5479. Early in his
career Dahlhaus exchanged views with Bertolt
Brecht in Zurich and for a time had an official
position as Schauspieldramaturg at the
Deutsches Theater in Gttingen. Despite this
experience of live theater, however, and
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notwithstanding the fact that Dahlhaus was
principally responsible for opening the eyes and
ears of German musicologists to the importance
energetically that he ultimately remained
beholden to a conservative metaphysics of
absolute music that hinders a critical awareness of
Wagners works as innovative music theater.
7. Theodor W. Adorno, Versuch ber Wagner
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1952). Also included in
Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 13, ed. Gretel
Suhrkamp, 1971), 7148. Published in English as
In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone
(London: New Left Books, 1981).
8. Theodor W. Adorno, Wagner, Nietzsche, and
Hitler, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 19, ed. Klaus
Schultz and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1984), 404. All three of Adornos
reviews of Newmans biography are reprinted in
this volume. See pp. 65152 for details of their
original publications in 1938 (in German) and in
1941 and 1947 (in English). The citation is taken
from the 1947 review of the fourth volume,
originally published in the Kenyon Review.
9. Urlandschaft des Faschismus. See
Selbstanzeige des Essaybuches Versuch ber
Wagner, published simultaneously with the
Versuch in 1952. Reprinted in Gesammelte
Schriften, vol. 13, 5048.
10. Adorno, Wagner, Nietzsche, and Hitler,
406.
11. Andreas Huyssen, Adorno in Reverse: From
Hollywood to Richard Wagner, New German
Critique 29 (SpringSummer 1983): 37. Repr. in
Huyssen, After the Great Divide (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1986).
12. The phrase anticipates the third order of
simulacra, in which in so-called postmodernity,
according to Baudrillard, the distinction between
representation and reality is finally broken down
and the traditional culture of meaning transmuted
arbitrarily into the aleatory order of signs. For an
example of how this affects his view of cultural
institutions, see his important (and devastating)

critique of the Pompidou Center in the Beaubourg
area of the fourth arrondissement in Paris: Jean
Baudrillard, The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion
and Deterrence, in Simulacra and Simulation,
trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1994), 6173, esp. 65. Adornos
phrase is borrowed with acknowledgment from
Paul Bekker, Wagner: Das Leben im Werke
(Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1924), 128.
See Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 90.
13. For a trenchant summary of and another
fierce attack on the (alleged) ties between fascism
and poststructuralism, see Richard Wolin, The
Seduction of Unreason, The Intellectual Romance
with Fascism: From Nietzsche to Postmodernism
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
One well-reasoned defense against the
accusationsalready long-standing when Wolins
book appearedis John P. McCormick, Derrida
on Law; Or, Poststructuralism Gets Serious,
Political Theory 29, no. 3 (June 3, 2001): 395423.
14. It is relatively easy, for example, to see from
two important and lengthy letters Wagner wrote to
August Rckel on January 2526, 1854, and August
23, 1856, that the Feuerbach-inspired category
love he ascribes as central to his thinking in the
first letter is blithely negated in the spirit of
Schopenhauer in the second. Yet the part of the
Ring text he was composing at the time was not
subject to any corresponding radical change.
Indeed, his obedience to the libretto, written in
any case before he read Schopenhauer, and the
footnote he inserted at the end of the Ring text in
his Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen
awkwardly justifying the abandonment of a large
chunk of the so-called Feuerbach ending and a
new one in the spirit of Schopenhauer, suggest
that ultimately his real objective had to do with
neither philosopher. More likely, to judge by his
views recorded by Cosima Wagner in her diaries
and until now never properly evaluated, is that he
held the authoritarian viewbrooking no
contradictionthat the ending encapsulates
entirely his own ideas for humanitys future. For
the letters to Rckel, see Selected Letters of Richard
Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry
Millington (London: Dent, 1987), 30013, 35659.
Ernest Newmans reaction to the footnote was
basically nonplussed and also valiantly unspecific.
The cause of Wagners dilemma about the ending
of the cycle, he wrote, was internal, and, strange
to say, musical. Ernest Newman, Wagner Nights
(London: Putnam, 1949), 669 (the emphasis is
Newmans).
15. Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner,
vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1976), 618.
waiting for wagner 283
16. See Yael Braunschweig, Schopenhauer and
Rossinian Universality: On the Italianate in
Schopenhauers Metaphysics of Music, in The
Invention of Beethoven and Rossini, ed. Nicholas
Mathew and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), 283304.
17. Alain Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, trans.
Susan Spitzer, with an afterword by Slavoj iek
(London: Verso, 2010). The present essay was
written before the appearance of Articulations:
Responses to Alain Badious Five Lessons on
Wagner, Opera Quarterly 29, nos. 34 (Summer
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Autumn 2013): 33567, an informative and
insightful collection of essays by Stephen Decatur
Smith, Michael Gallope, Brian Kane, Naomi
Waltham-Smith, and Kenneth Reinhard, with
different approaches to the one I have adopted
here.
18. Slavoj iek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent
Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999),
142.
19. Richard Wagner, An Friedrich Nietzsche,
ord[entlicher] Prof[essor] der klass[ischen]
Philologie in Basel, in Smtliche Schriften und
Dichtungen, Volksausgabe, vol. 9 (Leipzig:
Breitkopf und Hrtel and C. F. W. Siegel [R.
Linnenmann], 191114), 300 (my translation). The
rumor put about by Nietzsche after his break with
Wagner that the composer was at heart a Hegelian
was already debatable in the nineteenth century,
as Nietzsche himself must have remembered
from the spirit of this open letter, which received
wide attention on its first publication on June 23,
1873, in the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. See
Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner, in Werke,
ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol. 6,
pt. 3 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1969), 30.
20. See David Osmond-Smith, Berio (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991), 6364, and
Florivaldo Menezes, Un essai sur la composition
verbale lectronique Visage de Luciano Berio
(Modena: Mucchi 1993), which includes scored
excerpts. I am grateful to Amanda Carrick for
drawing my attention to Menezess publication.
21. John D. Caputo, ed., Deconstruction in a
Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida
(New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 10.
22. Ibid., 18.
23. So much is evident even within the limited
context of Wagners open letter, when he berated
the classical scholar Ulrich von
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, the most prominent
(and vitriolic) critic of Nietzsches treatise The
Birth of Tragedy (1872), for emptying out classical
studies and turning the field into an instrument
that no longer had any meaningful relationship to
the ancient world. The purpose of philology for
284 john deathridge
philologys sake, the high-minded puritanical
view that Herr Moellendorff had of the
subject, Wagner alleges, is that it serves solely
as an abstract and therefore highly effective
means of disciplining young people to make
them conform to moribund state-sponsored
values.
24. See Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum,
2004), 328. To demonstrate the rhizome concept
visually, the book opens with an illustration from
the score of Sylvano Busottis Five Piano Pieces for
David Tudor (1959).
25. Letter to August Rckel, August 23, 1856, in
Spencer and Millington, Selected Letters of Richard
Wagner, 358.
26. Friedrich Kittler, Weltatem: ber Wagners
Medientechnologie, in Das Nahen der Gtter
vorbereiten (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2012), 38.
Published in English as World-Breath: On
Wagners Media Technology, in Opera through
Other Eyes, ed. David J. Levin (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1993), 225. The essay was first
published in German and English in 1987 but
subsequently revised. All references to the
German text are to Kittlers final revision cited
here.
27. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari,
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane
(London: Athlone, 1984), 36.
28. Kittler, Weltatem, 45; World-Breath, 233.
29. For a brilliant and thorough examination of
this aspect of Wagner, see the study by David
Trippett, Wagners Melodies (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013).
30. Richard Wagner, Das Kunstwerk der
Zukunft, in Smtliche Schriften und Dichtungen,
vol. 3, 106. (My translation.)
31. Kittler, Weltatem, 43; World-Breath, 231.
32. Weltatem, 45; World-Breath, 233.
33. Weltatem, 43; World-Breath, 231.
34. Badiou, Five Lessons, 5762 and 7680 (the
emphases are Badious).
35. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta
(Figures of Wagner), trans. Felicia McCarren
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994),
122.
36. The phrase is Badious: see Five Lessons, 9.
37. Ibid., 8.
38. Ibid., 2.
39. Adam Schatz, Desire Was Everywhere,
review of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari:
Intersecting Lives, by Franois Dosse, trans.
Deborah Glassman, London Review of Books 32,
no. 24 (December 16, 2010): 912.
40. Badiou, Five Lessons, 43.
41. Gilles Deleuze, The Exhausted, trans.
Anthony Uhlmann, SubStance 24, no. 3 (1995): 3
28. (Originally published as Lpuis [Paris: Minuit,
1992].) The scant mention of Deleuze in Five
Lessons is odd, but attributable perhaps to the
positions pro and contra Deleuzes philosophy
already set out in Badious Deleuze: La clameur de
ltre (Paris: Hachette, 1997); published in English
as Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise
Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2000).
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42. Vergebliches Warten verbrgt nicht,
worauf die Erwartung geht, sondern reflektiert
den Zustand, der sein Ma hat an der
Versagung. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative
Dialektik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966), 366.
I have modified the translation in Negative
Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York:
Continuum, 1973), 375.
43. Deleuze, The Exhausted, 45.
44. Badiou, Five Lessons, 121.
45. Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta, 115.
46. Badiou, Five Lessons, 116.
47. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver
Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), see
esp. 17398. (First published as Ltre et
lvnement [Paris: Seuil, 1988].)
48. Daniel Bensad, Alain Badiou and the
Miracle of the Event, in Think Again: Alain Badiou
and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward
(London: Continuum, 2004), 96.
49. Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and
Event, 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (London:
Continuum, 2009), 85.
50. Quentin Meillassoux, History and Event in
Alain Badiou, trans. Thomas Nail, Parrhesia 12
(2011): 3.
51. Kenneth Reinhard, Badiou and the Subject
of Parsifal, Opera Quarterly 29, no. 34
(SummerAutumn 2013): 362.
52. Badiou, Five Lessons, 8283 (the emphasis is
Badious).
53. For a dazzling selection and discussion of
some of the Gesamtkunstwerks various growth
forms, see Matthew Wilson Smith, The Total Work
of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (New York:
Routledge, 2007).
54. See Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical
Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), 88.
55. Meillassoux, History and Event, 9.
56. Badiou, Five Lessons, xii.
57. Ibid., 91.
58. Ibid., 43.
59. Ibid., 147 (the emphasis is Badious).
60. Ibid., 153.
61. Ibid., 136.
 waiting for wagner 285

62. Slavoj iek and Mladen Dolar, Operas Love Parsifal, in Wagner beyond Good and Evil
Second Death (New York: Routledge, 2002), viii. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008),
See my response in John Deathridge, Strange 15977.
Love; Or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and 63. Badiou, Five Lessons, 137.

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