The Opera Quarterly Advance Access published January 31, 2014
Articulations: Responses to Alain Badiou’s Five
Lessons on Wagner
Badiou’s Wagner: Variations on the Generic
The Opera Quarterly pp. 1–6; doi: 10.1093/oq/kbt030
© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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In his Five Lessons on Wagner, Alain Badiou describes the philosophical reception of
Wagner—the “case of Wagner,” if you will—as nothing less than a “genre.”1
Indeed, Badiou has put his finger on something. Ever since Nietzsche abandoned
his defense of Wagner for star prosecutor, few texts on the philosophy of music
have traveled far from the genre. In those cases where Wagner is all but absent,
such as Jankélévitch’s Music and the Ineffable, the absence is telling. According to
Badiou, “Wagner created a new situation with respect to the relationship between
philosophy and music . . . because he instituted a special kind of philosophical
debate about himself that must inevitably also carry with it a broader debate about
music . . . about mythology, theater, and so forth.”2 We might say that Wagner
found a new way for music to make a claim on philosophy. The case of Wagner, spanning from Nietzsche to Adorno and Heidegger to Lacoue-Labarthe, is philosophy’s
countersuit to this claim, with Wagner as the defendant.
Five Lessons on Wagner is written as a variation on the genre, a robust defense of
Wagner’s artistic and philosophical significance against his critics. But while correctly identifying the case of Wagner as a philosophical genre, Badiou also reduces
it to something generic. To make the case for the prosecution univocal, Badiou
spends his first three lessons summarizing and redescribing the arguments for the
prosecution; but what results is a displacement of these arguments whereby they
never quite resemble the original.
As an example, take Badiou’s reading of Adorno. Instead of focusing on In
Search of Wagner or “Wagner’s Relevance for Today”—both texts that stand squarely
in the genre—Badiou analyzes Negative Dialectics in order to discover to what extent
Adorno’s philosophy lays the ground for his criticism of Wagner. The reading
focuses on Adorno’s critique of the identity principle: if the identity principle
brings about the unity of experience (in the Kantian sense) and the closure of
history (in the Hegelian sense), then one must affirm moments of nonidentity that
can resist unity and closure, since “the whole is the false”; the affirmation of nonidentity is an affirmation of difference; the concept (which grants the unity of experience) must give way to nonconceptual states, such as suffering, which register the
effects of totality on the subject; in artworks, form, where materials are shaped
into closure and unity, must be transformed into processes of becoming, that is,
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transformed into the informelle. In Badiou’s gloss, Adorno is suspicious of the identity principle’s universalism, since it
consists precisely in the imposition of the One; that is to say, an imposition of identity whereby one thing can apply to everyone . . . [by] reducing everyone to the same
insofar as the same is this universal norm. . . . The linked themes of the need for
appreciating differences, the respect for otherness, the criminal nature of identitarian disrespect of differences, and the inevitably violent will to universal sameness
are basic themes throughout Negative Dialectics.3
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By focusing on the issue of nonidentity, Badiou makes Adorno resemble more
familiar opponents such as Levinas and then deploys his standard objections. Like
Adorno, “Levinas maintains that metaphysics, imprisoned by its Greek origins, has
subordinated thought to the logic of the Same, to the primacy of substance and
identity.”4 It is for this reason that Badiou is “struck by how many contemporary
themes [Adorno] had worked out an approach to early on,” and how Negative
Dialectics “anticipates by twenty years themes that have become perfectly commonplace in contemporary ideology.”5 This damns with faint praise. By “contemporary,”
Badiou means the philosophy of difference, otherness, and multiculturalism—
exemplified in contemporary political theory, the politics of tolerance, and neoliberal democracy. By making difference sacrosanct, contemporary ethics and politics
undercut the possibility of identification with others around a political cause or
event. Badiou’s militant politics is cast in terms of immortality, greatness, and
truth, not finitude, victimization, and relativism.6
For Badiou, the identitarian critique of Negative Dialectics is also at the heart of
Adorno’s critique of Wagner. Adorno makes nonidentity into a musical duty, affirming only music capable of resisting the forces of closure and unity, that is, musique
informelle. Adorno’s critique of Wagner is characterized as, partially, a response to
Wagner’s desire for unification—unification of the arts into the Gesamtkunstwerk,
unification of the discontinuous recitative-and-aria opera into music drama, and unification of the musical syntax through the technique of the leitmotif. This critique of
unity is mutatis mutandis taken as a central tenet in Badiou’s summary of the prosecution: “Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe all agree in viewing
Wagner as someone who forces musical unity upon a variegated mass, upon difference whose essential character of otherness disappears or dissolves as a result. . . .
Unity in Wagner’s music is ultimately in the service of a vision . . . of the nation in
general and of the German nation in particular.” Finally, “the melodic line [endless
melody] ultimately subordinates all the differences to itself so that the One might reign
supreme.”7
In contrast to Badiou’s summary, it is instructive to revisit Adorno’s late essay,
“Wagner’s Relevance for Today.”8 There Adorno reassesses Wagner’s work, describing
its importance to the Schoenberg school and its potential for new music. The essay
articulations: responses to alain badiou’s five lessons on wagner
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offers a qualified defense of Wagner against his critics. To Badiou’s charge that
musique informelle is Adorno’s alternative to Wagnerian unity, I refer the reader to the
following: “[In Wagner’s music], the continuity is created, over long stretches, by an
unconstrained redrawing of the dramatic curve from moment to moment,” Adorno
writes. “The intact diatonic tonal structure makes it possible to dispense with surface
links. In this way, the music achieves a concreteness of the irregular that traditional
music never dreamed of. This would remain prototypical for Schoenberg, for Berg,
and for the most recent tendency: the trend toward structures that are free, yet
dense . . . it would provide the ideal model for a truly informal process of composition.”9
From what he says in the Five Lessons, Badiou would have to agree. He defends
Wagner against the accusation that the composer “reduces the melodic line to a principle of continuity (cf. the theory of ‘endless melody’) whose paradigm is actually the
artificial unity of lived experience,” a false unity that must be understood in terms of
Adorno’s critique of the identity principle.10 In defense, Badiou will say that Wagner’s
music is not identitarian, since “dramatic possibilities are created through the music.”11
Wagner’s music transforms the dramatic situation onstage, breaking its totality
through the creation of new possibilities. Like Adorno, Badiou finds in Wagner’s
music a resistance to closure. His compositional technique of leitmotif and “endless
melody” is nothing less than “a step in the direction of a totality-free greatness.”12
Why does Badiou get this wrong? He cannot plead ignorance, since he cites
“Wagner’s Relevance” in his text.13 Yet he mentions it only once in order to contest
Adorno’s reading of the “sentimental and trite” conclusion to Götterdämmerung.
Badiou knows the essay, yet he disavows how similar he and Adorno really are
about some central aspects of the case.14
The salient difference between Adorno and Badiou concerns the value of Wagner
today. While Adorno’s dialectical Rettung focuses on Wagner’s musical techniques
and the critical nature of art as Schein, Badiou focuses on the question of the “ceremony” and its relation to the event.15 In the final lesson Badiou turns to Parsifal,
arguing that the subject of the opera concerns the possibility of creating a new ceremony. The ceremony in mind is not the ruined Christian ceremony—epitomized in
Amfortas’s hauling out of the Grail—but the possibility of a ceremony that will be a
“sublation of Christianity.”16 It will be a ceremony “in which the collectivity will represent itself to itself without transcendence.”17 Readers of Badiou will recognize the
philosophy of the event behind of all this, the event that creates a new subject as the
repository of its effects. Because the event is neither a being nor a presence determining a situation from outside, it is without transcendence; rather, in its absolute contingency, the vanishing event makes possible the crystallization of a new collective
subject that will nominalize the event and transform the given situation.18
Badiou turns to the operatic representation of ceremony, before attending to the
ceremonial aspect of Parsifal’s performance at Bayreuth. First he notes that
Amfortas’s ceremony in act 1 is repeated by Parsifal in act 3, which has the same
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setting and “formal protocol.”19 Aside from the change of celebrant, the music plays a
crucial role in transforming Amfortas’s ruined ceremony into Parsifal’s new possibility. The music is what differentiates two otherwise formally identical acts. But how?
Midway through Badiou’s text he offers a subtle clue. He observes that, in Wagner’s
texts, “the story always comes undone little by little: even though it may be completely
narrative at the beginning, it gradually comes undone, as if it were being incrementally subjectivized under the pressure of the music.”20 In Badiou’s philosophy, a
subject is formed in the wake of an event. When an event occurs, a transformation of
the situation is suddenly possible, and “that which had been without any formal value
suddenly find[s] itself transfigured by an unforeseeable shift of the boundary recognized as form, even when de-formed, from what is relegated to formlessness.”21 A
faithful subject is the body where the effects of an event are realized, where the form
that emerged in the wake of the event is maintained and carried forth, despite all
resistance. The Badiouian subject, which does not necessarily designate an individual
but could be a whole community, is united around their attachment to the vanished
event, holding it up as the absent center around which to coalesce.
The difference between the event and its realization shapes Badiou’s analysis of
Parsifal at Bayreuth. While affirming Wagner’s creation of a new ceremony, Badiou
also criticizes him for confounding Bayreuth with its realization. If Parsifal dramatizes the ceremony from within the ceremonial setting, its realization was not quite
up to snuff: “Just think, with all the gussied-up bourgeois from around the world
who were in attendance, the ceremony was ultimately pathetic! No one applauded at
the end, everyone walked out of the theater without a word, and then they all went out
for sauerkraut—what else was there to do?—commenting that ‘the tenor wasn’t so
great.’ It is also possible to say that the priest wasn’t very good when Mass is over; that
doesn’t diminish the ceremonial nature of the ceremony.”22 The purity of the ceremony as
such can be separated from its realization. That is Badiou’s point: “In the case of
Parsifal, the self-reflexive nature of the ceremony (the ceremony of the ceremony) discredited or passed judgment on the validity of the ceremonial proposition as such,”
but that is no reason to dismiss “the validity of the ceremonial proposition as such.”23
Even if the implementation failed, the proposition was nevertheless correct.
The lesson we learn from Badiou’s reading of Parsifal is that Wagner articulated
the stakes of the ceremonial proposition, that is, the question as to whether a modern
ceremony—a ceremony without transcendence—is possible today. Wagner, like his
contemporary, Mallarmé, explores this question in the strongest possible terms. To
be sure, Badiou is unequivocal that Parsifal fails to realize this ceremony—“in my
opinion it does not succeed, from a formal point of view, in changing the ceremony
into something new”—but that does not diminish the force of the proposition as
such.24 To achieve a modern ceremony requires something greater, a new event. “It
could be said that an event today would be something that would make a ceremony
possible. In this sense, Parsifal is prophetic in its own way: Will an event occur that
articulations: responses to alain badiou’s five lessons on wagner
Brian Kane
Yale University
notes
Brian Kane is Assisstant Professor of Music at
Yale University and the author of Sound Unseen:
Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice.
1. Alain Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner,
trans. Susan Spitzer (London: Verso,
2010), 55.
2. Ibid., 56.
3. Ibid., 31–32.
4. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the
Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward
(London: Verso, 2001), 81.
5. Badiou, Five Lessons, 27, 31.
6. According to Badiou, the “commonsensical
discourse” of difference, which I am reading as
including Adorno’s commonplace and
contemporary themes, “has neither force nor
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will make a ceremony possible?”25 Despite the failures in implementation, Parsifal
articulates what is in Badiou’s eyes our current situation: the necessity and impossibility of a modern ceremony based on the event-to-come. This is a strange and fascinating lesson to have learned from Parsifal. It is one that posits a novel reading of
Parsifal while assimilating it to the terms of Badiou’s philosophical project.
But what criteria are to differentiate the supposed purity of idea (the “ceremonial proposition as such”) from its accidents? “I think we need to make a distinction
between what Wagner saw as his own greatness . . . and the place where his greatness really lies, namely, in the accomplishments that we can discern today.”26 But
what is to prevent us from simply reading into Wagner’s work the accomplishments we want to find? Where is the resistance to lie? (That was the point of
Adorno’s critique of the identity principle, after all.) The danger is one of tautology
—of simply finding in Wagner the Wagner we want to find because of our fidelity
to “redeeming the redeemer.” This seems to me the great and troubling wager of
Badiou’s reliance on the faithful subject—that, in the end, fidelity to the event
(whether already vanished or coming-to-be) trumps all other criteria. What matters
the most is the positing of a “primordial statement” and vigilant adherence to it. By
nominalizing the event it becomes a “commandment” that speaks to us “from the
heights of the authority granted it.”27 To be sure, the authority granted is not a transcendental authority; it comes from the subject who remains faithful, or from the
obscure or indifferent subject who tries to efface or ignore the consequences of
the statement. And thus the circularity: the greatness of the event is only great for
those who adhere to it, who assume its consequences. How are we to know where
Wagner’s greatness really lies? Without criteria, the answer is simply, “Because I
said so.” If the faithful subject believes it, then, for the faithful it is so.
In the end, Badiou’s analysis of Wagner is not unlike his reading of Adorno and
the genre of the case of Wagner before him. He makes a tautology of his interlocutors, to find in them what needs to be found in order to make them intelligible in
his terms. This is double-edged: on one hand, his opponents end up as interesting
as Badiou’s philosophy is; on the other hand, they end up as reductive.
5
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restoration and innovation wasn’t an easy thing to
do, and the decision between nostalgia and the
creation of something new had to remain
suspended” (ibid., 157).(5) Both critique the claim
that Wagner imposes a new myth on the masses,
or uses opera to aestheticize politics, to employ
Walter Benjamin’s phrase. Badiou notes that
Götterdämmerung ends with humanity onstage
after the gods have departed. Thus, “what is at
stake is not a mythological assertion with a view
towards creating a new myth . . . nor is it the
reconfiguration of the German people or the
totalization of the arts” (Badiou, Five Lessons,
129–30). Adorno argues that “Wagner makes the
case for myth, but accuses it through his creation”
(Adorno, “Wagner’s Relevance,” 590). The aesthetic
presentation of myth exposes myth as Schein.
15. On the relation of ceremony to the event, see
Badiou, Five Lessons, 159.
16. Ibid., 158.
17. Ibid., 155.
18. Badiou’s focus on ceremony reflects his
reading of Mallarmé, whom Badiou holds in
high esteem. He reads Mallarmé on the future
ceremony as prolepses of his philosophy
of the event. Parsifal is also read in
Badiouian-Mallarméan terms, producing another
displacement. Just as Adorno (and the Wagner
case) had be recast in terms of the “ethics of
difference,” Parsifal has to be recast in terms of
Mallarmé’s Livre so that Badiou can deploy his
standard set of philosophical operations. Mallarmé
assures us that, in a ceremony of the future,
magnificence will unfold (ibid., 150). But that future
ceremony can in no way be the prolongation of the
failed contemporary ceremonies of (according to
Mallarmé) the concert hall, the Catholic Mass, or
politics. The only way to attain a new ceremony is
to go beyond religion, to “sublate” it into a
ceremony analogous to religion but that will in no
way be religious. This Badiouian-Mallarméan
project is also identified as Wagner’s project.
Furthermore, it is recast in Badiou’s own language:
“Can there be a ceremony of the generic? That is
exactly what Mallarmé is talking about” (ibid., 150).
19. Ibid., 153.
20. Ibid., 96.
21. Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy,
trans. Louise Burchill (Cambridge: Polity Press),
83–84.
22. Badiou, Five Lessons, 158. Emphasis added.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 159.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 130.
27. Badiou, Second Manifesto, 84.
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truth.” (Badiou, Ethics, 20.)
7. Badiou, Five Lessons, 57–58.
8. Theodor Adorno, “Wagner’s Relevance for
Today,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002),
584–602.
9. Ibid., 592. Emphasis added.
10. Badiou, Five Lessons, 76.
11. Ibid., 89.
12. Ibid., 133.
13. Ibid., 106.
14. To substantiate this claim, I mention a few
of their shared views:(1) Both bemoan the
present-day state of Wagner productions, albeit
Badiou spends more time discussing particularly
successful stagings.(2) Both must find a way to
affirm aspects of Wagner’s work that are not those
of unity, closure, totality.(3) Both seek to revisit the
kernel of Wagner’s work in order to save its truth
content or truth procedure. “Redeeming the
redeemer” requires distancing Wagner’s own
views from his possibilities or “relevance” today.
Adorno’s anti-intentionalism always appears in
the guise of the truth content of artworks, which is
historical in nature but not beholden to
historicism. Badiou’s anti-intentionalism comes
across whenever he mounts his defense in the
Wagner case. Wagner needs to be “updated” or
“brought back again using different means”
(Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, 129, 83). This
updated Wagner is not to be confused with the
historical Wagner: “We need to regard Wagner as
someone who said something about high art that
can be understood in a different way today from
how he himself understood it, or in a different way
from those who constructed ‘the case of Wagner’
understood it” (ibid., 83).(4) Both see Wagner’s
faults. For Adorno, there is no dissolving of
Wagner’s conflation of true and false, which
makes the problem of staging Wagner today acute.
“His truth content and those elements that
legitimate criticism has found questionable are
mutually interdependent. The uncertainty with
which a self-conscious performance practice
approaches him is caused, not least of all, by the
fact that there is no way around this interweaving
of the true and false in his work” (Adorno,
“Wagner’s Relevance,” 596). For Badiou’s side, the
knotting of true and false appears in Parsifal as the
indeterminacy of two kinds of ceremonies, the
restoration of an old order and the innovation of a
new procedure. “There is no clear distinction
between restoration and innovation, or between
nostalgia and the creation of something new”
(Badiou, Five Lessons, 156). “The real conclusion of
[Parsifal]” is that “making a choice between
