Badiou pro Wagner

Abstract

This essay will be concerned with Badiou’s account of Wagner. In the first instance, it will pursue or track its thought, trace its structure, follow its development. Of course, it is only fairly recently that we have become aware that Wagner might have a place in Badiou’s canon. Badiou’s major philosophical works pay no attention to the composer. The exact significance of Wagner within a philosophical configuration of art and artists established by an `aesthetics of distinctions’ and ascribing a specific and distinct weight and meaning to any given element is consequently not finally clear. At a certain point, the essay will therefore try to place Badiou’s account of Wagner a little more precisely within the intricate architecture of his thought, to ground it more fully than Badiou himself has up to this point. Having done so, I shall ask how far one might want to swerve from the course of Badiou’s argument.