badiou: adorno&wagner

On the Connection Betwee _ Negative Dialectics an:

a Particular Assessment of Wagnel'*

ALAIN BADIOU

tn,mslated by JAKE BEILONE, BARBARA P. FULKS, PETER BRADLEY

The topics of these two sessions, whose general title concerns Adorno and music, are a little diffuse because, to be truthful, my greatest subjective interest in this affair is the question ofWagner today. I will approach this problem beginning with the question _ of using Wagner as possible contemporary analyzer (as he has been in a recurring fashion in the past) of the function of music in philosophy, and, in a much larger way, in ideology.

Thus the objective that I will undertake of going through Adorno does not concern the fundamental, previously unknown pieces of information on-the subject, but rather the contemporary question ofWagner. Thus this will not be concerned with Wagner as an historical question, but rather the contemporary function of Wagner in the general relationships among music, opera, theatricality and ideology.

I want to begin by pointing to an underlying thesis-thatl myself will not demonstrate-according to which music is a fundamental operator of coritemp()rary ideological apparatuses. I take

Adomo's Negative Dialectics and Wagner 73

. here in its most indistinct sense: neither art, nor intellectuality. ~~ ght but rather that which declares itself as music. There ~r ou ve:. 00 other more fonnal definition to seek for our topic. asmoreo • · · ed' th '1 d 1 · b ' We find here, as mdicat m e tit e, a ec arat1on y Pfill' pe Lacoue-Labarthe in his Musica Ficta, subtitled Figures of ~ JP~r(1991). He proposes in this book a series of reflections on 1he ~~nstitutive relationships of music in general-and of Wagner in particular-to contemporary ideologie~, and mo~ prec~ely to political ideologies. Lacoue-Labarthe pomts out tlus cruc1al and vital function of music in contemporary ideological formations:

To the extent that nihilism has spread since Wagner, music, with its powers still stronger than those Wagner himself gave it has not ceased to invade our world and manifestly to take' the path of every other form of art-including the art of the image. ·Perhaps a principal element of response is that ''musicolatry" has taken the path of idolatry.

This text is edifying because it too proposes, the thesis according to which music plays the role of vital vector in contemporary ideological apparatuses: it poses that we live in an epoch of "musicolatry." This term is interesting: music is an idol, it is situated on the path of idolatry, and finally, Wagner is the main culprit. It is in this era "since Wagner" that David Bowie, rap, etc. have arrived! And so assigned to Wagner is what could be called a function of musical terrorism. I will return to this point.

One can enumerate numerous indications tllat lead in this direction, as for example the thesis that in reality music is more important than the image. At bottom, the conventional thesis is that we are in a world of the image, and that ideological sovereignty is imparted to it. For Lacoue-Labarthe, music is truly more fundamental than the image in fue mental discipline that organizes the contemporary world. I am in agreement with fuis thesis and I would like, as an entrance, before taking up the quarrel between 4.domo and Wagner, to offer some disparate indications apart from any kind of a coherent fueory.

74 lacanian ink

First of all, it's clear that, since the 1960s, music has been identifier of youth at the level of the masses, and that this fu . an f 'd "fi . . h . . nction o 1 ent1 cation ts now ere, not even m Iconography or in ·

1 . . . . Th d b Cinema as c ear as 1t IS m mus1c. ere un ou tedly exists a "music 1 ~

. . f . d" . f o atry constttutlve o a certam rmenston o youth that, in a well defi sequence, one can clearly and justifiably connect to techn1·q nedf

. . ueso mass reproductiOn of mustc developed a short half-century

S dl . f . . ago. econ y, music unctiOns as a VItal organizer of wh

we migh~ c~l networks. of communica~on: technical networks : commumcatton are put m place as transits of music, exchanges of music, accumulations of music. I find extraordinary these appara. tuses boasting of their ability to hold fifty thousand, one hundred thousand, one hundred and twenty thousand songs, which assumes an extraordinary "musicolatrical" memory. At the same time, music is one of the dominant forces of financial circulation.

Thirdly, it is an operator of renewed forms of consensual sociality, from the great gatherings (festivals) of the nineteen sixties up to the developments that we know today (cf. raves, etc.). More generally, music, which had always been confined to the fringes of this role, has seen its scope become generalized in an extraordinary manner, such that it has become an operator of consensual sociality in youth and even beyond.

Fourthly, I think that music has played a very important role in the liquidation of the aesthetics of distinction. I call aesthetics of distinction those aesthetics which consider that between art and non-art there might be rational, possibly intelligible borders, that there might be transmissible criteria there. We know well that today this thesis is attacked on all sides, to the profit of what I would call an aesthetic of indistinction, so that, in sum, we must accept the set of what appears under the sign of music as partitioned by journalistic rubrics. If you search, for example, for "music," you find "classical," "rock," "blues." Evidently "classical" designates that which formerly would have been listed in a differe~t way, following the criteria of artistic distinction. It was in musiC

Adomo's Negative Dialiectics and Wagner... 75

t this protocol of presenting the aesthetics of indistinction first ~ ed · to the regime of a democracy of taste and a democracy St~ttlt~ty. It has even become a political theme: Berel Lang of p trUcted a theory of music showing this egalitarian plurality. cons Music has also been a powerful force in musicographic historicism, that is to say, in a conservative and musicographic connection to the past. Here, o?e ~nds first of ~~ the B~ues, with a certain reactionary valonzatton, rep~sentmg_ mus~c a~ an integral restoration of the p~t, as ';hat was ~ts .effective htstoncal essence, effective before bemg reVIewed, remterpreted ...

For all these reasons,! believe that we can take, as our first entrance, this idea of a singular function of music in regard to the articulation among artistic forms in the large sense, and dispositions or ideological resonances.

But what does Wagner, and particularly Wagner in France, have: to do with this affair? This concerns Lacoue-Labarthe 's arguments in favor of the thesis according to which music would play a quite singular aesthetic role in the contemporary universe. This problem of the French debate over Wagner will constitute therefore our second entrance.

1\vo very basic reference points. 1. First of all, at the end of the 1970s the representation

of Wagner's Tetralogy that takes ~old in Bayreuth is understood, particularly by the Gennans, as the French representation, with staging by Pierre Boulez, directed by Patrice Chereau, and, among the artistic counselors, Fran~ois Regnault. Consequently, this French team represents a force of penetration into the heart of the temple. if I may say, because a force of representation is deployed here and received quite positively. One shouldn't be provoked by this remark on the "Wagner question".

What is truly striking is that this representation ofWagner's ~etrtzfogy at the end of the 1970s represents, in my opinion, a mutatlO~ tn the very order of Wagnerian representation. We are not gomg to examine here the history of Wagner's stagings-a very

76 lacanian ink

tortuous and complex history indeed, but passionate and t truth, fundamental. To understand it, all we need is to ' 0 tell the h d.. f h . fB remember t e con 1t10ns o t e re-opemng o ayreuth after the war-h

ones to be sure. itrsh

The thing was, to say the least, not very simple: ev knows the ideological compromises of Wagnerism with Ne~one the person~ co~promises of the Wag~er family with the F:: the Wagnenan 1dol~try of a wh?le section of Nazi personnel, etc. Therefore the quest10n of knowmg what was going to happen w: strictly speaking, fraught. The solution was proposed by Wiel~ Wagner: musically, nothing was changed; this is the old guard th ceremonial music went on, nothing was modified, but the sta~in; was radically altered by Wagner's grandson. What was, at bottom Wieland Wagner's calculation? This point is very important, sin~ all the discussions, which we will see gravitate around Wagner through Lacoue-Labarthe and Adorno, are also structured around these types of questions .

.I would say that Wieland Wagner intended to divest Wagnerian representation of any indication of a national mythology, and to replace it with what we could call the pure "mytheme"; that is to say, at the mercy of an operation of abstraction, of the "mytheme" disconnected from the national. This consists of purifying the stylistics of Wagner's representation such that the set of previous ideological indices'are eliminated in order to obtain something absolutely trans-national, atemporal, and therefore Greek in a sense. The question ofknowing in what measure Wagner was a repetition of Greek tragedy is going to play a very important role in the discussion that follows. But Greek here must be understood in a non-national sense, which indicates to us that this discussion on Greece, being an aesthetic discussion on the Grecian paradigm, is bound up with the question of knowing whether or not this paradigm can and must be a national paradigm. We obtain then what one could call a non-mythological presentation ofWagner. ifmytholo~v signifies the founding myth of a nation or a people.


And this operation is a success, in_ the sense that the s~g l',VJeland wagner is first of all aesthetically accepted (With the

by . n of protests from the conservatives of the Bavarian bourexcepuo a1 hi . . h . · ): it is considered as a re scenograp c mventton, so muc geoJSte ur. . . "th N . mat the historicity of the nagnenan compromtse Wl aztsm ~into the background. W~er finds himself thus redepl~yable, J,ut back on the stage in the strict sense through these operations of

Wieiand Wagner. To my eye, it is precisely in that background that the French

Wagnerofthe end of the 1970s is situated, which is still the epoch of post-May '68, of political activism, of the rediscovered vitality of the idea of revolution, etc. I maintain that the representation Boule11Cbereau/Regnault is a presentation ofWagner in my demytbologized sense. Here, it is not so much about the passage from a national myth to a non-national or purified myth, but an attempt to ttuly dramatize Wagner, that is to exhibit the play of the disparate forces that dramatize it, to refuse the sacralization of the figures. We have then a dramatization ofWagner, but we note here that the dramatization is opposed to the integrative idea of a mythology.

In the same way, Boulez's direction seeks to make readable not the continu~ flow of Wagnerian musicality, but on the contrary, to show its underlying discontinuity. Seen closely, Wagner is strictly speaking a very complicated play of small cells that are transformed and deformed; there is therefore no reason to necessarily superimpose on him an abstract theory of infinite melody which would consist in saying that the pathos is primary. We are dealing as always with Boulez, in a rather analytic direction, that is to say a direction that seeks to make understood the complexity of Wagnerian operations behind the melodic flow in the service of mythological sacralization.

Then a new Tetralogy emerges in the double sense of a dramatizing scenographic presentation (non-mythologizing) and a me1od~c ~resentation which strives to articulate in a different way the pnnctples of conti.nuity and discontinuity in the Wagnerian

78 lacanian ink

undertaking (it's not about replacing the continuous . h d. . b . tb' ~ ~ tscontmuous, ut presenting err relationship in anoth

. erwayi Wagner's melodic orchestral and vocal technique). n In sum, at the end of the 1970s, a completely new ph

enon appeared: the "French" (with as many quotation marks enorn. wants ... ) as the ideological option of the moment. "The Frenc~ one a hold ofWagner not simply in the regime of commentary as th g~ done with Baudelaire, Mallarme or Claudel previously, but u:~ the regime of din:ct interve~tion ~Wagnerian presentation and its renew~. And this was the mte~tion ~f ~e directors of Bayreuth at the time: to produce a new discontinwty, like that of Wieland Wagner, who had proposed a kind of regime of precaution, rendering possible the re-opening of Bayreuth without too much turmoil. I don't want to be always relating Wieland Wagner's undertaking, which I myself have passionately admired, to such a protocol of precaution, but it is no doubt equally readable in those terms.

2. Afterwards, in 199l,Philippe Lacoue-Labartbe's Musica Ficta appears. The essays themselves date back to the 1980s. For the figure ofWagner, the turn between The Ring, ChereautBoulez/ Regnault at the end of the 1970s, and Musica Ficta, 1980-90, is quite significant. Musica Ficta is inscribed in our field of investigation since his latest study, constructed from Adomo's commentary on Schoenberg's Moses and Aaron, is dedicated to Adomo. What is quite striking is that Lacoue-Labarthe says that Adorno hasn't yet attained sufficient anti-Wagnerism, that he has not yet managed to free himself completely from Wagnerism. Thus one has here a theoretical protocol of anti-Wagnerism of extreme theoretical violence. We are going to see why and how.

I believe one can uphold that, since the 1980s, a sort of symptomatic reversal ofWagner has been produced, accompanying other phenomena of reversals, which sweeps aside the dramatized and analytically re-equilibrated Wagnerism proposed at the end ~f the 1970s, to the benefit of a particularly violent and subtle anti· Wagnerian denunciation of the Wagnerian construction. Let us say

Adomo'sNegative Dialiectics and Wagner... 79

ds about Lacoue~Labarthe's book which concerns the set a few wor · h · 1 d" Ad -,,. t' ns we are discussmg ere, me u mg orno. ofques 10 - • • - What is the structure and the aim of the book? It descnbes

an·os four conflicts, four contentions with Wagner or four fourscen ' . ·a1 tizable admirations of Wagner: the case of Baudelatre, the :s:~f Mallanne, the case of Heidegger-Nietzsche (considered in this respect as the same) and the Adorno case. Two Frenchmen

and two Germans. These four studies, which indicate four different relation-

ships to Wagner, converge towar~ the i~ea that despite th~ apparent conflict with him-wholly mamfest m the figure of nvalry for Mallarme, in Heidegger's reluctance to break with Wagner, and with Adomo in the figure of surpassing him- these thinkers remain captive to what is essentially harmful in Wagnerism. This is an a fortiori demonstration, and this is what makes for the extreme violence of the book: one envisages the case of explicit anti-Wagnerians or of people who, failing to think of themselves as anti-Wagnerians, compete with Wagner as did Mallarme (for whom it is a matter of showing that poetry is more apt than the Wagnerian drama to accomplish the tasks that the epoch demands), and the anti-Wagnerism of these cases is show~ to be absolutely insufficient. They have not reached the true crux of the Wagnerian operation.

What then is this crux ofWagnerism that, in these renewed critiques of his music, of his theatricality, of his operas, has not been reached? In the eyes of Lacoue-Labarthe, it is the Wagnerian system as bearer of the aestheticization of politics; it is Wagner as transformation of music into an ideological operator for which it is always a matter of constituting a people in art, that is to say a figuring or a con-figuring of a politics. Here a vision of Wagner as ~roto-fascist is affirmed (I take the expression here in its descriptt~e sense), in that he invented a figure of closure in the opera (we wtll return to this point) by assigning to it the configuration of a destiny or of a national ethos of such a type that it would constitute the definitive political function of the aesthetic itself.

80 lacanian ink

Wagner would have accomplished this through which, for Lacoue-Labarthe, is essential: the restoratio: :resture art. The fundamental lesson that Lacoue-Labarthe draws fu gr~

h. h · 1 Ad • · h · · orn thiS w tc 1s very c ose t~ orno s, IS t at It zs no longer possible t' create art under the sign of great art, and that at bottom the 0 . . f "d . great ~perative ~ contemporary ru:t r~SI es ~n restraint as the key norma. tlVe value, m the modesty of Its mtentions (we will retum agai this very delicate and subtle point that Adomo presents in his~ ner). Wagner would have been the last great creative figure capabl of supporting his subject i~ the regi_me of great art, and through~ he would have even unveiled outright that under the sign of great art, the contemporary world can only produce extremely reactive political configurations, dangerous if not criminally suspect.

In certain texts of Lacoue-Labarthe, not just Musica Ficta the violence is explicit in respect to Wagner, who is really consid~ ered as the unsurpassed and originary paradigm of fascist art. This implies that the demythologized Wagner, dramatized and restored to its underlying discontinuity (which was that ofBoulez/ChereauJ Regnault), is to be taken as makeup, a costume, a fancy dress slapped on an essential Wagner who seems coded in the ancient categories of mythology: of the national, of the aesthetic, of the sublime, etc. One enters here into a very complicated debate. We'd to listen to a little Wagner to decide the matter.

My thesis is the following: the movement which Lacoue· Labarthe proposes is in a certain sense the inverse of what it announces. It starts with evidence not truly interrogated and reaches the proof that Wagner is at base an inscription, a foundation in the theologico-political field, and that the essence at last revealed by this Wagner, evident in his effects, resides in the aestheticization of the political, proto-fascism, etc. The manoeuvre that LacoueLabarthe proposes is to demonstrate, knowing Wagner, that the debates around this Wagner indicate that the Wagnerian undertaking is an undertaking of pro to-fascist aestheticization of politic~· Th i.; j<;

why Lacoue-Labarthe can say, from the beginning of his book, that


. himself is not the object of this book, but rather the effect ~:;:OOuced." The effect, which as I have said at the beginning tba 'de···ra· ble since at the end of the day, as Lacoue-Labarthe wasconst •

xpllcitly, Wagner is the founder of the first art de masse. says e If not Wagner but the effects that he produced is the object ~ftbe boOk, it is because in a certain sense it is possible to apprehe d Wagner or to know what operates under the name of Wagner m:ough the effects that he produces ~d that one ~ust point out. And yet, as I see it, Lacoue-Labarthe s book functions absolutely in tbe inverse sense; that is to say that he pre-scribes a certain Wagner from a theory of the political as aestheticization. Reading Lacoue-Labarthe's book, you come away with, like it or not, a certain ideaofWagner-this book carries on about Wagner, to the nth degree! How can _a book that discusses the effects produced by Wagner not infer a certain Wagner? It's absolutely impossible, and here this Wagner is inferred by Lacoue-Labarthe 's hypotheses on the political as aestheticization and as a consequence of the aesthetic function of art in the political. An interesting aspect, for we find again this type of operation in another form in Adomo. It is essential to shrug off, to enliven the distinctive traits of this construction of a cert!W Wagner, because that's what it's all about: a certain Wagner is constructed or reconstructed under the influence of a speculative philosophical determination concerning in reality the theologico-political, or, if one prefers, the aestheticization of tbe political, that is to say the political as artistic religion (which is a possible definition of fascism).

The distinctive traits this Wagner is constructed with must be taken away from Wagnerin one way or another. It's very much a construction ofWagner that we participate in and, Wagner being a key name in the field of ideology, it is important to know how the name ofWagner is ~rating, that is to say how the name "Wagner'' was constructed.

T wiJJ indicate four characteristics of this construction which appear time and time again in discussions on Wagner. And

82 lacanian ink

if one allows for this construction, one will admit as Well • is in turn a deconstruction, for I am going to attempt to und:at ~ Wagner after having shown how he's constructed. this

1. The first trait, perhaps the most obvious (Maiiarme. particular participates in this construction), is the function of : in which Wagner is considered as emphasizing or formal~ . •

thl . I' . gm a necessary way a my o ogtca mstruction of representation that is to say propping up the representative universe and all of~ on founding myths, native myths, whose function is to insti: However, while this is undeniable, the staging Boulez/Chereaui Regnault demonstrates that it's not necessarily an essential trait of Wagnerian construction.

I am surprised to see that Lacoue-Labarthe doesn't mention this attempt, nor what he sees as its eventual failure: again it would be necessary to critique this representation in a rational and well-argued way in order to say that its failure means that the mythological is essential in the Wagnerian construction. No one supports the idea that it's absent, but this isn't sufficient. The question is to know what is the essential and organic link between Wagner's artistic construction and these undeniably present mythological supports. There were and there still are today attempts to present Wagner that free him from this mythological gravity and which show, then, that one of the potentials of the Wagnerian artistic enterprise is to not be the mythological, in the sense Lacoue-Labarthe shows us.

The three other characteristics are more precise, more pertinent, completely decisiv~ as well, and concern the function of technique (something like the quantitative role), the function of totalization. and the function of unification or synthesis.

2. The function of technique: this signifies, in the eyes of Lacoue-Labarthe, that one of Wagner's constitutive traits is his use of the maximum means of opera, of orchestra, of music. With Wagner, according to Lacoue-Labarthe, "the musical amplification and the aesthetic accumulation are at their limits and because

Adorno's Negative Dialiectics and Wagner... 83

ce is a resource of amplification, it is technique in its 1iJeteSOUJ:1 • • . d db h 'd h h ';· , The motif of techmque IS mtro uce y t e 1 eat at t e essence. · · 1 · · f h :ffi ffi tion of means in Wagnens enure y m service o t e e ect, JlllJ ~ ~tbe moment an amplification is in service of an effect, one an 1 a·timately speak of technique. Lacoue-Labarthe writes again can ·~e truth is that the first mass art had just been born, through ::ic (through technology)." So ~agner, at the whim of this quick

alogy between music and techmque, would be the ancestor of an sic as technical power, not in the sense of technology, but in the mu th' al f · nse of a production of effects as e mtern norm o the artistic :hema and requiring the most considerable means.

One could, moreover, develop this aspect even beyond what Lacoue-Labarthe says: one could say that if Wagner needed a new construction of the theatre, of the maximal strengths of the orchestra, singers for whom the characteristic techniques are beyond meir means, etc., it's not the result of chance or the stylistic traits of his art; it pertains to the fact that in Wagner the correlation between amplification of means and effects of production is the essence of the subject. So Wagner creates here the first mass art, inasmuch as this creation is definitively a technical creation.

Lacoue-Labarthe reminds us that this repeats an idea of Nietzsche's (who has many excellent ideas and many less excellent ones ... ), from a text where he explains that the decadence of Western music started with the opening of Mozart's Don Juan, where one finds, already, this full mobilization of the resources of the orchestra to produce an effect of terror and the sacred. So, the opening of Don Juan was originally Wagnerian, it was a sign of Wagner within Mozart-which is not, necessarily, false, even if one is loath to accept Nietzsche's conclusions from it.

This first point was articulated, very early on in a trivial form: "Wagner makes a lot of noise," "one only hears the brass," etc., said in a sophisticated form: amplification of musical means taken in their maximality in view of the technical production of an effect and the creation of mass art.

84 lacanian ink

What is striking is that Lacoue-Labarthe makes . th 1 d . . f h no attempt to examme e rea estmat10n o t e means in the w, .

. And . . . . agnenan enterpnse. yet It IS an mterestmg question: if it's und . th h . . . .. . en1abJe

at t ere IS a certam extensive requisition of means by Wa . · f h "fi ffi h · gner tn vieW o w at spec1 c e ects are t ey requrred? If one sid '

this question, one is limited to the consideration of the e-I'Cesteps . uect of

the effects: the effect 1s the effect, and so on . The e~ect · . .. w ffi. produce a certam effect, but all the same, we cannot assume th this ~counts for the extreme variability ofWagnerian music whi a~ is, contrary to what is sometimes said, an extraordinarily movi~ music. The question of the effect is, in truth, extremely subtle, an: the requisitioning of means to this effect is itself quite Variable. The Wagnerian orchestral totality is characterized by divisions, by strong diverse ramifications and doesn't appear at all as an invariable massivity. This question, the question of the effect, has not yet arisen, and yet this is the one we're waiting for in suspense: if there is truly a technical requisition singularly Wagnerian, a Wagnerian innovation, we must first decide on the nature of the effect, not simply agree on the fact, doubtless and impoverished in the end, that there is, indeed, an effect taking place, a fact which is, in my opinion, insufficient to swallow up the whole ofWagner in the figure of the technical.

3. The function of totalization: here too Lacoue~Labarthe contents himself with Wagner's programmatic dimension,lodged in the ambition of a total work of art. The expression is undoubtedly used by Wagner, who has this will for the total work of art, and who, consequently, says Lacoue-Labarthe, effectuates a gesture of closure: "the totalizing gesture is a closing gesture."

And yet, the watchword of the total work of art remains merely a watchword: if it is effectively present in Wagner's programmatic dimension, does this mean one can therefore reduce artistic enterprises to their agenda? This is where I often guide a recurring discussion. If one takes seriously the fact that art i.s a process of creation of something (I will say for my part the creation


th b tit's of little importance here ... ), obviously one cannot ofttU • 0 • d 1 . th 'd . I' ~· 't to the programmatic ec aratlons at gu1 e It. m not rdi~C: ~at they are indifferent, that they aren't party to the general saytn" fevaluation but pointing to the systematic character in the sysremo ' . .

atic dimension m regard to what Is the real process of the ~~g is in my eyes a contemporary vice, all the more negative unb e it's the programmatic dimension of an artist. Certain artists wen d' . th 1 0 ~ nnulateinanities,inclu mg ones concermng emse ves... ne c:nnot say that the work is not directly expressive of psychology

d that what the agenda says is revelatory of the truth of the work an tradi at the same time. It's con ctory.

The ambition of totalization is certainly there in Wagner, but we are dealing here with a programmatic indication and it would be necessary to demonstrate in what sense the Wagnerian creation is a totalization. I leave this question open, which doesn't resolve the programmatic indication of totalization, all the more so as Lacoue-Labarthe himself doubts that this totalization is effective. Thus, on the transformation of the scene, he declares that in reality Wagner has not brought about great upheavals, and that they are not included in his will to totalize. He says, for example, that Wagner proposed no veritab~e transformation of the Italianate scene, which is a very contestable passage. Briefly, here is the contradiction: to impute first of all a great mechanism of totalization to Wagner, then to deny that this totalization is operative. This proves that it's necessary to look at it closer, to examine what the operations of totalization are and to understand what totalization effectively means in the Wagnerian construction, which is of a whole other scope... What's more, one could say, in the reading of certain of Wagner's indications on orchestral direction, on the state of the acting of the actors of his time, that he also had the ideal of restraint, for generally he finds all this very inflated, noisy, bad, etc. . On the other hand, Lacoue-Labarthe says that this totaliza~JOn refers to Wagner's systematic nature: obviously this is Wagner's tdentifk:ation with Hegel behind the scenes. That is, Wagnerian

86 lacanian ink ·

systematizing is in reality the musical equivalent of the He eli system, and Wagner would put an end to a certain regime of g ~ the history of Western music exactly as He gel had, in a certa~l'eram

d . f h . Jnman. ner,putanen toareg~meo metap ySics:Wagnerwouldbeq to history a task as impossible as that which Hegelleft to hi:eatb

hi h . . . h h suc-cessors, w c consists m pursumg w at as already been achieved.

One could say, not only because of the escalation in the means of expression (which Nietzsche denounced in the name of an art subordinated to the search for the effect) but even more so because of its systematic character in th~ strict sense, that Wagner 's work has bequeathed to ~sterity a task as impossible as that which the philosophy of Gennan idealism (Hegel) has left to its successors: to follow what has been achieved.

Here the judgment is one of an extraordinary ambiguity: is it that this achievement is a programmatic and fallacious achievement

• or is it an effective achievement? What is said here? Is it said in historicity, or is it that the totalizing ambition, like fictive ambition, fallacious and ideological, leaves open what it pretends to close? An indecision characteristic of a certain type of Heideggerian thinking: an indecision between an element which would be in truth programmatic and a historicity which would be effective. Is there a Wagnerian closure of opera? This is certainly a good question, I don't deny that, but we see here that it cannot be posed in these terms. If there is a Wagnerian closure of opera, it will be necessary to clarify the intra-musical, intra-scenic, intra-theatrical reasons by means of which it effectively realizes a closure of opera, reasons that do not rest exclusively upon repeated Wagnerian declarations concerning the total work of art.

4. The function of unification: here we move a little closer to the music ... Just as Lacoue-Labarthe refers to the totalization of the entire work of art, so, concerning unification, he refers to the thematic of the infinite melody, Wagner constructing the opera around it. Lacoue-Labarthe interprets this as a saturation, anJ ill;.,


. . resting point. Infinite melody is, according to him, "too as.~ mte ·c .. that is to say a music that obstructs itself by satura-much musi ' . . th ame of which is infimte melody. oon. e n ur. I' · th · l Saturation means that vvagner e Immates e arttcu ated irred 'bility of speech, that is that the play of the gap between

u~~d music constitutive of the possible theatricality of opera ~one by Wagner in infinite melody, inasmuch as the latter is a :;;ying saturation by music of the totality of parameters. So "too

h music" as Lacoue-Labarthe understands Wagner, at least in :way be judges him, signifies that music creates a synthetic function of the parameters that it arranges, and this synthetic function undoes the effectivity of its words. We are very close to Adomo bere, whose major object is the principle of identity: Adomo considers metaphysically that the Hegelian dialectic is an exemplary dialectic that doesn't allow for difference, that in reality difference is engulfed in identity. Qua affirmative dialectic, and not qua truly negative dialectic, the Hegelian dialectic ends up re-absorbing difference in identity.

In a certain sense, Lacoue-Labarthe says the_ same thing of Wagner, who in his eyes re-absorbs all possible parametric differentiations in infinite melody. This is rather analogous to Hegel's odyssey of the spirit, to that whose function is to re-absorb incessantly and fundamentally the differentiation between the discontinuous articulation of speech and the melodic flow and thus, in the end, to re-absorb also the intra-musical references in the flow of music itself. Wagner would be the creator of a synthetic music, of a music that absorbs its own multiplicities, and that dissolves them in an indistinct chaos. Numerous passages from Lacoue-Labartbe

- are interesting on this point, which is the most significant. For example, he imputes to Wagner a defect of complexity: a musically interesting passage in this regard is one in which he examines ~dorno's position on Schoenberg. Lacoue-Labarthe points out that m t~e end, Adomo locates Scboenberg in a position of saturation; which is why be thinks Adomo is still too Wagnerian, because he

88 lacanian ink

doesn't see that in Schoenberg something else is at work. Ado diagnoses this synthetic function of music in Schoenberg himse~ from Moses and Aaron, and Lacoue-Labarthe comments: •

Once more, the style of this saturation is not Wagnerian could it be that because the writing is much too compi or and it is no longer structured by the imperative of a met ex [and he adds] but this is all the same a saturation. os,

The non-Wagnerian saturation would have for condition a more complex writing which isn't constructed by the imperative of melos, that is by infinite melody. We are here at the heart of~ question: first of all, is it true that Wagner's writing suffers from a defect of complexity, and is it true that this defect of complexity is due to the subordination of all parameters to infinite melody, to a shape itself endowed with a power oriented towards the externa)? Here again, in my opinion, the principal question isn't posed. We begin here with the programmatic indication of infinite melody but in truth the consequences taken from it (defect of complexity, subordination of multiplicity to unicity of the shape, etc.) aren't demonstrated in view of Wagner's proper undertaking.

On the leitmotifs, another delicate point in Wagner,LacoueLabarthe says that it is a matter of showing that Wagner's music is itself mythological. Here, we are linked to all the objections: the method according to which Wagner unifies his own music is only conceivable in mythological parameters. Lacoue-Labarthe tries to bring in the question of the mythological not only from the side of the anecdote, of myths, of gods, of the history that the operas recount, but even in the intimate texture of the music:

The solution that Wagner found to this problem is tbat the scenic acts, as well as the signifiers and the mythic components, can be constantly musically over-detennined.

We have a theory of the leitmotif, as musically over-determining the mythic components, just as we previously had a theory 0f

Adorno's Negative Dialiectics and Wagm~r... 89

. . . ..... Jody. So Wagner's intrinsically mythological and politi-infin•te ""' · · f h · 1 · · all ,, position charactenstic o t e nattona Is music y present ciil pro as the mythic ingredients are definitively musically overas soo~ned which signifies that the leitmotif is interpreted here as determ• • . · a1 synthesis of the mythological. If one takes, for example, amusic . . .~.. tif of Siegfrid, bearer of the sword, each time that thts same u•e 010 · • h · 11 1 th' 1 tifreturns, it is in reality m t e mustc ace u army tc e ement ~eh finally insinuates itself in musical unification itself. w There is something here Lacoue-Labarthe does not notice: the possibility that the leitmotif sometimes only has this function underneath another function. The fact that the leitmotif has a manifestly double function in Wagner is a point on which Boulez basinsisted, and justly so: certainly he has a theatrical articulation which one could say is mythical, or narrative, but he has equally a function of internal musical non-descriptive development, entirely deprived of dramatic or narrative connotation, that one could approach in the manner in which Haydn treats small cellular motifs which are distorted and transformed in his symphonies, and which produce something which is neither properly nor exactly spoken of as a development nor exactly a melody, and which is a singularity of this type of thing. Boulez shows thus that in the analysis of the score, we are very much obliged to see that the leitmotif, as musical gesture which is connected to the narration, is not a singular Wagnerian production, and that very often, on the contrary, we observe an indecision of leitmotifs, a fusion of one in the other because they rest themselves on the harmonic or diachronic transformable components which are like pieces of musical modules.

This function of musical modules, in reality scattershot, and which the principle of metamorphosis organizes in the Wagnerian musical discourse, is absolutely not considered when one maintains, following the Lacoue-Labarthe, that the leitmotif is, in the end, the mythological prescription in the very fabric of the music.

. From this point of view, we will never say enough bad thmgs about what systematic appointment has done to leitmotifs.

90 lacanian ink

If, for example, one recognizes and says that "here, this is s· . bearer of the sword," and if one sends three notes that serv Iegfnd, transition to pass to another melodic system, we know thate ~the

ne1ther the sw_ord n~r. the_ bea~er of the sword are in play in this affair: Sometimes, It ts Stegfrid bearer of the sword, but not alway ·

This theme is essential because it connects Wagner t:·· h. . h h' l. . . w at ts per_ aps 1~ rea mnovat~on, a p~~ular regime of ambiguity: there 1s certamly a Wagnenan ambtgmty, but it isn't reducibl t h · 1 " " h' h L e 0 t e umvoca parameter to w 1c acoue-Labarthe assigns it. It resides in a rather s_yst~matic _fashion in_ the double function of what Wagner convokes m hts mustcal matenal as well as in his scenic 0 narrative material, and even in his poetic material where we find, i~ more of a declarative, narrative, and explicative function, a function of assonance, which is repetitive and directly pre-formed for the musical declamation. So one can identify, in almost all the ingre. dients of the Wagnerian production, a systematicity of the double function escaping naturally from the interpretive grid which tries to reduce Wagner to the theologico-political.

I believe, to end this first point, that this construction of a mythological, technical, totalizing Wagner, where the music is the synthesis of the mythological prescription, grows out of a pre-conceived notion in Lacoue-Labarthe, a Holderlinian ideal of restraint. Actually, Lacoue-Labarthe operates under the cover of a certain position on what contemporary art ought to be, and Wagner, thus constructed, becomes the foil to that ideal. This characterization is largely independent of the effective examination of its procedure. We can, then, trace this Holderlinian ideal against the thread of aU we've said thus far and ask what it is, this ideal, that, for LacoueLabarthe, shapes the task of contemporary art, this ideal whereby all is made consonant in debate with Adomo.

Firstly, it's not necessarily indicative of great art. Restraint is thus a sign of poverty, of humility assumed by the artistic inten· tion, which is combined with a will to de-tota1ize. This does not signify, on the contrary, that one will exclude mixtures, passages

Adorno'sNegative Dialiectics and Wagner... 91

art to another, but it will always produce itself under the trorn one f th d al' ed f . . :;· of the fragmentary, o e e-tot 1z , o expenmentatiOn. SI~ • why we are going to make great art change radically from 'fhiSb 1w8 as in Lacoue-Labarthe eyes, its last explicit representation, w at • namely, Wagner. . . . .

It is also necessary m thts discuss10n on contemporary art, estion the excessively prescriptive fringes between art and non-

roqu · dhumil' I th' th art which are also part of restramt an Ity. n IS sense ere are' no criteria of distinction between art and non-art that are entirely reflexively reliable. In Lacoue-Labarthe, for example, this takes the fonn of a theory of the contemporary poem as becoming-prose, where the essence of contemporary poetry is the becoming-prose of the poem. For it is precisely this delimitation between poetry and prose that the poem must put into question, the essence of the poem.

The renunciation of the proximate form of the sublime is equally suggested, as well as the sublime as effect of sublime is, in sum, the renunciation of effect: we can posit that art must modestly assume a certain regime of the absence of effect, which seeks to produce the effect without effect, that is to say a conjunctive dissolution which is what I call the effect without effect, or mqre precisely the effect of dissolution.

We will not' forget, of course, the well-known theme that the process must be self-reflexive, this process of art before reflecting itself in its own becoming.

It is interesting to note that, in a more general way, Wagner- this book serves as a connecting thread- is the name of everything which isn't that, which is what makes him a negative presence on the horizon of aesthetic discussion. He wields the project of great art, of totalization, the idea of the poem as distinct from the prosaic; he does not renounce the proximate form of the s~blime and the effect of the sublime; he doesn't seek the effect Without effect, but he remains in the logic of the aesthetic.

92 lacanian ink

At this point, we should ask two distinct questio . -Is this protocol of prescription on contemporary art le~:: . · gi .. mate and if so, how? . • -Is it legitimate to make Wagner the foil for this agenda?

It is true, and t~e probl~?I isn't new but it is going to be aggravated, that there ts a position to take relative to what could call l'art pompier of used-up empires. Without do obne

d . u~ every use -up emp~ proposes an art ?~~pier, which 1 would define as the correlano~ of ~lamor and mhiltsm, or noisy nihilism. For example, one can tdentify very clearly what is a deliberately pompier production at the cinema today: it is, beyond the simple reference to Hollywood, a singular correlation between clamor and nihilism, that is to say an amplification. We proceed then to the amplification of the means (in comparison with which Wagner is not a very big deal!), and this amplification is at the same time, in terms of its crux, worked from the inside by an absolutely nihilist vision of the future of the world, with a logic of salvation entirely exterior, neo-religious, abstract, improbable ... This correlation of clamor and nihilism is not without connection to societies uncertain of themselves or used-up empires, and evidently Wagner has retroactively appeared as part of this deployment. He plays the role of he who would be the still-artistic presence of this future.

The position that we take is clear: it advances a term in the history of art, the closing, the finishing touches, it's something like the last author of opera... Lacoue-Labarthe makes a rather droll examination of those who come after Wagner: all the same he is a little bothered by Berg, where he situates de-totalization, and he rejoices in the significant incompletion, in his view, of Lulu; as for Pelleas and Melisande, this is for him the opera of deconstruction. Strauss, for his part, is nothing other than an undefined nostalgia for an already-finished opera, and Puccini is he who unsuccessfully devotes his last breath to great art, after which there is no longer anything, this is the end of the end ...

We can see then the position assigned to Wagner as the one


1 5 the history of the opera. We cannot continue what is wf.~ cedose and he is a part of that history just as he is the first great acbieVi ' · d · · · hi h ttnmpier of used-up emprres, an It 1s moreover m t s se~se t ~t ; is proto-fascist. Thus, he closes and opens at the same time, m

· nse that he opens to the future of mass art; he founds the latter :e~: same time that he closes something which passed through

Mozart Beethoven, etc. 'Adomo says the same thing in the beginning of In Search

ifWagner when he affirms that Wagner is typical of a certain petty :Ourgeois pompousness, which no longer has the means to sustain 'tself and which is obliged to proceed to an enlargement of expres:ive means because the effective historical content is lacking. This is almost the same as the art pompier of used-up empires: where the creative content of the historical epoch is missing, and one just pretends through historical pomposity, when it gets to be a matter of simply waiting around for the next election something like The Lord of the Rings can be made ...

But the question is to know if this applies to Wagner: is this typology absolutely pertinent? It is rather complicated, because it supposes that one has simultaneously a judgment of closure and a judgment of opening. We superimpose on Wagner his double function, on the one hand, he is the amplified completion of all the means of opera, on another, all this is only a wheezy working out of what is going to become mass art, so that the effectiveness of Wagner is nothing other than his historical effectiveness that is the end of the story is a big concert in Bercy... The noise, moreover, was the same.

The idea is then to consider Wagner's position and to examine it from a precise question that we will address this time to Adomo, which is knowing to what extent Adomo's philosophy prepares or constructs this position for Wagner. If we take Negative Dialectics, which is the reference for this whole seminar we are obliged to note that Wagner is quite absent from it, and thls is the same Adomo who wrote In Search ojWagner.

94 lacanian ink

This approach interests me. It asks how a phil . . . l . . b h OSOphicat condition p ays out m Its a sence, ow music and Wagner

to hold a certain position without needing to mention W:agnare e seen . . r atatl·

he comes up qUite naturally, because this position is nothin th • than his own and more generally that of music. g 0 er

Thus, we will interrogate certain aspects of Ado , h 'l h h · · · f h · rno s p 1 osop y as t e pos1t10nmg o t e possibility to see Wag

f . . . th , . b ner uncttomng m e manner we ve JUSt een over. In re-doing this work of meticulous re-reading for the occa

sion, I have been struck by the number of contemporary themes whose tendencies are shaped very early by Adorno. I think that many of the analyses that have become hegemonic in the 1980s were already hatched by Adorno. We must do Adorno justice, he really invented something, which is very distinct when one reads him today in the contemporary French system.

We propose this time to begin with Negative Dialectics, Adorno's great work completed in 1966, and attempt to elucidate what is already there, tacitly constructing the possibility of this Wagner, his position, his location. Then, we will deconstructhim and his position so as to propose something else.

In its fundamental orientation, Negative Dialectics is nothing less than the proposition of a new path for philosophy. It is thus a work of philosophy in the strong sense, if we allow that every work of philosophy reconstitutes or reconfigures the place of philosophy. Here it consists in proposing a new path for philosophy while acknowledging the heritage of German idealism, that is to say, Kant and Hegel-we will see why. There is Kant and Hegel, and there is the absolute necessity to formulate a new orientation which recognizes this heritage but which, at the same time, in many regards, abandons it.

I would like, in my turn, to state Adorno's plan, such as I understand this extraordinarily dense book (it is an exercise to read it!), in five points which concentrate on what I think is the core material of this book.


I. German idealism is the s~cul.ativ~ achievement of~e . _ all m of the Enlightenment. Likewise, If one wants to enVIs

ranotbn ~tionalism of the Enlightenment, of Western philosophy in aoee · · "th hGe rhe Jarge sense, one can m certam ways grasp It roug rman ·dea)· m that is to say Hegel and Kant. t 18 i. German idealism, or the rationalism of the Enlightenment,

t 0 faces: a critical or negative face (very clear in Kant of :Surs':. but negative as well in the Hegeli~ di~ectic~ and also a totalizing face with the absolute or ~a~ve d1alect~~ of Hegel. Qermall idealism is therefore the ~?nJUnCtiOn Of a cntlqu~ and a totalization, the conjunction of a cntique and an absolute or, m fact, rhe conjunction of a negation and an identity. Such is its innermost constitution, represented by the pair Kant/Hegel, which is in my opinion integral knowledge for Adorno.

What is truly interesting for him isn't the opposition of Kant and Hegel, or He gel's surpassing Kant, or even the necessity 10 return to the Kantian critique. All these gestures are present in Adomo, but what interests him is the pair Kant/Hegel, inasmuch as he,Adomo, is the one-not one of the two terms-that completes die rational project of the Enlightenment.

3. Adomo·~ proposition consists in retaining (simultaneously and at the same time going beyond) Kant's negative critique as well as Hegers dialectical negativity. One joins Kant's critical gesture, which is a gesture of separation, of limitation of the pretensions of reason, with the Hegelian dialectical negativity shorn of its affirmative absoluteness. One retains Hegelian negativity as purely negative negativity. This is why Adorno's doctrines, and more generally what will be called the Frankfurt School in the 1960s, which is called "critical theory," are called by Adomo, "negative dialectics," placing critical theory and negative dialectic side by side, surpassing Kant and Hegel.

This phrase is particularly characteristic of Adorno's ~!!e~d~: "The intelligible would be no less in the spirit of Kantian litrutation than in the spirit of the Hegelian method of surpassing

96 lacanian ink

it and thinking only negatively." It's a matter. then of . past this conjunction while holding on to it in order t~ rea g~tting strictly negative thought. We have in this fonnulation th c to a pitulation of Adomo's analysis and agenda: to construct N: ~a. Dial · · h h d f Ge "d a1i ganve ecttcs m t e s a ow o rman 1 e sm as a perfecting f the Enlightenment, with new conditions. 0

4. Heidegger's ontology, the examination of which be · Negative Dialectics and which presents itself as another pro~~ tion of going beyond the Enlightenment, falls short in Adorn !

Th. . h h d , h . 0 s eyes. IS IS w y e oesn t esttate to say-and this great! saddens Lacoue-Labarthe-that Heidegger was a full-blowy fascist. There is a long explication about Heidegger's ontolo~ because it is presented as the necessity to go beyond the rational~ ism of the Enlightenment, described as a moment in the history of metaphysics. Thus Heidegger's ontology is a rival, since apparently the agenda is the same as Adomo's, who disqualifies it in the end by saying that, far from going beyond the rationality of the Enlightenment, Heideggerian ontology falls on this side of reality, contrary to Negative Dialectics, which is going to place the Kantian critical system and the Hegelian dialectical system side by side in a new undertaking.

5. The reference of every Adomian undertaking is a his· torical break. The very possibility of its construction is linked to the historical fact of Nazism, the concentration camps, and this historical break takes the name of Auschwitz. The possibility of the gesture proposed by Adorno of an intrinsically negative thought that recovers the critical heritage of Kant and the dialectical heritage of Hegel, but which cuts them off from what made Auschwitz possible-that is, an identifying affirmation in excess of rationality itself-is made possible by a historical fact.

Here is, it appears to me, what one can say aboutAdorno's general system. In this ensemble. music appears scarcely readable . and it remains largely absent in the massiveness of the text. one finds a few allusions to Schoenberg, Beethoven, and Berg. My


. h ever, is that his position is entirely prepared and that, if ~· ~wfinally to understand--and this is the motif of this whole one~ -the importance of Adorno to musical theory, one can se~ar bow this position of music is constructed in this purely exaJD!De • l ~ hi th b Iative text, in an otherwise more comp ete ~as on an y spec: a directlY atAdomo's Essays on Music. 100 Do 1 would like to outline how a preparation of this position

tes in Adorno, and the technique of preparation for the posi~perafor art in general and more singularly for music in Negative non. h I · f · d' 1 J)io/ectics. We will get at a w o e senes o questions rrect y

ncerning Wagner's music at the same time, which will be the CO • framework of the next session.

1. Let's start with Adomo's objective: his principal adversary in this vast agenda is what he believes to be the principle of the rationality of the Enlightenment, the decisive function of the principle of identity. ·

We can say that Negative Dialectics is a gigantic polemic against the effects of the ensemble of the identity principle, and at the same time an analysis of the function of the principle of identity in Western rationalism. This principle is present in latent form in the Kantian critique, where one finds the themes of the unity of experience, the invariance of the transcendental subject, the final unity of different critiques (despite the fact that the Kantian critique is a critique of delimitation, of the separation of faculties, etc., the action of the principle of identity is in the end working in latent fashion) and it is explicitly present in Hegel in the Absolute Unity which supports everything.

Adorno's target is the function of the principle of identity in Western rationalism and, consequently, he gets suspicious with regard to universalism, inasmuch as the latter is the imposition of the One, be it an identitary imposition according to which one thing can be the value of all; or the reduction of all to the identical, inasmuch as the identical is this universal prescription. Thus, Adorno anticipates twenty years in advance themes that have become absolutely

98 lacanian ink

ordinary in contemporary ideology. We find passages of A which are a little .sophisticated (he isn't a light writer ) b do~o

.•• Ut Which today are omnipresent in journals. Just witness this extract:

It is pre_cisely the insati~ble princi.J?le that perpetuates · anta~omsm by suppr~ssu~g contradiction. What tolerate~ nothtng that 18 not hke Itself thwarts the reconcilem for which it makes. The violence of equality-mongeJnt reproduces the contradiction that it elimfuates. ng

~e .necessity to ~v~luate differen~es •. to :espect othemess, the crmnnal charactenstlc of not cons1denng Identity, the necessar. ily violent will to universal similitude, etc., are the main themes of Negative Dialectics. We have at this· point the question of the violence of the identity principle, culminating in the extermination of the other in the figure of Nazism, which, at base, is only a par. oxysm of the identity principle, of this violence which is precisely in question. AU this must be absolutely contained, delimited, and if possible abolished by Negative Dialectics. Besides, in a muchquoted formula, Adorno writes "identity is the originary form of ideology." In other words, to combat ideology, in the vocabulary of the epoch (ideology is a word of the 1960s and we see it take on a new sense then), is to combat identity.

This leads us to this first question: should we thus understand, if all this is really part of the construction of a new music, that contemporary art, the music of the future, is what is apt to be subtracted from identity? Should we understand that the function, opened by the end of the reign of identity, as the proper function of art, would be to show a capacity to be subtracted from identity? Correlatively, is it necessary to understand that Wagner is one of the supreme forms in the music of the reign of identity? This is, in effect, Lacoue-Labarthe's thesis according to which unification, the unity of language, synthesis, properly constitute the characteristic of Wagnerian musical discourse. If identity is where Western rationality spoils, after which it's necessary to reconstruct something else.


N. ative Dialectics, and if music is called upon to play a n:une1IY egle 1·n thi's affair, this would mean that music is, before

"' au ar ro sttJ~> • lse what should be subtracted from identity. anything e ' ... fi I · · · fi This is also an agenda 1.or non- orma music: IS mus1c t to

btracted from identity? This is, then, the first point deducible beSU , b' · the question of Adomo s o ~ective. from 2. If identity is the adversary, the goal must be difference,

d Negative Dialectics has difference as its aim. an This is the decisive element in Negative Dialectics, that . rice is rendered by conceiving what is other: "Non-identity is ~:secret telos of identification. It is the part th~t can be salvaged." (Let's note in passing that one has here a cheiDically pure example of Hegel's reversal.) What must be salvaged in identification is non-identity. Adomo continues: "the mistake in traditional thinking is that identity is taken for the goal. The force that shatters the appearance of identity is the force of thinking." The proposition is that thinking is the force which shatters the appearance of identity and that establishes non-identity for its telos. It's necessary to remark also that this thinking about non-identity in the style of Adorno is at the same time programmatic and ethical. This isn't simply, or even p~rhaps principally, a theoretical proposition. Besides, as one can easily imagine, the whole book is marked by a considerable wariness in regard to the concept, since it always ends up reproducing the identitary drive of rationality. Thus we have here the proposal of a thought, of a telos of non-identity, of programmatic and ethical difference: "what would be different has not yet begun."

We inquire as to what extent difference is an agenda for Adorno, and we find this fundamental historicity envisaged previously. Difference is not simply what has been repressed by identity; qua expression of itself, qua affirmation of itself, it has not even begun yet... We don't yet truly know what the different is. . As for ethics, one can read: "the subject must give to nontdentity reparation for the violence done to it." From the point of

lOO lacanian ink

view of the programmatic dimension of difference, it's n that difference begins, which is only possible in an eleme e~:a~ fundamentally ethical and not theoretical. It is thus in the di~ ~IS of an essential reparation that difference can begin; it's nee IISJon to return to the violence that identity has inflicted on differeessary . One can then. sa~ thatA~rno's system is an ethical hi~Ity, an agenda of begmnmg which can only begin on the order f prescription and not on the order of a deduction. Thus, sup~ a that we are always in the construction of a position for music w g h th . . b ' e ave e question: can music e an agenda of difference? Can it be inscribed in the agenda of the beginning of a difference? If difference hasn't yet begun, can music contribute, or even play a decisive role, in the direction of a beginning of difference? Can art be the place of a reparation? Is there an ethical function of music and of art in general which, precisely because it could create the beginning of difference, does so in the element of a reparation, that is to say in the element of an essential non-violence constructed through the identity of that which is not itself? Then, still in the logic of the counter-model, is it necessary to sustain that Wagner is the enemy of an agenda of difference, that is to say that he participates in the impossibility for difference beginning in music. This is Lacoue-Labarthe's thesis, according to which Wagner saturates and thereby closes the history of music, thus denying him by the very same gesture the capacity of producing his proper ctifference.

Wagner's achievement for Lacoue-Labarthe is Hegelian, for it is he who forbids music from installing itself in the production of difference and, in so doing, perpetuates the violence done to othemess. In this perspective, one can recall Wagner's diatribes against Judaic art, and his indisputable anti-Semitism seen, not simply as a personal trait, but as a very fundamental trait in which the essence of his art would be precisely in not being the element of the ethical beginning of difference but, on the contrary. the element of an identitary closure taken to its paroxysm of power, and

in this way even more perilous.


A slightly marginal but in my eyes significant element is that

laborates of all this a second time in anti-scientific terms. Adornoe . d Ioyment of science, he says, has become today a mecham-~ be~lderment (we note that he has an absolutely Heideggerian ~ . of science and the proximity between Adorno and Heidegger VlSIOR h k th . A 'd' . triking). In particular, e attac s ma ematics. ccor mg to :: rno something has been borrowed from mathematics against

hi:h Hegel reacted out of habit in characteristic fashion: that the ~gation of negation is an affirmation. Finally, there is a singular thesis of Adorno's that I have found retrospectively very interesting: despite his constant disparagement of mathematics, which doesn't manage to produce the reflexive concept of true infinity but limits itself to blindly creating something concerning the infinite while being absolutely incapable of conceptually understanding

. it, remaining as a result in a purely immediate level of the question of the infinite, mathematics has the merit of having presented the latter, without knowing how to reflect on it. Hegel also in general devalues mathematics, which he considers as an exterior concept, announcing moreover speculations on mathematics as a fragment of the technical. But, according to Adomo, the stakes are situated elsewhere, and it can be stated thus: Hegel retains from mathematics something absolutely essential, which is that the negation of negation is an affirmation. Consequently, he retains from mathematics the prohibition of a negative dialectic, because if the negation of negation is an affirmation, one cannot be in the element of the reiteration of negation without finding oneself in affirmative absoluteness:

To. equate the n~gation of negation with positivity is the 9umtessence of tdentification; it is the formal principle in tts purest form. What thus wins out in the inmost core of di~ectic~ is the anti-dialectical principle: that traditional logtc which,more arithmetico, takes minus times for a plus. It was borrowed from the same mathematics to which Hegel reacts so idiosyncratically elsewhere.

102 lacanian ink

So Hegel didn't know how to react in the right way again · h did ' th 'fth · st math., emancs: e n t see at 1 e question of the infinite is i effi ·

very important, the logical form which assures that the n n ~ f · · affi · d egation o negation 1s an rmatton, an consequently the intrusion· the

dialectic of a non-dialectical element, constitutes a still more r: borrowing which doesn't respect the laws of negativity. cai

Consequently, it's necessary to abandon the principl f dou~le negation as ~~on if one want~ to avoid the mec~~ bewilderment ?f scten?fic _and mathemattcallogicization. By the same token, th1s question 1s addressed, from the point of view of its position, to music and to art, and their effective relationship to scientism, to mathematics, and more fundamentally, to the question of negation. How, in sum, does the negative element function in art and singularly in music? Is there something in music which constrains it relative to the intensification of negation, that is to the negation of negation in music? For example, isn't the ordinary or classic regime of musical peroration, at the end of the work, of the affirmative element in which the work is resolved, in fact a negation of the negative elements which have traversed the conftictive construction of the musical movement? Isn't there something Hegelian in the peroration, something, that by negation, pulls us out of conflict and contradiction, pulls us out of the negative elements the piece has worked through? Are not tonal resolutions themselves captive, as with Hegel, to the logic of negation of negation? Is it not necessary to invent a music which is entirely liberated from all this, that is to say a music that would be music of the negative dialectic, which would free itself from the subterranean discourse ruled by the question of the negation of negation?

One could apply this to many things: the function in tonal music of the major and minor oppositions, the question of perorations, that of resolutions of development, etc. Is Wagner not the one who pushed this aspect the furthest? Pushed it in a fi~re all-together particular which would aim to suspend lh~ r.:soluuou to better affirm it? The question of negation in Wagner could be


,. roJCbed as Hegelian neg~tion, th~t is as negation_not taken in lJPP tive dialectic. This IS a very Important question, to know ~e= easure Wagnerian music is a music that configures. 10 ;ere is, in my opinion, in spite of being metaphorical, a

jmpOrtant opposition in Adorno between configuration and very tellation. At base, Western music has been a mainly configuring ams_c a music that submits the ramified system of possible affects mus~ipline of form, ultimately a unifying discipline of form. This ~~e power of configuration of music, which would configure its 15wn imnWlent multiplicity, and whichAdorno proposes to abandon ?n order to substitute in constellation, a dispersive explosion such ~at at no point does the identitary sovereignty of the form govern its construction and its perception.

This question is central, for we could then consider that Wagner is the last great model of a music built on configuration, which configures the system of its immanent multiplicity and does not at all let it disperse in the figure of constellation.

To generalize, one can say that the philosophy of Negative Dialectics is that the thinker is different from the thought. If one properly applies to philosophy this idea that authentic thought is thought of non-identity, one must also think that the thought of authentic philosophy is the thought of what is not identical to the thought. If one broadens this philosophically, what is posed is not simply the question of the difference of the object, but that of access to the difference of what is originally different from thought itself, that is the thought ofwhatis different from thought. Configuration, according to Adomo's definition of traditional thinking, of traditional philosophy, is a thought that confi.gures thinking. To set up constellation in its place is then to think what is different from thought.

But how does non-identity appear to thought? What is the experience which makes possible the thinking of that which is ~on-identical to thought? What is the appearance of non-identity to ~~ou~t? Non-identity is not given to thought as thought; it is given mevttably as affect, as body even. Consequently, this is the real

104 lacanian ink

content of the decisive caesura of Auschwitz; what is expe . in Auschwitz is something which is in no way pre-configu:.:~~ thought, ~d th~re i~ n~ way to relate to wh~t t~ok place there 0~ than to let 1t arr1ve m Its own element, whrch IS entirely hete mous to thought and which is revealed consequently in whatA:ny.

11 • di · fth · omo ea s an unme ate expenence o e essential and the inessential And yet to be precise, the inessential does not belon t ·

thought. Ultimately the sole radical attestation of what though~. 0

confronted with what does not belong to it, comes in the appe~ of suffering. For Adomo, the immediate experience of the essential and the inessential finds measure in what the subject feels objec. tively as suffering. We're looking at an extremely dense and, in certain respects, very powerful anticipation of what could be called a victimary system (dispositifvictimaire). The unique witnessing of difference is, as such, through the position of the victim. The attestation is non configurable, it is nothing but the constellation of experience, and in this position of the victim stands only what is heteronymous to thinking. It's here that something like a positive counterpart of Negative Dialectics emerges: "the telos of such an organization of society would be to negate the physical suffering of even the least of its members." The organization in question is the one that could comply and conform to the vows of the negative dialectic.

Therefore, we must take suffering here in its most materialist sense: this is the body, this is immediate suffering, unconditioned, and conversely, the negative dialectic would open, as much as it can, to an organization of thought for which the telos is the negation of the physical suffering of the least of its members. This is why Auschwitz is the name of a historical caesura out of which a whole other thought must be constructed, which is in no way organically preconfigured. As a result, the appearance of difference is constructed in the objectivity of suffering. From here, our task is to examine how the question of art, especially that of music, is presented: is there a link between music and the appearance of difference as objectivity of suffering?


This refers us to another meditation between Schopenhauer -.; Wa er for whom the question of pity, and therefore that of ~ . gnis ~ythically central; how can one evaluate this from the 5 • en~g~iew of Adomo's dialectic? What is the ultimate signifi-pomt o . f · f AT • D · 1 · ? . of Parsifal from the pomt o v1ew o negatzve za ecttcs. canon · · dil d d" 'fbes types of questions are 1mme ate y opene up an gtve way

l:byrinth inasmuch as Wagner preordains the resolution of the (08 •• a . • d . 1 . ed jrreducible experience of SwLenng m a re empt10n proc rum ; rhus in reality, he doesn't leave it be in its alterity, but has already, fro~ the outset, reabsorbed suffering into identity. Nevertheless, this isn't measured immediately in the examination of the Parsifal libretto. but it opens up a discussion which consists in asking how this is present in the musical dialectic itself. Straight off, we are aware of the intensity of the question ...

This said, how doesAdomo think of the present time? What came before concerns the general facts supporting the dialectic, the question of the non-identitary caesura, that of Auschwitz and the victim. We also find inAdomo a series of convergent propositions that characterize the present time, that is to say the time after Auschwitz. How is this time identified?

First of all, ~t has become impossible to affirm the positivity of existence, everything that affinns the positivity of existence without examination-whatever, for example, claims to give a sense to existence-has become, according to him, obscene. He proceeds with a selfooCritique limited to its own affirmation, immediately after the war, according to which it bad become impossible, obscene, to write poems after Auschwitz. Here, he returns a little to this topic and proposes considering that one could not, after Auschwitz, affirm the positivity of all that was culture and perhaps even all that was existence. In a movement of generalization, he displaces the aesthetic injunction toward the existential injunction and, in the same way that the initial aesthetic proposition must be generalized !? the proposition of existence, so too must we note at the present time a radical failure of every idea of culture. Every thematic of

106 lacanian ink

the positivity of something as culture, or of the civilizing fu . of culture, is in its turn absolutely impossible, and in this nction he says with good sense, the critique of culture isn't more v=:d, than culture, it is part of it. All this has become absolutely i le

bl 'th di.r:~: d · ' nco111- · mensura e WI ~ere~ce, an_ It s necessary t? see here eleventh hour maneu~ers of 1d~ntity, w~ch co~es back stn;tply to say "there · was a barbanty, so let s be cultivated, the crystallization being th the inaugural subjective situation is that of guilt. at

· We find again here_the ethic~ element of the beginning. The new thought can only begm, accordmg to a very anti-Nietzschean proposition, in the element of guilt, because we can accord no . positive value to existence since we are simply those who survived Auschwitz. The living are nothing but survivors, bearing as such the incurable mourning of the dead, it is impossible that justice be rendered to the dead of Auschwitz, for they are dead in total dereliction of sense and we cannot hope to atone for their death with any. thing. As justice cannot be rendered, so guilt is inevitable, and for Adorno "existence has become the universal relationship of guilt."

He will summarize the work of Samuel Beckett from this perspective which, according to him, holds that today whatever exists is always more or less a concentration camp. I don't think that this is Beckett's discourse, but that's not important; let us simply note that he's brought in to testify to universal guilt as the unique meaning of existence.

These are extremely dark characterizations or still an impasse at the present time, thought of absolutely negatively as a time of dereliction, not because we are unhappy, but because there is a difference which cannot begin, and consequently a justice which cannot be rendered.

Couldn't music then be able to state this dereliction? It's absolutely necessary to renounce the idea that music is a redemption, a sublimation, all this being impracticable in a present thus conceived. Nevertheless, could it state this dereliction, this universal guilt, this obscene characteristic of all culture and all cultural


. . ? This would be a supplementary question addressed to c~n~ue. art and also to Wagner, in the sense that the question of musJc, to ' · d 1· · · ffi d rtofWagner's music to ere tct10n IS an a rme rapport tberappo · 1 B d ' h

h. hone can give many examp es. ut on t we ave here of \V tc d 1' . ? I fti . · W:agner a falsified rapport to ere tct10n. n e ect, we aga~n m . .

•1n Wagner a rapport which orchestrates a state of derehc-observe . . to which music bears witness, but only to stage a pardon or a

non . bl salvation, in truth impracttca e.

When we conceive of the present as such, what are the imperatives that one can take :rom it? Adomo p~ovides us with the imperatives of the present time which, as one might expect, are

all negative. 1. The crux of everything is this: "Anew categorical impera-

tive has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen." As this is formulated, and in spite of its being our object here, the imperative appears to me in part contradictory because it invokes the similar, that is to say identity, to the point where one must say that nothing of difference can happen which is not, at a minimum, similar. Something is profiled here, like the immanent limitation of this type of imperative, in that the unrepeatable and repetition are simultaneously affirmed.

2. It's necessary to express, to make visible the sentiment that there will be no relief, that there is no salvation, that justice is not rendered. The tiny beginning of a justice testifies at least that justice is not rendered, or in any case causes us not to pretend that it is.

Inspired by Beckett in Waiting for Godot,Adomo describes the waiting in vain, which is a fundamental affect, the feeling that the Absolute isn't coming. It is remarkable that at this moment he expressly invokes music, to which he dedicates only a few rare passages. It concerns behaving in a negative fashion, to actualize oneself in the vain waiting. If this is an imperative, it is stated in V:·;;ari1~c Dialectics that music alone is capable of expressing, of Witnessmg that justice will not be rendered.

108 lacanian ink

What is then the music of waiting in vain from th . · f ·? epollll ofvtew o contemporary questions. Here, the waiting in va· . ·

• ·nl • th h' h . tn1sa major nagnenan erne w 1c constitutes the fundamental te of the first two-thirds of the third act of Tristan and Isolde If an x.ture ever has. proposed a mu~ic of waiting in vain, it was Wa~er. ~~ here agam, one could object that at the end, this waiting isn'ttrul .to vain, since Isolde has the time to bless him before he dies, since~ tonic chord arrives in the end, bringing some kind of relief. Wb t remains despite all is that we are entitled to ask ourselves if~ most important thing is that this waiting in vain is finally reveal~ in Wagner's theatrical dynamic; or if it is that there has been an extraordinary anticipated purpose of the intrinsic value itself of the waiting in vain, to the point of creating a poetic without precedent from it, an extraordinary musical system which constantly defers resolutions, installing in this way a hannonic state of incertitude charged with translating the "in vainness" of the waiting.

3. It is important to oppose open-endedness to the scientific ideal. Adomo is one of those who has given in to the ideal of the open-ended, along with Bergson, Heidegger, Deleuze and others, in opposition to the supposedly closed characteristic of the scientific ideal, understood as that which conveys that the negation of negation is affirmation and consequently shuts off the negation. The ideal of the open-ended, on the contrary, seeks the idea of a negation such that even the negation doesn't abolish it; even though we would deny negation, we do not suppress it, and every opening would be maintained. Open-endedness is the fact of substituting for form the transformation of form. The informal is, in this perspective, the possibility of confronting the shapeless in the dimension which holds that every form is there to be immediately transformed, and that this transformation must itself be erratic, or without form.

This transformation of form must thus touch non-form. Straight off we are advised that this concerns a musical question, that ofknowing if it makes sense here to speak of non-formal mu~ir Is the transformation of forms perhaps itself absolutely without


1 't tbat, consequently, music is capable of expressing or of fgi'Jll? sti~ng the open-ended? Is it not of the essence of music to .-resen . . f . I •vr arily always the immanent propos1tlon o Its c osure, or be necessl ure? Is it univocally destined for the open-ended? Does ofacos · . sarily contain a curious game of the open-ended and the ~~::;This is the debate that will be assigned to Wagner, of which ~question will be of knowing if, finally, the infinite melody is the

· 'pie of the open~ended or of closure. If, for Lacoue-Labarthe, ::~nite melody is what pennits the closing and the saturation fthe set of parameters of music or of opera, it is perhaps equally ~a principle of the open-ended, having been initially proposed as what put an end to closed forms. We will examine then this devious dialectic in the wake of which the struggle versus the closing is itself trapped in cloj;ure.

4. Finally, it's necessary to save appearance from the totalizing hold of meaning or of the essential, that is to say to save the precariousness of appearance against the totalizing hold of meaning. In effect, difference doesn't do anything but appear; if it gives itself in confonnity to essence, it's because it isn't truly different.

First of all, since difference is given as what isn't already in thought, it arises as something which appears, which takes place, following the example ofAuschwitz, as very much something which takes place and not something pre-configurable by thought. To save appearance is to make it, then, before everything, the object of an ethical nwcim, and not an epistemological or aesthetic maxim; it's necessary to give absolute respect to appearance, for it is in appearance, in the appearance finally of the body, where what is to be thought as being not of thought gives itself to thinking. Adomo writes that "art is appearance" (it has then an immediate function) and that there is an "incomparable metaphysical importance in rescuing appearance, the object of aesthetics." "Aesthetic" is here taken in the broad sense, both as the transcendental aesthetic of Knnt and, more generally, as the sense of the doctrine of appearance, which takes on a major metaphysical importance by virtue of

110 lacanian ink

the fact that saving appearance recovers an ethical maxim tri speaking, of difference. It will be necessary, then, to ask's ctly . h . .b th oneself m w ~t ~easur~ music. c~ntn utes to ~ ~escuing of appearance What 1s It that, m music Itself, can participate in the rescu· ·

? I . l h . th . · IngOf appearance. n parttcu ar, w at 1s e pomt m Wagner of this q tion of appearance, of music as expression, pure from the outs:~

To end this first session, I thereby propose summing it: · · . . d .c th th . . Pin 1ts entirety, as an agen a 1.0t e next one, e position freed up~ art, music, and for the establishment of this counter-model, whi: isWagner.

1. Music and principle of identity: is the essence of Wagner's undertaking, the unity of language, that is to say the synthesis as Lacoue-Labarthe states, following Adomo 's example as we've read him? Is the nodal function of the Wagnerian undertaking synthetic?

Our reference will be, in the third act of the Die Meistersinger, Sachs' monologue and the quintet, interrogated from this question of knowing if, for example, Wagner is a proposition concerning the unity of language or if, on the contrary, he doesn't open up to a sophisticated discussion on the non-unity of language. Sachs' monologue carries over directly to this question of the immoderate; as for the quintet, a rare thing in Wagner, it ends up being particularly pertinent on the question of difference.

2. Music and the ethics of difference: the Wagnerian proposition, is it an indifferent redemption, that is a redemption which in a certain sense would bring difference back to an identity? Is this the Wagnerian proposition of the libretto and, what's more, is this its musical proposition, in that it would propose an ascendant musical construction which would eventually distribute identity over the complete system of an immanent difference? This proposition, is it an indifferent redemption?

I propose three examples: Sachs' great monologue at the end of Die Meistersinger, Brtinnhi1de's proclamation at the end of Twilight of the Gods (with the celebrated fact that Wagner had

Adorno's Negative Dialiectics and Wagner... Ill

d to put a stanza to music) and the question of the meaning P.t~!ec~: .. d act of Parsifal, whose closure Pierre Boulez critiqued, ofu•euau

rare event to be sure. 8 3. Music and figuration or music and calculation, configu-

. and constellation: does Wagner submit music to an exterior ranon il . . Ad ' ? M figuration rather than a conste ation m orno s sense. any ~potbeses have been put forth here, from the one according to ~eh Wagner submits music to the text, to the one according

: which he annihilates the text in music, both ~ust~ined again~t Wagner. Sometimes he was reproached for subJecting the musical flow entirely to the text, that he wrote without wanting then to modify one line,leaving the labor of following his interminable text; and sometimes reproached for the inverse, according to which the articulation of the s~h is entirely dissolved in the infinite melody.

I return to this subject in the gigantic monologue of Wotan in the second act of Die Walkyrie, where one more time he recounts everything that's happened since the beginning; this is one of the more considerable, more paradoxical narratives, which puts into play the question of the articulation of speech, of the narrative, of the phrasing, of the leitmotif, of the exterior and the interior in an exemplary manner.

4. Music and suffering: what relationship does music have to this revelation of something by affect, of this possibility to bypass the reign of identity in delivering a directly sensible difference?

The question bears on Wagner and Schopenhauer; does Wagner order music by sentimental effects (according to the accusation repeated by Nietzsche,Adomo, and Lacoue-Labarthe) which prevents, on the contrary, difference from being understood in its effective appearance, and it is incorporated in a sort of aesthetic identity? Far from rendering reason from the affect, sentimentality, hysteria, the erotic, Wagnerian voluptuousness would drown it in a logic of the exterior effect.

We will examine a separation in the painful farewells of Wotan to his daughter at the end of Die Walkyrie.

112 lacanian ink

5. Music and present-day dereliction: if our pres ... .c th fd li · f" · entJsm 1act e present o ere c~ton, o JUstice not rendered, etc., does Wagner elude the unsustamable? Does he deliver or prete d deliver? Is there in Wagner a capacity to testify musically ton ~ is pr~p~rly a derelic~on and n~t ~~ply an instrumentation 0;this. dereliction to strategtc, aesthetictztng, or absolutizing ends?

Our example will be the narrative of the voyage to Ro . of Tannhli.user in the third act of Tannhiiuser, which recounts me absolute dereliction; Tannhauser asks for the Pope•s pardon:: his guilt. The Pope refuses, and he returns then with nothing i~ an absolute dereliction since the recourse no longer exists. And despite this he finds a completely miraculous, supernumerary, and unpredictable recourse. Is this not articulated in the absence of recourse? Is the narrative of Rome musically capable of testifying to an absolute dereliction, in that justice cannot be rendered?

6. Music and waiting in vain: does Wagner respect the waiting in vain or does he always re-absorb it in a positive issue? We'll come back to the third act of Tristan and Jsolde.

7. Conforming to the last imperative, music and transfonnation of fonns, music touching the non-formed through the perpetual transformation of its own forms: does Wagner employ the unitary imposition of form or does he touch the non-formed of the interior itself of the variability of form? The question of knowing ifWagner touches the non-formed through the possibility of inscribing types of variation of forms which are singular to him is substantial. We could mention a number of moments in Wagner where music appears at the edge of its dissolution and, more generally, we can ask, where does the very remarkable fact that the proper color of each Wagnerian opera is different, that we can identify a Wagnerian opera metonymically by a color. come from? Is there not here a variability of the form, that is to say a capacity in Wagner, from one opera to another, to change colors in a surprising manner? The question exceeds the sole problem of the orchestral color; all;!v~l) turn there is a reprise of the question of form and of the putting into


forlll that which is varia~le and so~etime~, in ~ach act, differences • f h' type emerge; at ttmes, even m the mtenor of an act, we find 0 [ JS £ al . b']' . . tched components whose ~orm vana Itty IS constderab]e, : 1 would provoca~ively call this ap~tud~ to treat each scene for . lf including musically, the Brechtian stde ofWagner. Jtse ' All this permits us to raise the ultimate position of Wagner

· ·n regard toAdomo's phrase near the end of Negative Dialectics: ~vhat exists must be changeable if it is not to be all." A powerful phrase, more difficult than it seems. From here on, the question addressed to Wagner is the following: Is not the Wagnerian project 10 sbow that what takes place at a given moment is not all, precisely in that it can be transformed? Should not the infinite melody be understood in the sense of transformation, endless and infinite, such that at no moment is what-is everything, what-is is not all. Wagner's music, at the antipodes of totalization, would acquire an infinite power of de-totalization, of organizing the suspense of detota1ization. And it is here, precisely at the site of de-totalization, so much more than in grand declarations and predications on total art, that all his power to captivate the subjective must be situated. In doing so, would not Wagner's music manifest, to an unprecedented degree, an immanent power of metamorphosis?

•s· . . . Ec~~Narr~us1qu~ ~t philosophie: La dialectique negative d'Adorno,

o e Supeneure, 01108/2005. Edited by Nancy Mentelin.

badiou: adorno&wagner

Documents