Waiting for Wagner: John Deathridge critiques a radical intellectual rescue of Wagner’s legacy

Review of Alain Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, tr. Susan Spitzer, with an afterword by Slavoj Žižek (Verso, 2010).

March 2011, Volume 5, Number 1, 103–8.

For many reasons, this intervention in the Wagner debate by Alain Badiou, former Maoist sympathiser and now in his mid-seventies a doyen of France’s philosophical and political left, reminds me of the ‘three devices of such lethal kind’ that Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) manfully negotiates at the end of Steven Spielberg’s film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). Indiana kneels to avoid being beheaded by a razor-sharp triple pendulum (‘The penitent man is humble before God’), treads over a gaping void on crumbling stones marked by letters of the alphabet that spell the name of God (‘Proceed in the footsteps of the word’) and through blind faith discovers a concealed pathway over an unbridgeable mountain gulf (‘Only in the leap from the lion’s head will [the hero] prove his worth’).