Žižek’s Death Drive, the Intervention of Grace, and the Wagnerian Performative: Conceptualising the Director’s Subjectivity

Abstract

To talk about Wagner is to immediately invite controversy. Since Nietzsche, the case of Wagner has signified nothing less than a constant and highly spirited provocation. Pronounced as the triumph of appearance over essence, Nietzsche’s criticism is relentless.¹ This later takes a more confrontational overtone when Wagner’s ‘social character’ comes into play in the rigorous, yet not always unbiased, assessments by the Frankfurt School and, most notably, by Adorno.² The rancour with which Adorno treats Wagner’s revolutionary inclinations and, particularly, his involvement in the Dresden 1848–1849 revolution, is equivalent to the scale of betrayal for which Wagnerian art is held accountable: the introduction of high art modernism to the culture industry. This is an accusation which acquires a persistently negative connotation in the context of politics as aestheticisation³ and profoundly entangles Wagner’s operas with the political. Benjamin spells out the wider implication most forcefully by stating that in presenting an intersection of a mythological teleology of art and a radical or utopian sociopolitical vision, Wagner’s operas ultimately assign the theory of revolutionary rupture to the constitution of a nation or people which always involves figuring or configuring a politics.⁴ Following from this thought, it is one small step to conceiving a vision of Wagner as a proto-fascist whose ideological underpinnings point directly to configuring a national destiny or ethos and ultimately staging the political function of the aesthetic itself.