Music drama and politics: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Alain Badiou on Richard Wagner's idea of the 'Gesamtkunstwerk'

Abstract

This paper sketches the debate between Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Alain Badiou concerning Richard Wagner's idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Following in part the account of the Gesamtkunstwerk that was developed in Theodor W. Adorno's pivotal text In Search of Wagner, Lacoue-Labarthe regards the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk as the central key for unlocking the implications of Wagner's theory and practice of music drama. That is to say, Lacoue-Labarthe claims that the fusion of art and politics characterizing the Gesamtkunstwerk can only be grasped by unearthing the conception of (romantic) aesthetics that underlies Wagner's staging of the relationship between art and politics. Lacoue-Labarthe identifies Wagnerian aesthetics as the anticipation of national-aestheticism (a term that Lacoue-Labarthe elaborates in the context of his reading of Heidegger's deconstruction of aesthetics) that finds its completion in National Socialism. Consequently, Wagner's art taking figure in the Gesamtkunstwerk engenders totalitarian politics. In critical opposition to Lacoue-Labarthe, Alain Badiou both relegates the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk to the realm of mere ideology and demonstrates that the former obscures the complex relationship between art and politics that is actually engendered in Wagner's music dramas. Once the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk is dismissed as the central category of Wagnerian artistic production, one can return to Wagner's music dramas as sites both for a "music of the future" and a different conception of politics.