Sanders Releases Explosive Bailout List

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/11895-sanders-releases-explosive-bailout-list

Sen. Bernie Sanders, Reader Supported News

13 June 12

ore than $4 trillion in near zero-interest Federal Reserve loans and other financial assistance went to the banks and businesses of at least 18 current and former Federal Reserve regional bank directors in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, according to Government Accountability Office records made public for the first time today by Sen. Bernie Sanders.

On the eve of Senate testimony by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Sanders (I-Vt.) released the detailed findings on Dimon and other Fed board members whose banks and businesses benefited from Fed actions.

A Sanders provision in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act required the Government Accountability Office to investigate potential conflicts of interest. The Oct. 19, 2011 report by the non-partisan investigative arm of Congress laid out the findings, but did not name names. Sanders today released the names.

"This report reveals the inherent conflicts of interest that exist at the Federal Reserve. At a time when small businesses could not get affordable loans to create jobs, the Fed was providing trillions in secret loans to some of the largest banks and corporations in America that were well represented on the boards of the Federal Reserve Banks. These conflicts must end," Sanders said.

The GAO study found that allowing members of the banking industry to both elect and serve on the Federal Reserve's board of directors creates "an appearance of a conflict of interest" and poses "reputational risks" to the Federal Reserve System.

In Dimon's case, JPMorgan received some $391 billion of the $4 trillion in emergency Fed funds at the same time his bank was used by the Fed as a clearinghouse for emergency lending programs. In March of 2008, the Fed provided JPMorgan with $29 billion in financing to acquire Bear Stearns. Dimon also got the Fed to provide JPMorgan Chase with an 18-month exemption from risk-based leverage and capital requirements. And he convinced the Fed to take risky mortgage-related assets off of Bear Stearns balance sheet before JP Morgan Chase acquired the troubled investment bank.

Another high-profile conflict involved Stephen Friedman, the former chairman of the New York Fed's board of directors. Late in 2008, the New York Fed approved an application from Goldman Sachs to become a bank holding company giving it access to cheap loans from the Federal Reserve. During that period, Friedman sat on the Goldman Sachs board. He also owned Goldman stock, something that was prohibited by Federal Reserve conflict of interest regulations. Although it was not publicly disclosed at the time, Friedman received a waiver from the Fed's conflict of interest rules in late 2008. Unbeknownst to the Fed, Friedman continued to purchase shares in Goldman from November 2008 through January of 2009, according to the GAO.

In another case, General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt was a New York Fed board member at the same time GE helped create a Commercial Paper Funding Facility during the financial crisis. The Fed later provided $16 billion in financing to GE under this emergency lending program.

Sanders on May 22 introduced legislation to prohibit banking industry and business executives from serving as directors of the 12 Federal Reserve regional banks.

To read a report summarizing the new GAO information, click here.

Reports of Occupy’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Posted 2 days ago on June 10, 2012, 8:41 a.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

via Ben Vitelli, Occupy Baton Rouge:

http://occupywallst.org/article/reports-occupys-death-have-been-greatly-exaggerate/

[…]

Shrugging off Occupy as a momentary fad or a leftist pipedream is to do a disservice to both Occupy and our collective yearning for a more legitimate community. When Occupy began, there was a feeling in the air that another world was not only possible, but that it was possibly inevitable. Our isolation and alienation no longer seemed like an unbridgeable gap:

“Separations are broken down. Personal problems are transformed into public issues; public issues that seemed distant and abstract become immediate practical matters. The old order is analyzed, criticized, satirized. People learn more about society in a week than in years of academic “social studies” or leftist “consciousness raising.” Long repressed experiences are revived. Everything seems possible — and much more is possible. People can hardly believe what they used to put up with in “the old days.” (Ken Knabb, The Joy of Revolution)

Since those days, over 7,200 Occupy protestors have been arrested in the United States. Many have been beaten and tortured. The media has been strong-armed into not reporting on Occupy except in an unfavorable light, and non-participants (but potential sympathizers) are encouraged to sarcastically roll their eyes at those silly protestors who just don’t seem to get it. In light of all this demoralization, Occupy protestors are left wondering what it was all about, grasping at easy explanations for their continued movement such as “shifting the national dialogue” or hoping that this next week’s protest might suddenly convince the powers that be to change their corrupt ways.

While I’m certainly happy that the “national dialogue” has “shifted” (I no longer feel like a crazy person babbling away about economic injustice) [editors note: we support "crazy people" speaking out about economic injustice] celebrating the fact that Obama now has to pretend to give a shit and Romney must now pretend to be human is an incredibly hopeless prospect. This “national dialogue” we speak about is not something that happens when we reach critical mass and the media and the politicians can no longer afford to ignore us. It’s a continued conversation that reverberates among the masses. It’s a process of teaching one another, of questioning the status quo and debating the proper course of action—it’s the sound of agreements and disagreements among individuals who view each other as human beings. It’s the sound of people sharing their visions of a better society and realizing their common goals.

It needs to be remembered that the word “occupy” is a verb. It’s a call to action, not the action itself. The word “occupy” was useful for getting individuals and organizations previously isolated or focused on one-issue grievances out into the streets. Whether the individuals involved wanted to merely overturn Citizens United or overthrow the entire capitalist system itself, Occupy was the first all-encompassing protest movement to occur within many of our lifetimes. Whether or not the word “Occupy” continues to be the word to describe this movement is not important. What is important is that there’s wide community of opposition being formed across many social barriers, and those who hold power are very afraid.

Žižek on the film Melancholia

http://bigthink.com/postcards-from-zizek/the-most-anticipated-movie-of-the-summer-according-to-slavoj-zizek

Despite the fact that it depicts the last 24 hours on Earth and is directed by Lars von Trier, Melancholia is not as pessimistic as you'd think, he says. "I find something beautifully poetical in the attitude of the main person, Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst, this inner peace, how she accepts this."

You could even read it as a kind of optimism, he argues. "If you really want to do something good for society, if you want to avoid all totalitarian threats and so on, you basically should go . . . we should all go to this, let me call it--although I’m a total materialist--fundamentally spiritual experience of accepting that at some day everything will finish, that at any point the end may be near. I think that, quite on the contrary of what may appear, this can be a deep experience which pushes you to strengthen ethical activity." The result is not fatalistic hedonism, but a kind of profound engagement with the meaning and significance of life.

Bruce Springsteen: last of the protest singers

On his European tour, the Boss assails the banks and inveighs against the 'robber barons'. Yet among stadium rockers, he is a lone voice

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/jun/10/bruce-springsteen-last-protest-singer

Under a full moon rising above the old Olympic stadium in Rome during the summer of 1993, Bruce Springsteen paused to catch breath between gale-force blasts of music – it was another of those thermo-charged, three-hour concerts – to cue his next number, Darkness on the Edge of Town. I was taking time out from frontlines in Bosnia, back across the Adriatic where no one gave a damn, for a bit of dolce vita.

"I wanna dedicate this song," gasped Springsteen, "to the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina!" The crowd, if it heard, was puzzled, and I was dumbstruck with gratitude – Springsteen? Here in Italy, ranting on about Bosnia? How good can this guy get?!

Last week in Berlin, he did it again – only this time his message, like his new album, Wrecking Ball, concerned a matter of more universal and mainstream concern: the looting of our economies and lives by banks brazenly gorging on our money. He railed against "greedy thieves" and "robber barons", saying from the stage that "in America a lot of people lost their jobs and I know that in Europe and Berlin also times are tough". He sang: "The banker man grows fatter, the working man grows thin …/ … Now sometimes tomorrow comes soaked in treasure and blood / Here we stood the drought, now we'll stand the flood … / ...If I had me a gun, I'd find the bastards and shoot 'em on sight / I'm a Jack of all trades, we'll be all right". Cop an earful of that!

Next month, after playing Sunderland, Manchester and the Isle of Wight, the Boss heads for London, where the darkness from the edge of town infests the steel and glass of the City and thereby all our lives. His concert falls on Bastille Day, only a week before the most aggressively corporate Olympics Games ever staged. The day also marks the centenary of the birth of Woody Guthrie, the father of American folk protest, of whom Springsteen is regarded as some kind of electric superstar incarnation. (Or at least that is how he seems to see himself.)

Why would we who love Springsteen's music and share his rage not await this night with bated breath? On the other hand, why does it matter so much? Why is it always Springsteen, and at this level of stadium rock and record sales, only Springsteen?

There are very few rock superstars from the Anglo-American axis who have played at this level over time – and a quick survey shows how far they have bloated away from serious commitment. Perky Sir Paul McCartney rounds off the jubilee for Her Majesty's whooping, servile subjects. Sir Mick Jagger showed a sign of rigor mortis by refusing to serenade the burghers of Davos, but struts and frets his years upon the world's stages to little cogent effect. Of the young ones, Coldplay filled the Emirates stadium with even less political content than Arsenal.

Across the Irish Sea, U2 traded Sunday Bloody Sunday for one of the great tax avoidance scandals in showbiz, and when a group of protesters raised a defiant balloon at Glastonbury, they were roughly handled – leading many to wonder that if you cannot peacefully and safely protest at Glastonbury, where can you?

The American greats are more complex. Bob Dylan cannot be said to count – he inspired a generation but now orbits another planet, despite playing Ballad of a Thin Man to very great effect during the 2003 Iraq war. Neil Young, author of Ohio back in the day that four protesting students were murdered by state troopers, veered into a Reaganite moment during the 1980s, but re-emerged to record the only album by a big star to overtly challenge war in Iraq. He was cheered by half his audiences, booed and middle-fingered by the other half. But last week, he did something weird, releasing God Save the Queen, perhaps ironic in the mode of Springsteen's Born In the USA, or – as Young has explained – integral to Canadiana, but the video taken from his new album is as bulimic as any other TV content of late. Aerosmith, Bon Jovi et al are simply excruciating.

Some do pronounce: Sting added rainforests to Tantric sex and Jarvis Cocker cares about melting ice caps, but so what? It's the banks, stupid – the looters, foreclosers, launderers of drug profits, arms deals and tax evasion, the new zillionaire global dictatorship that brings Death to My Hometown, as a new Springsteen song goes. Who is going to sing about them?

There is a roll of honour. In the UK, the estimable folk bards and balladeers: Dick Gaughan, Chris Wood, Martin Simpson, Martin Carthy and their small, devoted following. Billy Bragg lays claim to Orwell. In Ireland, rebel folk endures and develops, uniquely – just listen to Lizzie Nunnery's England Loves a Poor Boy.

In America, Jefferson Starship remains an unreconstructed project to plant a tree of liberty both from somewhere out there and within. Patti Smith strikes up People Have the Power on the stroke of midnight every New Year's Eve, even though they don't. Steve Earle clenches his fist and urges "Come back Woody Guthrie". But these are venerable – dare one say it, elderly – people, apart from the Dixie Chicks: blacklisted across American radio and their CDs ploughed into the ground at what amounted to musical book-burnings in George W Bush's America, after mildly criticising the then president.

Ah, then there's Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, now The Night Watchman, singing for striking teachers and assailed unions – playing both his own subversions and acquainting young America with the great radical folk canon. Morello became the watchman after an attempt to have his band crushed by the patriotic tsunami that followed 9/11, during which their music was blanket-blacklisted. Morello's response was to team up for a series of live performances with no equal in modern America: a blood-vessel-bursting account of The Ghost of Tom Joad – invoking Steinbeck's hero – with the man who wrote the song: Springsteen. Now, Morello features on the new album.

Even on this list, Springsteen stands alone for sheer stature, durability and profile. None of these others have been singing for 40 years to stadiums worldwide. His adrenalin-pumping shows are woven into American life, yet subvert its capitalist fundamentals, that innate American principle of screw-thy-neighbour, in favour of what he insists to be "real" America – working class, militant, street-savvy, tough but romantic, nomadic but with roots – compiled into what feels like a single epic but vernacular rock-opera lasting four decades.

Springsteen does this because he believes in what he says, and because it is easier to be an American leftwing patriot than a British one. We do not have that "redneck left", of blue-collar scaffolders who smoke weed and listen to Springsteen and even the Grateful Dead. And he gets away with it. As Glenn Stuart, front man for the tribute B Street Band, observes: "He's never been Dixie-Chicked".

Springsteen made his name in part by challenging and rejecting Reagan's attempted appropriation of Born in the USA, the irony of which the then president was too dim to grasp. But it wasn't only Reagan: Springsteen is so popular astride political fissures that Chris Christie, the recently elected Republican governor of his home state, New Jersey, wanted Springsteen to play at his inaugural bash. Springsteen refused, but the episode demonstrated Stuart's point that "either they don't hear what he is saying, or they just overlook it".

This leads to charges of ineffectuality. And to pointing out that Springsteen is himself a millionaire with a 378-acre horse ranch. It is further argued that the blue-collar working class for which Springsteen stands is largely Republican, though this was not true of the industrial and post-industrial swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan in which Springsteen performed for Barack Obama last time round.

Certainly, though, they do not account for feudal America's desperate poor – at food collection points and homeless shelters, working in fruit fields or online shopping warehouses, living in trailer parks across the edge of town – let alone the ghetto. But there it is: a song called American Skin (41 Shots), about those fired by New York cops, killing a young black man called Amadou Diallo in 1999 – and that is real American roots folk at its best.

Springsteen throws down a challenge no other superstar – or craven politician for that matter – has the vim, guts or gusto to even consider. That's why it matters. And he does so with an album at No 1 in the Billboard charts, with five stars from Rolling Stone and lyrics like this: "Yeah, sing it hard and sing it well / Send the robber barons straight to hell / The greedy thieves that came around and ate the flesh of everything they've found / Whose crimes have gone unpunished now / Walk the streets as free men now."

Bring on Bastille Day, bring on the Boss!

"On Divine Self-Limitation and Revolutionary Love"

An Interview with Slavoj Žižek

Joshua Delpech-Ramey, Journal of Philosophy and Scripture

---

http://www.philosophyandscripture.org/Issue1-2/Slavoj_Zizek/slavoj_zizek.html

(Note: An unpublished article by Slavoj Zizek which complements and extends the discussion pursued in the following interview will be included in the Fall 2004 issue of JPS)

JPS: Of late, the writings of St. Paul have become for you, as well as for Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben, a touchstone for radical thought. You seem to see in Paul's works something of a revolutionary manual, and in the founding of the community of believers a supreme example of the structure and effect of an authentic revolutionary act. For Badiou, Paul articulates a general structure of universality. But how separable is Paul's gesture in founding Christianity from the particularities of Christianity itself? How general are the lessons one can learn from Paul? Can or should those lessons be separated out, as form from content, from their particularity as aspects of the history of Christianity, itself? Or are the particularities of Christianity somehow, of the essence of this gesture?

SZ: My problem with Badiou, although I admire his book very much, is that Badiou . . . allows for only four truth procedures: science, art, politics, and love (and then philosophy is just the study of these genetic procedures . . . ). The point is that his supreme example of a truth-procedure—event, and so on—its implicit model is a kind of religious interpellation. So no wonder that the best example, it's religious! But paradoxically there is no place for religion. You know the irony is that the supreme example of the seminal structure of truth event that he tries to articulate, and it doesn't count as a truth-event.

So what he does is something similar to Heidegger—there is a long history to this. As we know the early Heidegger started with the same reference, St. Paul. He [Heidegger] I think used the term formales anzeigen, formal indication. The idea being that, as Heidegger would have put it, religious experience is just an ontic experience, it doesn't really have this transcendental dignity, and so on, but you find there a certain formal structure which can be then generalized, abstracted from its particular context into a kind of transcendental a priori. But still what is not answered, as you said, is that we cannot simply arrange this and say it's a simply empirical concept. Why this structure?

The second point I want to make here is, I think the reason that Badiou does not deploy this, as I tried to develop in the long chapter on Badiou and St. Paul in The Ticklish Subject , the key question for me is negativity in the sense of death. For him, in Badiou's reading of St. Paul, the death of Christ, as he puts it, has no inherent meaning whatsoever—it's just to prepare the site for the event. All that matters is resurrection life. This is connected with a very complex philosophical-theological topic . . . you may have noticed if you read Badiou, Badiou has some kind of natural, gut-feeling resistance toward the topic of death and finitude. For him, death and finitude, animality and so on, being-towards-death, death-drive—he uses the term sometimes in a purely non-conceptual way, "death drive, decadence" as if we were reading some kind of naïve Marxist liberal optimist from the early 20th century. This is all somehow for me interconnected. Although I am also taking St. Paul as a model, a formal structure which can then be applied to revolutionary emancipatory collectivities, and so on, nonetheless I try to ground it in a specific Christian content, which again for me focuses precisely on Christ's death, [his] death and resurrection. I am trying even to identify the two. The idea that resurrection follows death, the idea that these are two narrative events, this is at the narrative level of what Hegel would have called vorstellungen , representations. Actually, the two of them are even united. That is to say that Christ's death, in the Hegelian reading, is the disappearance of disappearance. It is in itself already what becomes for itself the new community.

What interests me is how precisely to distinguish Christ's death from this old boring topic—and all the old materialist critics of Christianity like to point this out: what's the big news, don't you have this sacrificial death of God in all pagan religions? Ah ah! You don't. The structure is totally different if you read it closely: already at the most superficial level, after Christ's death what you get is Holy Spirit, which is something totally different than in previous societies. All this about Isis, and so on, this rather boring circular myth, where basically god dies . . . you know, it's like, people are disordered, things go bad, but then there is the phoenix, everything is good again—no wonder this version is so popular, like even in The Lion King, where you have a kind of Hamlet-version where king dies, son redeems, there is a new king and so on . . . Christianity precisely is not this.

This brings us to two further topics. Now in Badiou's reading of psychoanalysis, he totally dismisses death drive. But the paradox for me, as I try to develop in my work, is that death drive is a very paradoxical notion if you read Freud closely. Death drive is basically, I claim, the Freudian term for immortality. Death drive has nothing to do, as Lacan points out, convincingly, with this so-called nirvana principle where everything wants to disappear, and so on. If anything (and because of this I like to read Richard Wagner's operas where you have this), death drive is that which prevents you from dying. Death drive is that which persists beyond life and death. Again, it's precisely what, in my beloved Stephen King's horror/science fiction terminology he calls the "undead": this terrifying insistence beneath death, which is why Freud links death drive to the compulsion to repeat. You know, it can be dead, but it goes on. This terrifying insistence of an undead object.

Point two: This is the big lesson to be learned, with all my criticism (criticism is the vulgar word, my difference of horizon), from Heidegger. The big breakthrough of Heidegger is to totally reconceptualize the notion of finitude. Already we have this in the early Heidegger with special reference to Kant. Already you see precisely how the other of finitude, the big stuff—infinity, eternity, and so on—is a category, modality, horizon of finitude. This was, for Heidegger, Kant's big breakthrough: transcendental as opposed to transcendent is a category of finitude.

All this somehow gets lost, in Badiou. [But] the whole category of "event" works only from the category of finitude. There are events only in finite situations. You can prove it only from his own position. Only for a finite being do you have this infinite work, what he likes to describe, in Christian terms, this trinity of faith, hope, love. Faith that the event did take place, hope in the final state (in Christianity universal redemption, in Marxism I don't know, communism at the end) and love as work, as what is between the two, fidelity to the event and so on. But . . . when in his last work, Badiou tries to articulate the structure of totalitarian danger, he calls "forcing the event," which means simply to ontologize the event, as if the event were not an infinite process whose place you have to discern in reality, as if the event totally permits its irrealities. But the gap between event and reality, that which is covered up by totalitarianism, is precisely the gap of finitude—so there is something missing at this level in Badiou.

JPS: A fourth term for that triad, as it were, of faith, hope and love?

SZ: Yes, yeah, maybe, but also . . . in these terms, I would say it: what I do like in Badiou is his clear awareness that the authentic Christian notion of love is something basically very violent and unilateral, it's totally different for me from the pagan notion where love is this kind of universal balance, you love the whole universe, you say yes to everything—no! Love—you find this in Christianity—is one-sided, unilateral. Love means "I love you more than everything": love is precisely what Buddhists would have called the origin of evil. Love is a kind of radical imbalance. Here I think you get (as I tried to put it in my Fragile Absolute) a very fine analysis of this logic of finitude already in the Bible, already in Paul, in Corinthians. It's very mysterious, that part, that paragraph on love [I Corinthians 13]. The mystery is the following one. He [Paul] oscillates basically between two versions, and the key point I think is to read them together. The first one is a kind of radical affirmation of love's priority, in the sense of "even if I got to know everything, and have all the power, without love I would be nothing, etc." But then two paragraphs later, he says—as if since now we don't know everything—all that we have is love. And I think that the two are to be read together. This is the paradox of Christianity, for me, that it's not God sitting up there and was a good enough guy to come to us . . . what we have to think, in a way, is the self-limitation of divinity itself.

The basic message is that I think there is a certain dimension of Christianity which for more complex reasons is missed, I think, by Badiou, because of his overall view that there is no place for finitude, as for example in his critique of Heidegger where he misses the point. He even goes into this mode where being-toward-death is just the animal level of being threatened . . . although I don't identify Heidegger's being-toward-death with death drive, Badiou is also missing that, because he cannot elevate finitude to its transcendental a priori dignity. He remains precisely, at a certain level, a pre-kantian metaphysician.

JPS: Next let's talk about this idea of the incarnation, as you read it in The Puppet and the Dwarf, as symbolizing an internal difference, a lack in God. The other side of that speculative judgment is the way you read Christ, from the perspective of finitude. Now for orthodox Christianity, Christ is the icon of God: what can be known of God is seen in Christ. Now for your materialist idiom, you want to say something like "Christ is the icon of humanity, or of what in humanity is not quite human"—is that what is breaking through from the perspective of finitude?

SZ: One thing I would like to specify is that nonetheless I violently reject this so-called "humanist" reading of Christianity, which says that simply, in a kind of Fuerbachian boring statement, that God is only the projection of various aspects of being human, and so on. No, I think this "more in the human than humanity"—you have to take it very radically. The basic message of religion, to put it in a nutshell, is that humanity cannot stand on its own, that you need an otherness, not a natural otherness like the earth or the all-embracing feminine . . . Here I may be approaching not so much gnosticism as certain not a little bit heretical twists, because I want to say not only that humanity only knows God through Christ but that only through Christ does God know himself. We all know that this is a well-known gnostic, or not so much gnostic as a certain mystic tradition or heretical move, this idea that our knowledge of God is divine self-knowledge, and so on.

But this is also how I read Jewish iconoclasm. I don't think Jewish iconoclasm is opposed to Christianity. Those who claim Jews got it correctly, let's not conceive God in an anthropomorphic way, Christians screwed it up in a half-pagan way—no! They don't get it. The true lesson already of Jewish iconoclasm is against this gnostic fake mysticism. The only terrain of the divine is contact with other humans. The divine is not [there] in this gnostic way, you withdraw into some absolute knowledge. Images of God [are not proscribed] because God is tout autre, beyond, and every image betrays him, but because the space of the divine is not up there, it's here, in human interactions, and I think this is perhaps only brought to a conclusion in Christianity.

But again I cannot emphasize enough, I am not playing the old game, "theology is just the alienated self-image of humanity" and so on. The whole problem is precisely that humanity never coincides with itself.

JPS: Does this have to do with why for you the true anti-type of Christ is not Adam, but Job. Why is that, exactly?

SZ: On the one hand, as we all know, this is one of the standard readings of Christianity, that Job's suffering in a way points towards Christ's suffering.

JPS: But you also, in The Puppet and the Dwarf, propose the character of Job as the first great critic of ideology. What is uncanny about Job however, is that unlike the modern liberal subject who considers herself as having the legal right to the criticism of the state, of religion, of any authority, etc., Job does not presume that he has the right to criticize God. After God's "answer" to Job—an answer which takes the form of a kind of obscene slide-show of the history of God's power—Job remains silent. How, then, can you claim that Job is the first critic of ideology? How and in what sense are we to interpret Job's silence as critical?

SZ: There is sympathy with God: Job correctly reads this very strange text, this divine boasting: "I created monsters, sea serpents, who are you?" [Job replies:] "I sympathize with you, I know that this is a show to conceal that you are impotent. . ."

Where I see this critical-ideological dimension is more in this—I would really like to write about these three or four guys who confront Job. In these three or four guys you see a spontaneous categorization of different modes of ideology. The first guy is a pretty brutal, simplistic ideologist. He says God is God, you suffer because you must have done something wrong. The other guys have more and more refined versions and so on. But again, the shocking news for me is that when God appears, you remember he says "every word that Job says is true." In a way Job doesn't even have to answer because God, in a way . . .

JPS: God answers for him?

SZ: Yes, God says everything Job says is true and everything those four ideologists said is false. So God clearly takes sides. This is for me really the single maybe most radical theological breakthrough, especially if you read it with Rene Girard. I don't always follow Girard but here I think he was right that what matters is this parallax as such, that is so uncanny. It's not simply who is right: in a way, nobody is right. The point is not simply that God was wrong . . .

I tend to agree with historicist critics of Christianity about this first scene with the devil. Probably this was a remainder of some previous pagan tradition where you have something like this, a gentleman's conversation between God and devil, let's make a deal, and so on . . . but I wouldn't make too much out of that. OK, they took it, OK! Bricolage, it's how you write sacred books! What interests me more is that you have two perspectives, and you cannot say this or that is the true one. You cannot say simply Job was right, God was cruel, you cannot say it was just illusion, there is this undecided openness. This is for me such a tremendous breakthrough. Why? It's not the usual oriental openness, where all our perspectives are finite. . . it's not just different finite perspectives on some more primordial maternal chaos or whatever. No, the gap is between God and man . . . Never forget this.

That's my thesis: you just have to transpose this radical gap back into God himself and you get Christ. This is the big mystery I'm struggling with. This is in the subtitle of the book [ The Puppet and the Dwarf], "the perverse core of Christianity." In a way I am sorry for that subtitle because some of my more vulgar materialist antitheological friends misread it and thought that I was saying Christianity is in itself perverse, and that I want to point to some perverse core in a negative way. Or some people even misread it as if in a kind of vulgar Deleuzian way that I want to assert "yes, Christianity is perverse!"—you know, people who praise perversion as liberation, and so on. No, no none of it!

My desperate problem is how to draw, how to extract the Christian notion of redemption from this financial transaction logic. This is what I'm desperately looking for. Here I think it is crucial to read Christ's sacrifice not literally as paying a debt. It is also—we should just trust our intuitions here—because the message of Christ's sacrifice is not "now I take it for you, you can screw it up again." No, it just opens the space for our struggle, and this is the paradox I like. This is what I like in what maybe is the best chapter of this book, the fifth one [of Puppet]. To put it in very simple terms, Christ's redemption doesn't mean that, OK, now we can go watch hard-core movies because we are redeemed each time. No, it's done, the Messiah is here, it's done, means that the space is now open for struggle. It's this nice paradox that the fact that the big thing happened does not mean it's over. It precisely opens the space for struggle. This is what I find again so incredible. Which is why to the horror of some of my Jewish friends, who doesn't like this idea that in Christianity everything happened whereas in Judaism the Messiah is always postponed, always to-come, and so on. No, I like here this crazy radicality of Christianity which is that, no, it happened, it already happened. But precisely that doesn't mean everything is already decided. No, again, what intrigues me is that I find here such a shattering revolution of the entire economy. . .

And another aspect which is linked to this entire economy—and here I do agree with Badiou—I do not agree with his critics who think Paul's famous "for me there are no Jews nor Greeks" simply means everybody can become a member, it is universally open. Then you can play all these games: if you are out, then you are not even human, there are only my brothers and if you are not my brother you are not even people. OK, OK, but my point is that Badiou nonetheless is still more precise. I speak here ironically of Badiou's Leninism. The shattering point is that truth is unilateral, that universal truth, no less universal for that reason, is accessible only from an engaged position. We don't have, "you are saying this, I am saying that, let's find the neutral position, the common." Truth is unilateral.

This is where I think Agamben misreads Badiou (because Agamben's book is explicitly in polemic with Badiou) precisely concerning universality. What Agamben tries to prove is that Paul's position is not universality but even double division—you cut a line, a division between those who are in and those who are out within every community. But I would say that precisely this is the Paulinian-Hegelian notion of universality, not universality as a positive encompassing feature. Universality is a line that cuts universally and this is, how shall I put it, absolutely unique in Christianity and this is what we are losing with these gnostic wisdoms and even with political correctness, tolerance, and so on, because the notion of truth there is not that of a fighting truth but that of differences, space open for everything. This notion of truth as painful, truth means you cut a line of difference . . . which is why for me, as I claim, you know that mysterious statement of Christ's "I came here not to bring peace but a sword"—I don't think this should be read as "kill the bad guys." It is a militant work of love.

JPS: A cut within ourselves?

SZ: Yeah, yes! This is why again, in a totally different way (you put it wonderfully) this too, is in a movie that I like, Fight Club, where at first, you hit yourself. This is the most difficult part. The change is a change in you. Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School, so sadly forgotten today, put it in a very nice way in his essay on liberation, "freedom is the condition of liberation." In order to liberate yourself you must be free.

We see this today, with feminists, that the first step in liberation is that you perceive that your situation is unjust. This already is the inner freedom. The problem is not, at first, that the situation for women was bad, but [rather] that they just accepted it as a fact. Even in revolution it goes like this. If you look at the French Revolution, the shift was purely ideological. They overthrew the king when they started to perceive that position as unjustified. Look at it in an objective way. The ancienne regime was, in the second part of the 18th century, much more liberal and open than before. It's just that the implicit ethical standards changed. My big obsession with Christianity is that there is something extremely precious in this legacy that is being lost today.

JPS: This is a question about idolatry, one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest theme of monotheistic religion, and of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scriptures. You claim provocatively in The Puppet and the Dwarf that "the ultimate idolatry is not the idolizing of the mask, the image, but the belief that there is some hidden, positive content beyond the mask" (138). What do you mean, exactly, by this phrase?

SZ: The key point for me is that Hegelian statement which I make all the time, which is that what dies on the cross is not a finite representative of God, but the God beyond himself. So that "Holy Spirit" means precisely, we are on our own, in a way. This terrible opening, this freedom, which, and here I am quite dogmatic: what we really mean by freedom was opened only through Judeo-Christian space. Freedom in this radical sense only is or appears as a correlate of what Lacan would have called desire of the Other qua Other. Without the abyss of the other, without perceiving the other in an abyss, without not knowing what the other wants, you are not free. If you know what they other one wants, and you are the object of his desire . . . Here it can be said also why Christianity is the religion of love. It's a positive ontological constituent of love: you only love someone who is an abyss, whom you don't know. Love always means this. . . In order to love someone, it should be an abyss . . . it should be a lacking in perfect being, but at the same time a being with an impenetrable excess. There is no love without this. You have all that mystical stuff where you say yes to the universe, but that's not what is uniquely Christian love.

And here I think, again, as for the essence of Christianity Kierkegaard got it first. When he emphasized that it is totally wrong to read Christ as a metaphor in the sense that first the truth appears just as a person but then with the Holy Spirit we know that it's not a person but just a universal notion of love, or whatever. The greatness of Kierkegaard is to show that our only access to eternity is through temporality. Not in this fake Hegelian sense that eternity is just the totality of the movement of the temporal, but this crazy paradox that in a specific historical moment something happened. Only through that passage do you get eternity. That is to say, if you go directly to eternity, you get nothing, you miss eternity itself. So if I were to pick out one writer here who got it, it would have been technically Kierkegaard. It's also clear that the Kierkegaardian triad aesthetic-ethical-religious is so clearly the Lacanian imaginary-symbolic-real. It fits so perfectly.

Also, what interests me in some of my works is to explain this relation between sexuality and love. Not in some cheap New Age religious sense where the ultimate religious experience is to have good sex, because you get the yin-yang balance and so on . . . what I think is that something is missing for me, in Kierkegaard. I develop this, I think, in my Wagner book. It's that you have a.) the aesthetic mode of sexuality which is, basically—I know it's more complex than this—seduction, Don Giovanni, blah blah. Then you have the ethical mode which is marriage. Then where is the religious mode? I think it is courtly love, this absolute logic, and so on. But something is missing there. And the whole trick of it, and Kierkegaard was approaching it, is how (we should never forget it) with Kierkegaard, it's either/or: the three are not at the same level, you always have to make a choice between the two. Which is why (and in some of his most radical formulations Kierkegaard did get a presentiment of it), paradoxically, once you make the fundamental choice and you opt for the ethical, from within the ethical the only step toward the religious is, often in its appearance, a regression towards the aesthetic.

Which is why I refer, in the last pages of my On Belief , to that weird English catholic novel by Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited, where you have exactly this. For the heroine, it would be ethical to marry the guy, now [at the end], because she is divorced. But she says no. Her only way to maintain fidelity to God is to go on changing lovers like crazy. Ethical would be, as Kierkegaard puts it (in a wonderful way apropos Abraham) the ethical is sheer interpretation itself. To act ethically, as opposed to religiously . . . from a religious perspective ethics is not something you should stick to against temptation. The ethical, as such, is the temptation. Which is why, again, this crazy leap of faith into the religious, can well appear, to external observers, to those not within the event, as merely aesthetic, as some kind of aesthetic regression. And again I think that to return to a diagnosis of where we are today, I think that precisely what I find horrible in these new forms of spirituality is that we are simply losing our sense for these kinds of paradoxes, which are the very core of Christianity.

Why is Wagner Worth Saving?

Slavoj Žižek

http://www.philosophyandscripture.org/Issue2-1/Slavoj_Zizek/slavoj_zizek.html

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Editor's Note: You will find printed in a previous issue of this journal (Volume 1, Issue 2) a companion interview to this article. At the conclusion of this interview, Slavoj Zizek generously offered the journal this additional essay as a way of illustrating many of the issues that had been discussed. See also in this issue Joshua Delpech-Ramey's brief essay clarifying the connection between his interview and this article.

1. With Romanticism, music changes its role: it is no longer a mere accompaniment of the message delivered in speech, it contains/renders a message of its own, "deeper" than the one delivered in words. It was Rousseau who first clearly articulated this expressive potential of music as such, when he claimed that, instead of merely imitating the affective features of verbal speech, music should be given the right to "speak for itself" - in contrast to the deceiving verbal speech, in music, it is, to paraphrase Lacan, the truth itself which speaks. As Schopenhauer put it, music directly enacts/renders the noumenal Will, while speech remains limited to the level of phenomenal representation. Music is the substance which renders the true heart of the subject, which is what Hegel called the "Night of the World," the abyss of radical negativity: music becomes the bearer of the true message beyond words with the shift from the Enlightenment subject of rational logos to the Romantic subject of the "night of the world," i.e., with the shift of the metaphor for the kernel of the subject from Day to Night. Here we encounter the Uncanny: no longer the external transcendence, but, following Kant's transcendental turn, the excess of the Night in the very heart of the subject (the dimension of the Undead), what Tomlison called the "internal otherworldliness that marks the Kantian subject."1 What music renders is no longer the "semantics of the soul," but the underlying "noumenal" flux of jouissance beyond the linguistic meaningfulness. This noumenal is radically different from the pre-Kantian transcendent divine Truth: it is the inaccessible excess which forms the very core of the subject.

2. In history of opera, this sublime excess of life is discernible in two main versions, Italian and German, Rossini and Wagner - so, maybe, although they are the great opposites, Wagner's surprising private sympathy for Rossini, as well as their friendly meeting in Paris, do bear witness to a deeper affinity. Rossini's great male portraits, the three from Barbiere (Figaro's "Largo il factotum," Basilio's "Calumnia," and Bartolo's "Un dottor della mia sorte"), plus the father's wishful self-portrait of corruption in Cenerentola, enact a mocked self-complaint, where one imagines oneself in a desired position, being bombarded by demands for a favor or service. The subject twice shifts his position: first, he assumes the roles of those who address him, enacting the overwhelming multitude of demands which bombard him; then, he feigns a reaction to it, the state of deep satisfaction in being overwhelmed by demands one cannot fulfill. Let us take the father in Cenerentola: he imagines how, when one of his daughters will be married to the Prince, people will turn to him, offering him bribes for a service at the court, and he will react to it first with cunning deliberation, then with fake despair at being bombarded with too many requests… The culminating moment of the archetypal Rossini aria is this unique moment of happiness, of the full assertion of the excess of Life which occurs when the subject is overwhelmed by demands, no longer being able to deal with them. At the highpoint of his "factotum" aria, Figaro exclaims: "What a crowd /of the people bombarding me with their demands/ - have mercy, one after the other /uno per volta, per carita!", referring therewith to the Kantian experience of the Sublime, in which the subject is bombarded with an excess of the data that he is unable to comprehend. The basic economy is here obsessional: the object of the hero's desire is the other's demand.

3. This is the excessive counterpoint to the Wagnerian Sublime, to the "hoechste Lust" of the immersion into the Void that concludes Tristan. This opposition of the Rossinian and of the Wagnerian Sublime perfectly fits the Kantian opposition between the mathematical and the dynamic Sublime: as we have just seen, the Rossinian Sublime is mathematical, it enacts the inability of the subject to comprehend the pure quantity of the demands that overflow him, while the Wagnerian Sublime is dynamic, it enacts the concentrated overpowering force of the ONE demand, the unconditional demand of love. One can also say that the Wagnerian Sublime is the absolute Emotion - this is how one should read the famous first sentence of Wagner's "Religion and Art," where he claims that, when religion becomes artificial, art can save the true spirit of religion, its hidden truth - how? Precisely by abandoning the dogma and rendering only the authentic religious emotion, i.e., by transforming religion into the ultimate aesthetic experience.

4. Tristan should thus be read as the resolution of the tension between sublime passion and religion still operative in Tannheuser. The entreaty at the beginning of Tannheuser enacts a strange reversal of the standard entreaty: not to escape the constraints of mortality and rejoin the beloved, but the entreaty addressed at the beloved to let the hero go and return to the mortal life of pain, struggle, and freedom. Tannheuser complains that, as a mortal, he cannot sustain the continuous enjoyment ("Wenn stets ein Gott geniessen kann, bin ich dem Wechsel untertan; nicht Lust allein liegt mir am Herzen, aus Freuden sehn ich mich nach Schmerzen"). A little bit later, Tannhauser makes it clear that what he is longing for is the peace of death itself: "Mein Sehnen draengt zum Kampfe, nicht such ich Wonn und Lust! Ach moegest du es fassen, Goettin! (wild) Hin zum Tod, den ich suche, zum Tode draengt es mich!" If there is a conflict between eternity and temporal existence, between transcendence and terrestrial reality here, then Venus is on the side of a terrifying ETERNITY of unbearable excessive Geniessen.

5. This provides the key to the opera's central conflict: it is NOT, as it is usually claimed, the conflict between the spiritual and the bodily, the sublime and the ordinary pleasures of flesh, but a conflict inherent to the Sublime itself, splitting it up. Venus and Elisabeth are BOTH meta-physical figures of the sublime: neither of the two is a woman destined to become a common wife. While Elisabeth is, obviously, the sacred virgin, the purely spiritual entity, the untouchable idealized Lady of the courtly love, Venus also stands for a meta-physical excess, that of the excessively intensified sexual enjoyment; if anything, it is Elisabeth who is closer to the ordinary terrestrial life. In Kierkegaard's terms, one can say that Venus stands for the Aesthetic and Elisabeth for the Religious - on condition that one conceives here of the Aesthetic as included in the Religious, elevated to the level of the unconditional Absolute. And therein resides the unpardonable sin of Tannheuser: not in the fact that he engaged in a little bit of free sexuality (in this case, the severe punishment would have been ridiculously exaggerated), but that he elevated sexuality, sexual lust, to the level of the Absolute, asserting it as the inherent obverse of the Sacred. This is the reason why the roles of Venus and Elisabeth definitely should be played by the same singer: the two ARE one and the same person, the only difference resides in the male hero's attitude towards her. Is this not clear from the final choice Tannheuser has to make between the two? When he is in his mortal agony, Venus is calling him to join her again ("Komm, o komm! Zu mir! Zu mir!"); when he gets close to her, Wolfram cries from the background "Elisabeth!", to which Tannheuser replies: "Elisabeth!" In the standard staging, the mention of the dead sacred Elisabeth gives Tannheuser the strength to avoid Venus' embrace, and Venus then leaves in fury; however, would it not be much more logical to stage it so that Tannheuser continues to approach THE SAME woman, discovering, when he is close to her, that Venus really is Elisabeth? The subversive power of this shift is that it turns around the old courtly love poetry motif of the dazzlingly beautiful lady who, when one approaches her too much, is revealed as a disgusting entity of rotten flesh full of crawling worms - here, the sacred virgin is discovered in the very heart of the dissolute seductress. So the message is not the usual desublimation ("Beware of the beautiful woman! It is a deceptive lure which hides the disgusting rotten flesh!"), but the unexpected sublimation, elevation of the erotic woman to the mode of appearance of the sacred Thing. The tension of Tannheuser is thus the one between the two aspects of the Absolute, Ideal-Symbolic and Real, Law and Superego. The true topic of Tannheuser is that of a disturbance in the order of sublimation: sublimation starts to oscillate between these two poles.

6. We can see, now, in what precise sense Tristan embodies the "aesthetic" attitude (in the Kierkegaardian sense of the term): refusing to compromise one's desire, one goes to the end and willingly embraces death. Meistersinger counters it with the ethical solution: the true redemption resides not in following the immortal passion to its self-destructive conclusion; one should rather learn to overcome it via creative sublimation and to return, in a mood of wise resignation, to the "daily" life of symbolic obligations. In Parsifal, finally, the passion can no longer be overcome via its reintegration to society in which it survives in a gentrified form: one has to deny it thoroughly in the ecstatic assertion of the religious jouissance. The triad Tristan-Meistersinger-Parsifal thus follows a precise logic: Meistersinger and Tristan render the two opposite versions of the Oedipal matrix, within which Meistersinger inverts Tristan (the son steals the woman from the paternal figure; the passion breaks out between the paternal figure and the young woman destined to become the partner of the young man), while Parsifal gives the coordinates themselves an anti-Oedipal twist - the lamenting wounded subject is here the paternal figure (Amfortas), not the young transgressor (Tristan). (The closest one comes to lament in Meistersinger is Sachs's "Wahn, wahn!" song from Act III.) Wagner planned to have in the first half of Act III of Tristan Parsifal to visit the wounded Tristan, but he wisely renounced it: not only would the scene ruin the perfect overall structure of Act III, it would also stage the IMPOSSIBLE encounter of a character with (the different, alternate reality, version of) ITSELF, as in the time travel science fiction narratives where I encounter MYSELF. One can even bring things to the ridiculous here by imagining the THIRD hero joining the two - Hans Sachs (in his earlier embodiment, as King Mark who arrives with a ship prior to Isolde), so that the three of them (Tristan, Mark, Parsifal), standing for the three attitudes, debate their differences in a Habermasian undistorted communicational exchange.

7. And one is tempted to claim that the triad of Tristan-Meistersinger-Parsifal is reproduced in three exemplary post-Wagnerian operas: Richard Strauss' Salome, Puccini's Turandot and Schoenberg's Moses und Aaron. Is not Salome yet another version of the possible outcome of Tristan? What if, at the end of Act II, when King Mark surprises the lovers, he were to explode in fury and order Tristan's head to be cut off; the desperate Isolde would then take her lover's head in her hands and start to kiss his lips in a Salomean Liebestod. (And, to add yet another variation of the virtual link between Salome and Tristan: what if, at the end of Tristan, Isolde would not simply die after finishing her "Mild und leise" - what if she were to remain entranced by her immersion in the ecstatic jouissance, and, disgusted by it, King Mark would give the order: "This woman is to be killed!"?) It was often noted that the closing scene of Salome is modelled on Isolde's Liebestod; however, what makes it a perverted version of the Wagnerian Liebestod is that what Salome demands, in an unconditional act of CAPRICE, is to kiss the lips of John the Baptist ("I want to kiss your lips!") - not the contact with a person, but with the partial object. If Salome is a counterpart to Tristan, then Turandot is the counterpart to Meistersinger - let us not forget that they are both operas about the public contest with the woman as the prize won by the hero.

8. Salome twice insists to the end in her demand: first, she insists that the soldiers bring to her Jokanaan; then, after the dance of seven veils, she insists that the king Herod bring her on a silver platter the head of Jokanaan - when the king, believing that Jokanaan effectively is a sacred man and that it is therefore better not to touch him, offers Salome in exchange for her dance anything she wants, up to half of his kingdom and the most sacred objects in his custody, just not the head (and thus the death) of Jokanaan, she ignores this explosive outburst of higher and higher bidding and simply repeats her inexorable demand "Bring me the head of Jokanaan." Is there not something properly Antigonean in this request of her? Like Antigone, she insists without regard to consequences. Is therefore Salome not in a way, no less than Antigone, the embodiment of a certain ethical stance? No wonder she is so attracted to Jokanaan - it is the matter of one saint recognizing another. And how can one overlook that, at the end of Oscar Wilde's play on which Strauss' opera is based, after kissing his head, she utters a properly Christian comment on how this proves that love is stronger than death, that love can overcome death?

9. Which, then, would be the counterpart to Parsifal? Parsifal was from the very beginning perceived as a thoroughly ambiguous work: the attempt to reassert art at its highest, the proto-religious spectacle bringing together Community (art as the mediator between religion and politics), against the utilitarian corruption of modern life with its commercialized kitsch culture - yet at the same time drifting towards a commercialized aesthetic kitsch of an ersatz religion, a fake, if there ever was one. In other words, the problem of Parsifal is not the unmediated dualism of its universe (Klingsor's kingdom of fake pleasures versus the sacred domain of the Grail), but, rather, the lack of distance, the ultimate identity, of its opposites: is not the Grail ritual (which provides the most satisfying aesthetic spectacle of the work, its two "biggest hits") the ultimate "Klingsorian" fake? (The taint of bad faith in our enjoyment of Parsifal as similar to the bad faith in our enjoyment of Puccini.) For this reason, Parsifal was the traumatic starting point which allows us to conceive of the multitude of later operas as reactions to it, as attempts to resolve its deadlock. The key among these attempts is, of course, Schoenberg's Moses und Aaron, the ultimate pretender to the title "the last opera," the meta-opera about the conditions of (im)possibility of the opera: the sudden rupture at the end of Act II, after Moses' desperate "O Wort, das mir fehlt!", the failure to compose the work to the end. Moses und Aaron is effectively anti-Parsifal: while Parsifal retains a full naïve trust in the (redemptive) power of music and finds no problems in rendering the noumenal divine dimension in the aesthetic spectacle of the ritual, Moses und Aaron attempts the impossible: to be an opera directed against the very principle of opera, that of the stage-musical spectacle - it is an operatic representation of the Jewish prohibition of aesthetic representation.

10. Is the buoyant music of the Golden Calf not the ultimate version of the bacchanalian music in Wagner, from Tannheuser to the Flower Maidens' music in Parsifal. And is there not another key parallel between Parsifal and Moses und Aaron? As it was noted by Adorno, the ultimate tension of Moses is not simply between divine transcendence and its representation in music, but, inherent to music itself, between the "choral" spirit of the religious community and the two individuals (Moses and Aaron) who stick out as subjects; in the same way, in Parsifal, Amfortas and Parsifal himself stick out as forceful individuals - are the two "complaints" by Amfortas not the strongest passages of Parsifal, implicitly undermining the message of the renunciation to subjectivity? The musical opposition between the clear choral style of the Grail community and the chromaticism of the Klingsor universe in Parsifal is radicalized in Moses und Aaron in the guise of the opposition between Moses' Sprechstimme and Aaron's full song - in both cases, the tension is unresolved.

11. What, then, can follow this breakdown? It is here that one is tempted to return to our starting point, to Rossinian comedy. After the complete breakdown of expressive subjectivity, comedy reemerges - but a weird, uncanny one. What comes after Moses und Aaron is the imbecilic "comic" Sprechgesang of Pierrot Lunaire, the smile of a madman who is so devastated by pain that he cannot even perceive his tragedy - like the smile of a cat in cartoons with birds flying around the head after the cat gets hit on the head with a hammer. The comedy enters when the situation is too horrifying to be rendered as tragedy - which is why the only proper way to do a film about concentration camps is a comedy: there is something fake in doing a concentration camp tragedy.

12. Is, however, this the only way out? What if Parsifal also points in another direction, that of the emergence of a new collective? If Tristan enacts redemption as the ecstatic suicidal escape FROM the social order and Meistersinger the resigned integration INTO the existing social order, then Parsifal concludes with the invention of a new form of the Social. With Parsifal's "Disclose the Grail!" ("Enthuellt den Graal!"), we pass from the Grail community as a closed order where Grail is only revealed in the prescribed time a ritual to the circle of the initiated, to a new order in which the Grail has to remain revealed all the time: "No more shall the shrine be sealed!" ("Nicht soll der mehr verschlossen sein!"). As to the revolutionary consequences of this change, recall the fate of the Master figure in the triad Tristan-Meistersinger-Parsifal (King Marke, Hans Sachs, Amfortas): in the first two works, the Master survives as a saddened melancholic figure; in the third he is DEPOSED and dies.

13. Why, then, should we not read Parsifal from today's perspective: the kingdom of Klingsor in the Act II is a domain of digital phantasmagoria, of virtual amusement - Harry Kupfer was right to stage Klingsor's magic garden as a video parlor, with Flower Girls reduced to fragments of female bodies (faces, legs…) appearing on dispersed TV-screens. Is Klingsor not a kind of Master of the Matrix, manipulating virtual reality, a combination of Murdoch and Bill Gates? And when we pass from Act II to Act III, do we not effectively pass from the fake virtual reality to the "desert of the real," the "waste land" in the aftermath of ecological catastrophy which derailed the "normal" functioning of nature? Is Parsifal not a model for Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, with Laurence Fishburne in the role of Gurnemanz?

14. One is thus tempted to offer a direct "vulgar" answer to the question: what the hell was Parsifal doing on his journey in the long time which passes between Acts II and III? That the true "Grail" are the people, its suffering. What if he simply got acquainted with human misery, suffering and exploitation? So what if the NEW collective is something like a revolutionary party, what if one takes the risk of reading Parsifal as the precursor of Brecht's Lehrstuecke, what if its topic of sacrifice points towards that of Brecht's Die Massnahme, which was put to music by Hans Eisler, the third great pupil of Schoenberg, after Bert and Webern? Is the topic of both Parsifal and Die Massnahme not that of learning: the hero has to learn how to help people in their suffering. The outcome, however, is opposite: in Wagner compassion, in Brecht/Eisler the strength not to give way to one's compassion and directly act on it. However, this opposition itself is relative: the shared motif is that of COLD, DISTANCED COMPASSION. The lesson of Brecht is the art of COLD compassion, compassion with suffering which learns to resist the immediate urge to help others; the lesson of Wagner is cold COMPASSION, the distanced saintly attitude (recall the cold girl into which Parsifal turns in Syberberg's version) which nonetheless retains compassion. Wagner's lesson (and Wotan's insight) about how the greatest act of freedom is to accept and freely enact what necessarily has to occur, is strangely echoed in the basic lesson of Brecht's "learning plays": what the young boy to be killed by his colleagues has to learn is the art of Einverstaendnis, of accepting his own killing which will occur anyway.

15. And what about the misogynism which obviously sustains this option? Is it not that Parsifal negated the shared presupposition of the first two works, their assertion of love (ecstatic courtly love, marital love), opting for the exclusively male community? However, what if, here also, Syberberg was right: after Kundry's kiss, in the very rejection of (hysterical-seductive) femininity, Parsifal turns into a woman, adopts a feminine subjective position? What if what we effectively get is a dedicated "radical" community led by a cold ruthless woman, a new Joan of Arc?

16. And what about the notion that the Grail community is an elitist closed initiatic circle? Parsifal's final injunction to disclose the Grail undermines this false alternative of elitism/populism: every true elitism is universal, addressed at everyone and all, and there is something inherently vulgar about initiatic secret gnostic wisdoms. There is a standard complaint of the numerous Parsifal lovers: a great opera with numerous passages of breathtaking beauty - but, nonetheless, the two long narratives of Gurnemanz (taking most of the first half of Acts I and III) are Wagner at his worst: a boring recapitulation of the past deeds already known to us, lacking any dramatic tension. Our proposed "Communist" reading of Parsifal entails a full rehabilitation of these two narratives as crucial moments of the opera - the fact that they may appear "boring" is to be understood along the lines of a short poem of Brecht from the early 1950s, addressed to a nameless worker in the GDR who, after long hours of work, is obliged to listen to a boring political speech by a local party functionary: "You are exhausted from long work / The speaker is repeating himself / His speech is long-winded, he speaks with strain / Do not forget, the tired one: / He speaks the truth."2 This is the role of Gurnemanz - no more and no less than the agent - the mouth-piece, why not - of truth. In this precise case, the very predicate of "boring" is an indicator (a vector even) of truth as opposed to the dazzling perplexity of jokes and superficial amusements. (There is, of course, another sense in which, as Brecht knew very well, dialectics itself is inherently comical.)

17. And what about the final call of the Chorus "Redeem the Redeemer!", which some read as the anti-Semitic statement "redeem/save Christ from the clutches of the Jewish tradition, de-Semitize him"? However, what if we read this line more literally, as echoing the other "tautological" statement from the finale, "the wound can be healed only by the spear which smote it (die Wunde schliesst der Speer nur, der sie schlug)"? Is this not the key paradox of every revolutionary process, in the course of which not only violence is needed to overcome the existing violence, but the revolution, in order to stabilize itself into a New Order, has to eat its own children?

18. Wagner a proto-Fascist? Why not leave behind this search for the "proto-Fascist" elements in Wagner and, rather, in a violent gesture of appropriation, reinscribe Parsifal in the tradition of radical revolutionary parties? Perhaps, such a reading enables us also to cast a new light on the link between Parsifal and The Ring. The Ring depicts a pagan world, which, following its inherent logic, MUST end in a global catastrophy; however, there are survivors of this catastrophy, the nameless crowd of humanity which silently witnesses God's self-destruction. In the unique figure of Hagen, The Ring also provides the first portrait of what will later emerge as the Fascist leader; however, since the world of The Ring is pagan, caught in the Oedipal family conflict of passions, it cannot even address the true problem of how this humanity, the force of the New, is to organize itself, of how it should learn the truth about its place; THIS is the task of Parsifal, which therefore logically follows The Ring. The conflict between Oedipal dynamics and the post-Oedipal universe is inscribed within Parsifal itself: Klingsor's and Amfortas' adventures are Oedipal, then what happens with Parsifal's big turn (rejection of Kundry) is precisely that he leaves behind the Oedipal incestuous eroticism, opening himself up to a new community.

19. The dark figure of Hagen is profoundly ambiguous: although initially depicted as a dark plotter, both in the Nibelungenlied and in Fritz Lang's film, he emerges as the ultimate hero of the entire work and is redeemed at the end as the supreme case of the Nibelungentreue, fidelity to death to one's cause (or, rather, to the Master who stands for this cause), asserted in the final slaughter at the Attila's court. The conflict is here between fidelity to the Master and our everyday moral obligations: Hagen stands for a kind of teleological suspension of morality on behalf of fidelity, he is the ultimate "Gefolgsmann."

20. Significantly, it is ONLY Wagner who depicts Hagen as a figure of Evil - is this not an indication of how Wagner nonetheless belongs to the modern space of freedom? And is Lang's return to the positive Hagen not an indication of how the XXth century marked the reemergence of a new barbarism? It was Wagner's genius to intuit ahead of his time the rising figure of the Fascist ruthless executive who is at the same time a rabble-rousing demagogue (recall Hagen's terrifying Maennerruf) - a worthy supplement to his other great intuition, that of a hysterical woman (Kundry) well before this figure overwhelmed European consciousness (in Charcot's clinic, in the art from Ibsen to Schoenberg).

21. What makes Hagen a "proto-Fascist" is his role as the unconditional support for the weak ruler (King Gunther): he does for Gunther the "dirty jobs" which, although necessary, have to remain concealed from the public gaze - "Unsere Ehre heisst Treue." We find this stance, a kind of mirror-reversal of the Beautiful Soul which refuses to dirty its hands, at its purest in the Rightist admiration for the heroes who are ready to do the necessary dirty job: it is easy to do a noble thing for one's country, up to sacrificing one's life for it - it is much more difficult to commit a CRIME for one's country when it is needed. Hitler knew very well how to play this double game apropos the holocaust, using Himmler as his Hagen. In the speech to the SS leaders in Posen on October 4 1943, Himmler spoke quite openly about the mass killing of the Jews as "a glorious page in our history, and one that has never been written and never can be written," explicitly including the killing of women and children: "I did not regard myself as justified in exterminating the men - that is to say, to kill them or have them killed - and to allow the avengers in the shape of children to grow up for our sons and grandchildren. The difficult decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the earth."

22. This is Hagen's Treue brought to its extreme - however, was the paradoxical price for Wagner's negative portrayal of Hagen not his Judifizierung? A lot of historical work has been done recently trying to bring out the contextual "true meaning" of the Wagnerian figures and topics: the pale Hagen is really a masturbating Jew; Amfortas' wound is really syphillis. The idea is that Wagner is mobilizing historical codes known to everyone in his epoch: when a person stumbles, sings in cracking high tones, makes nervous gestures, etc., "everyone knew" this is a Jew, so Mime from Siegfried is a caricature of a Jew; the fear of syphillis as the illness in the groin one gets from having intercourse with an "impure" woman was an obsession in the second half of the 19th century, so it was "clear to everyone" that Amfortas really contracted syphillis from Kundry. Marc Weiner developed the most perspicuous version of this decoding by focusing on the micro-texture of Wagner's musical dramas - manner of singing, gestures, smells - it is at this level of what Deleuze would have called pre-subjective affects that anti-Semitism is operative in Wagner's operas, even if Jews are not explicitly mentioned: in the way Beckmesser sings, in the way Mime complains.

23. However, the first problem here is that, even if accurate, such insights do not contribute much to a pertinent understanding of the work in question. One often hears that, in order to understand a work of art, one needs to know its historical context. Against this historicist commonplace, one should affirm that too much of a historical context can blur the proper contact with a work of art - in order to properly grasp, say, Parsifal, one should ABSTRACT from such historical trivia, one should DECONTEXTUALIZE the work, tear it out from the context in which it was originally embedded. Even more, it is, rather, the work of art itself which provides a context enabling us to properly understand a given historical situation. If, today, someone were to visit Serbia, the direct contact with raw data there would leave him confused. If, however, he were to read a couple of literary works and see a couple of representative movies, they would definitely provide the context that would enable him to locate the raw data of his experience. There is thus an unexpected truth in the old cynical wisdom from the Stalinist Soviet Union: "he lies as an eye-witness!"

24. There is another, more fundamental, problem with such historicist decoding: it is not enough to "decode" Alberich, Mime, Hagen etc. as Jews, making the point that the Ring is one big anti-Semitic tract, a story about how Jews, by renouncing love and opting for power, brought corruption to the universe; the more basic fact is that the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew itself is not a direct ultimate referent, but already encoded, a cypher of ideological and social antagonisms. (And the same goes for syphillis: in the second half of the 19th century, it was, together with tuberculosis, the other big case of "illness as a metaphor" (Susan Sontag), serving as an encoded message about socio-sexual antagonisms, and this is the reason why people were so obsessed by it - not because of its direct real threat, but because of the ideological surplus-investment in it.) An appropriate reading of Wagner should take this fact into account and not merely "decode" Alberich as a Jew, but also ask the question: how does Wagner's encoding refer to the "original" social antagonism of which the (anti-Semitic figure of the) "Jew" itself is already a cypher?

25. A further counter-argument is that Siegfried, Mime's opponent, is in no way simply the beautiful Aryan blond hero - his portrait is much more ambiguous. The short last scene of Act 1 of The Twilight (Siegfried's violent abduction of Brunhilde; under the cover of Tarnhelm, Siegfried poses as Gunther) is a shocking interlude of extreme brutality and ghost-like nightmarish quality. What makes it additionally interesting is one of the big inconsistencies of The Ring: why does Siegfried, after brutally subduing Brunhilde, put his sword between the two when they lay down, to prove that they will not have sex, since he is just doing a service to his friend, the weak king Gunther? TO WHOM does he have to prove this? Is Brunhilde not supposed to think that he IS Gunther? Before she is subdued, Brunhilde displays to the masked Siegfried her hand with the ring on it, trusting that the ring will serve as protection; when Siegfried brutally tears the ring off her hand, this gesture has to be read as the repetition of the first extremely violent robbery of the ring in the Scene 4 of Rhinegold, when Wotan tears the ring off Alberich's hand. The horror of this scene is that it shows Siegfried's brutality naked, in its raw state: it somehow "depsychologizes" Siegfried, making him visible as in inhuman monster, i.e., the way he "really is," deprived of his deceiving mask - THIS is the effect of the potion on him.

26. There is effectively in Wagner's Siegfried an unconstrained "innocent" aggressivity, an urge to directly pass to the act and just squash what gets on your nerves - as in Siegfrid's words to Mime in the Act I of Siegfried: "when I watch you standing, / shuffling and shambling, / servilely stooping, squinting and blinking, / I long to seize you by your nodding neck / and make an end of your obscene blinking!" (the sound of the original German is here even more impressive: "seh'ich dich stehn, gangeln und gehn, / knicken und nicken, / mit den Augen zwicken, / beim Genick moecht'ich den Nicker packen, / den Garaus geben dem garst'gen Zwicker!"). The same outburst is repeated twice in Act II: "Das eklige Nicken / und Augenzwicken, / wann endlich soll ich's / nicht mehr sehn, / wann werd ich den Albernen los?" "That shuffling and slinking, / those eyelids blinking - / how long must I / endure the sight? / When shall I be rid of this fool?", and, just a little bit later: "Grade so garstig, / griesig und grau, / klein und krumm, / hoeckrig und hinkend, / mit haengenden Ohren, / triefigen Augen - / Fort mit dem Alb! / Ich mag ihn nicht mehr sehn." "Shuffling and slinking, / grizzled and gray, / small and crooked, / limping and hunchbacked, / with ears that are drooping, eyes that are bleary… / Off with the imp! I hope he's gone for good!" Is this not the most elementary disgust, repulsion felt by the ego when confronted with the intruding foreign body? One can easily imagine a neo-Nazi skinhead uttering just the same words in the face of a worn-out Turkish Gastarbeiter.3

27. And, finally, one should not forget that, in the Ring, the source of all evil is not Alberich's fatal choice in the first scene of Rhinegold: long before this event took place, Wotan broke the natural balance, succumbing to the lure of power, giving preference to power over love - he tore out and destroyed the World-Tree, making out of it his spear on which he inscribed the runes fixating the laws of his rule, plus he plucked out one of his eyes in order to gain insight into inner truth. Evil thus does not come from the Outside - the insight of Wotan's tragic "monologue with Brunhilde" in the Act II of Walkure is that the power of Alberich and the prospect of the "end of the world" is ultimately Wotan's own guilt, the result of his ethical fiasco - in Hegelese, external opposition is the effect of inner contradiction. No wonder, then, that Wotan is called the "White Alb" in contrast to the "Black Alb," Alberich - if anything, Wotan's choice was ethically worse than Alberich's: Alberich longed for love and only turned towards power after being brutally mocked and turned down by the Rhinemaidens, while Wotan turned to power after fully enjoying the fruits of love and getting tired of them. One should also bear in mind that, after his moral fiasco in Walkure, Wotan turns into "Wanderer" - a figure of the Wandering Jew like already the first great Wagnerian hero, the Flying Dutchman, this "Ahasver des Ozeans."

28. And the same goes for Parsifal which is not about an elitist circle of the pure-blooded threatened by external contamination (copulation by the Jewess Kundry). There are two complications to this image: first, Klingsor, the evil magician and Kundry's Master, is himself an ex-Grail knight, he comes from within; second point, if one reads the text really close, one cannot avoid the conclusion that the true source of evil, the primordial imbalance which derailed the Grail community, resides at its very center - it is Titurel's excessive fixation of enjoying the Grail which is at the origins of the misfortune. The true figure of Evil is Titurel, this obscene pere-jouisseur (perhaps comparable to giant worm-like members of the Space Guild from Frank Herbert's Dune, whose bodies are disgustingly distorted because of their excessive consumption of the "spice").

29. This, then, undermines the anti-Semitic perspective according to which the disturbance always ultimately comes from outside, in the guise of a foreign body which throws out of joint the balance of the social organism: for Wagner, the external intruder (Alberich) is just a secondary repetition, externalization, of an absolutely immanent inconsistency/antagonism (of Wotan). With reference to Brecht's famous "What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank? ", one is tempted to say: "What is a poor Jew's stealing of the gold compared to the violence of the Aryan's (Wotan's) grounding of the rule of Law?"

30. One of the signs of this inherent status of the disturbance is the failure of the big finales of Wagner's operas: the formal failure here signals the persistence of the social antagonism. Let us take the biggest of them all, the mother of all finales, that of The Twilight of Gods. It is a well-known fact that, in the last minutes of The Twilight, the orchestra performs an excessively intricate cobweb of motifs, basically nothing less than the recapitulation of the motivic wealth of the entire Ring - is this fact not the ultimate proof that Wagner himself was not sure about what the final apotheosis of the Ring "means"? Not being sure of it, he took a kind of "flight forward" and threw together ALL the motifs. So the culminating motif of "Redemption through Love" (a beautiful and passionate melodic line which previously appears only in Act III of Walkuere) cannot but make us think of Joseph Kerman's acerbic comment about the last notes of Puccini's Tosca in which the orchestra bombastically recapitulates the "beautiful" pathetic melodic line of the Cavaradossi's "E lucevan le stelle," as if, unsure of what to do, Puccini simply desperately repeated the most "effective" melody from the previous score, ignoring all narrative or emotional logic.4 And what if Wagner did exactly the same thing at the end of The Twilight? Not sure about the final twist that should stabilize and guarantee the meaning of it all, he took recourse to a beautiful melody whose effect is something like "whatever all this may mean, let us make it sure that the concluding impression will be that of something triumphant and upbeating in its redemptive beauty." In short, what if this final motif enacts an empty gesture?

31. It is a commonplace of Wagner studies that the triumphant finale of Das Rheingold is a fake, an empty triumph indicating the fragility of the gods' power and their forthcoming downfall - however, does the same not go also for the finale of Siegfried? The sublime duet of Brunhilde and Siegfried which concludes the opera fails a couple of minutes before the ending, with the entry of the motif anouncing the couple's triumphant reunion (usually designated as the motif of "happy love" or "love's bond") - this motif is obviously a fake (not to mention the miserable failure of the concluding noisy-bombastic orchestral tutti, which lacks the efficiency of the gods' entry to Walhalla in Rhinegold). Does this failure encode Wagner's (unconscious?) critique of Siegfried? Recall the additional curious fact that this motif is almost the same as - closely related to - the Beckmesser motif in Meistersinger (I owe this insight to Gerhard Koch; Act III of Siegfried was written just after Meistersinger)! Furthermore, does this empty bombastic failure of the final notes not also signal the catastrophy-to-come of Brunhilde and Siegfried's love? As such, this "failure" of the duet is a structural necessity.5 (One should nonetheless follow closely the inner triadic structure of this duet: its entire dynamic is on the side of Brunhilde who twice shifts her subjective stance, while Siegfried remains the same. First, from her elevated divine position, Brunhilde joyously asserts her love for Siegfried; then, once she becomes aware of what Siegfried's passionate advances mean - the loss of her safe distanced position - she displays fear of losing her identity, of descending to the level of a vulnerable mortal woman, man's prey and passive victim. In a wonderful metaphor, she compares herself to a beautiful image in the water which gets blurred once man's hand directly touches and disturbs the water. Finally, she surrenders to Siegfried's passionate advances and throws herself into the vortex.) However, excepting the last notes, Act III of Siegfried - at least from the moment when Siegfried breaks Wotan's spear to Brunhilde's awakening - is not only unbearably beautiful, but also the most concise statement of the Oedipal problematic in its specific Wagnerian twist.

32. On his way to the magic mountain where Brunhilde lies, surrounded by a wall of fire which can be tresspassed only by a hero who does not know fear, Siegfried first encounters Wotan, the deposed (or, rather, abdicated) supreme god, disguised as a Wanderer; Wotan tries to stop him, but in an ambiguous way - basically, he WANTS Siegfried to break his spear. After Siegfried disrespectfully does this, full of contempt in his ignorance for the embittered and wise old man, he progresses through the flames and perceives a wonderful creature lying there in deep sleep. Thinking that the armored plate on the creature's chest is making its breathing difficult, he proceeds to cut off its straps by his sword; after he raises the plate and sees Brunhilde's breasts, he utters a desperate cry of surprise: "Das ist kein Mann! / This is no man!" This reaction, of course, cannot but strike us as comic, exaggerated beyond credulity. However, one should bear in mind a couple of things. First, the whole point of the story of Siegfried till this moment is that while Siegfried spent his entire youth in the forest in the sole company of the evil dwarf Mime who claimed to be his only parent, mother-father, he nonetheless observed that, in the case of animals, parents are always a couple, and thus longs to see his mother, the feminine counterpart of Mime. Siegfried's quest for a woman is thus a quest for sexual difference, and the fact that this quest is at the same time the quest of fear, of an experience that would teach him what fear is, clearly points in the direction of castration - with a specific twist. In the paradigmatic Freudian description of the scene of castration (in his late short text on "Fetishism"), the gaze discovers an absence where a presence (a penis) is expected, while here, Siegfried's gaze discovers an excessive presence (of breasts - and should one add that the typical Wagnerian soprano is an opulent soprano with large breasts, so that Siegfried's "Das ist kein Mann!" usually gives rise to a hearty laughter in the public?).6

33. Secondly, one should bear in mind here an apparent inconsistency in the libretto which points the way to proper understanding of this scene: why is Siegfried so surprised at not encountering a man, when, prior to it, he emphasizes that he wants to penetrate the fire precisely in order to find there a woman? To the Wanderer, he says: "Give ground then, for that way, I know, leads to the sleeping woman." And, a couple of minutes later: "Go back yourself, braggart! I must go there, to the burning heart of the blaze, to Brunhilde!" From this, one should draw the only possible conclusion: while Siegfried was effectively looking for a woman, he did not expect her not to be a man. In short, he was looking for a woman who would be - not the same as man, but - a symmetric supplement to man, with whom she would form a balanced signifying dyad - and what he found was an unbearable lack/excess. What he discovered is the excess/lack not covered by the binary signifier, i.e., the fact that Woman and Man are not complementary but asymmetrical, that there is no yin-yang balance - in short, that there is no sexual relationship.

34. No wonder, then, that Siegfried's discovery that Brunhilde "is no man" gives rise to an outburst of true panic accompanied by a loss of reality, in which Siegfried takes refuge with his (unknown) mother: "That's no man! A searing spell pierces my heart; a fiery anxiety fills my eyes; my senses swim and swoon! Whom can I call on to help me? Mother, mother! Think of me!" He then gather all his courage and decides to kiss the sleeping woman on her lips, even if this will mean his own death: "Then I will suck life from those sweetest lips, though I die in doing so." What follows is the majestic awakening of Brunhilde and then the love duet which concludes the opera. It is crucial to note that this acceptance of death as the price for contacting the feminine Other is accompanied musically by the echo of the so-called motif of "renunciation," arguably the most important leitmotif in the entire tetralogy. This motif is first heard in the Scene 1 of Rhinegold, when, answering Alberich's query, Woglinde discloses that "nur wer der Minne Macht versagt /only the one who renounces the power of love" can take possession of the gold; its next most noticeable appearance occurs towards the end of Act 1 of Walkure, at the moment of the most triumphant assertion of love between Sieglinde and Siegmund - just prior to his pulling out of the sword from the tree trunk, Siegmund sings it to the words: "Heiligster Minne hoechste Not / holiest love's highest need." How are we to read these two occurrences together? What if one treats them as two fragments of the complete sentence that was distorted by "dreamwork," that is, rendered unreadable by being split into two - the solution is thus to reconstitute the complete proposition: "Love's highest need is to renounce its own power." This is what Lacan calls "symbolic castration": if one is to remain faithful to one's love, one should not elevate it into the direct focus of one's love, one should renounce its centrality.

35. Perhaps a detour through the best (or worst) of Hollywood melodrama can help us to clarify this point. The basic lesson of King Vidor's Rhapsody is that, in order to gain the beloved woman's love, the man has to prove that he is able to survive without her, that he prefers his mission or profession to her. There are two immediate choices: (1) my professional career is what matters most to me, the woman is just an amusement, a distracting affair; or (2) the woman is everything to me, I am ready to humiliate myself, to forsake all my public and professional dignity for her. They are both false: they both lead to the man being rejected by the woman. The message of true love is thus: even if you are everything to me, I can survive without you, I am ready to forsake you for my mission or profession. The proper way for the woman to test the man's love is thus to "betray" him at the crucial moment of his career (the first public concert in the film, the key exam, the business negotiation which will decide his career) - only if he can survive the ordeal and accomplish successfully his task although deeply traumatized by her desertion, will he deserve her and she will return to him. The underlying paradox is that love, precisely as the Absolute, should not be posited as a direct goal - it should retain the status of a by-product, of something we get as an undeserved grace. Perhaps, there is no greater love than that of a revolutionary couple, where each of the two lovers is ready to abandon the other at any moment if revolution demands it.

36. What, then, happens when Siegfried kisses the sleeping Brunhilde, so that this act deserves to be accompanied by the Renunciation motif? What Siegfried says is that he will kiss Brunhilde "though I die in doing so" - reaching out to the Other Sex involves accepting one's mortality. Recall here another sublime moment from The Ring: in the Act II of Die Walkuere, Siegmund literally renounces immortality. He prefers to stay a common mortal if his beloved Sieglinde cannot follow him to Walhalla, the eternal dwelling of the dead heroes - is this not the highest ethical act of them all? The shattered Brunhilde comments on this refusal: "So little do you value everlasting bliss? Is she everything to you, this poor woman who, tired and sorrowful, lies limp in your lap? Do you think nothing less glorious?" Ernst Bloch was right to remark that what is lacking in German history are more gestures like Siegmund's.

37. But which LOVE is here renounced? To put it bluntly: the incestuous maternal love. The "fearless hero" is fearless insofar as he experiences himself as protected by his mother, by the maternal envelope - what "learning to fear" effectively amounts to is learning that one is exposed to the world without any maternal shield. It is essential to read this scene in conjunction with the scene, from Parsifal, of Kundry giving a kiss to Parsifal: in both cases, an innocent hero discovers fear and/or suffering through a kiss located somewhere between the maternal and the properly feminine. Till the late 19th century, they practiced in Montenegro a weird wedding night ritual: in the evening after the marriage ceremony, the son gets into bed with his mother and, after he falls asleep, the mother silently withdraws and lets the bride take her place: after spending the rest of the night with the bride, the son has to escape from the village into a mountain and spend a couple of days alone there in order to get accustomed to the shame of being married. Does something homologous not happen to Siegfried?

38. However, the difference between Siegfried and Parsifal is that, in the first case, the woman is accepted; in the second case, she is rejected. This does not mean that the feminine dimension disappears in Parsifal, and that we remain within the homoerotic male community of the Grail. Syberberg was right when, after Parsifal's rejection of Kundry which follows her kiss, "the last kiss of the mother and the first kiss of a woman," he replaced Parsifal-the-boy with another actor, a young cold woman - did he thereby not enact the Freudian insight according to which identification is, at its most radical, identification with the lost (or rejected) libidinal object? We BECOME (identify with) the OBJECT which we were deprived of, so that our subjective identity is a repository of the traces of our lost objects.

Notes
1. Gary Tomlison, Metaphysical Song, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999), 94.
2. Bertolt Brecht, Die Gedichte in einem Band, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), 1005.
3. When, in his Der Fall Wagner, Nietzsche mockingly rejects Wagner's universe, does his style not refer to these lines? Wagner himself was such a repulsive figure to him - and there is a kind of poetic justice in it, since Mime effectively is Wagner's ironic self-portrait.
4. Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
5. This love-duet is also one of the Verdi-relapses in Wagner (the best known being the revenge-trio that concludes the Act III of The Twilight, apropos which already Bernard Shaw remarked that it sounds like the trio of the conspirators from Un ballo in maschera). Gutman designated it as a farewell to music drama towards the rediscovered goal of the ultimate grand opera. See Robert Gutman, Richard Wagner, (New York, 1968), 299.
6. As if referring to this scene, Jacques-Alain Miller once engaged in a mental experiment, enumerating other possible operators of sexual difference which could replace the absence/presence of penis, and mentions the absence/presence of breasts.