Opera, Wagner & Music as Cultural Form

In his words 1

“Love's highest need is to renounce its own power. This is what Lacan calls symbolic castration.”
1:07:43 Wagner’s Ring as a Communist Narrative · renunciation motif as symbolic castration

The stories that teach it

the jokes and anecdotes he reaches for when he works in this idea, ranked by how many of its talks they turn up in; each card is one story, with every retelling on its page

example · in 1 of its talks

Coetzee's Disgrace as Hegelian reconciliation

Žižek cites J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace as the closest literary approximation to Hegelian reconciliation: the hero loses everything, and this total loss/acceptance is the reconciliation, not a triumphant reappropriation.

example · in 1 of its talks

Blue Velvet as child's primal scene fantasy

Michel Chion's reading of the Dennis Hopper / Isabella Rossellini scene in Blue Velvet: the disturbing details (breathing mask etc.) are best read as a child's imaginary reconstruction of what parents are doing behind a closed door, having heard sounds without understanding sex.

anecdote · in 1 of its talks

Udi Aloni's Holocaust joke

Pro-Palestinian Jewish filmmaker Udi Aloni criticizes collaborators' clumsiness, saying 'If you were so efficient like this, you wouldn't have been able to do the Holocaust properly,' highlighting the taboo against such irony in Germany.

example · in 1 of its talks

The Dark Tower (Film/Book)

A story where a modern city and a 'Magic Wild West' are connected by a Dark Tower. Destroying the tower destroys both worlds, illustrating a 'redoubled suture' where each reality needs the other's representative to exist.

example · in 1 of its talks

Adorno on Schoenberg and Rachmaninov

Adorno argues that after Schoenberg's atonal revolution, traditional tonal music (like Rachmaninov's) loses its innocence and becomes 'kitsch' or a negation of itself, mediated by the new break.

example · in 1 of its talks

Hamlet and the Norwegian King

A reading of Hamlet where Hamlet's father won independence from Norway (throwing the world 'out of joint'), and Hamlet restores the status quo by installing the Norwegian Fortinbras, making Hamlet a traitor to his father's revolutionary act.

Freud at Škocjan Cave meets Karl Lueger1 Lévi-Strauss's two maps of the village1 Hegel on America and Russia in the 1820s1 The Venezuelan Factory Failure1 Steve Bannon the Left Trumpian1 Viking horned helmets invented for Wagner1

Where it comes up 7

8 moments located in the transcripts, click a timestamp to play from there

Slavoj Zizek Wagner's Ring as a Communist Narrative Discussion2009-06-17 · 28:24

10:58 the seductress is the redemption

… He wrote Wagner that when she got it that the same woman who is the seductress is the redemption and so on and so on.

13:30 Wagner is too precious to be left to the enemies

… So it was practically you see this is what like Wagner is too precious to be left to the enemies to the enemies my god no? It's there is so much there is so much in Wagner just again look at the texture of the work and see how it interacts with let's call it for example would you agree with another point with which I am obsessed.

Slavoj Zizek – Transcendental Subjectivity, Sexual Difference, Brain Sciences2017-10-06 · 2:02:10

~1:19:41 Viking horns (Wagnerian invention)

and so on and so forth. And isn't this absolutely a correct theory of ideology? Isn't every historical epoch like that? For example, the last detail that I learned here, a trivial one as an old Wagnerian: you know this Viking idea that they have …

Is it possible to Move Beyond The Transcendental?2016-11-01 · 2:15:01

1:00:04 void supplement

… I will try to give you a simple musical example of this logic of void supplement.

The Prospect Of The Post-Human2016-11-02 · 1:42:49

42:34 romantic lie

… That's the romantic lie.

Wagner’s Ring as a Communist Narrative2009-06-17 · 1:27:04

1:04:19 renunciation motif

… So what happens then effectively at the end, what kind of love do we get after all this? The key I claim is provided by so-called renunciation motif.