Wagner's Jesus of Nazareth: marriage is adultery
example · opera/literary: Wagner ·
retold in 3 talks
In Wagner's unpublished draft Jesus of Nazareth, Christ rewrites the commandment against adultery: the true adultery is not copulation outside marriage but a loveless marriage, which violates the law's spirit from within. Žižek reads this as a paradigm case of Hegelian negation of negation.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 3
“The commandment says you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you: you shall not marry without love. A marriage without love is broken as soon as entered into”
“sex within marriage which is not grounded in love is even a greater sin... it ruins the idea of marriage from within... the true catastrophe.”
“The true adultery is not to copulate outside marriage, but to copulate in marriage without love.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
contents · one story, 3 jobsuses
negation of negation
×3
marriage without love is adultery
×1
property is theft
×1
Its cast and sources
populated by
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon3Rider Haggard1Charles Baudelaire1Yevgeny Yevtushenko1Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau1André Glucksmann1Anna Netrebko1Laura Kipnis1
alongside works
Every retelling 3
In Wagner's unpublished draft Jesus of Nazareth, Christ rewrites the commandment against adultery: the true adultery is not copulation outside marriage but a loveless marriage, which violates the law's spirit from within. Žižek reads this as a paradigm case of Hegelian negation of negation., illustrating negation of negation,marriage without love is adultery,property is theft,Hegelian dialectics
In his unfinished drama, Wagner interprets the Sermon on the Mount: adultery merely transgresses marriage from outside, but sex in marriage without love corrupts it from within, a negation of negation that destroys the very field., illustrating negation of negation,internal contradiction vs external opposition
Wagner's unpublished play has Jesus supplement the commandments: the true adultery is not extramarital sex but copulation within a loveless marriage, which destroys the law's spirit from within while respecting its letter., illustrating negation of negation,internal vs. external violation,Proudhon's property is theft