Biographical note:

Alain Badiou teaches philosophy at the E?cole normale supérieure and the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. In addition to several novels, plays and political essays, he has published a number of major philosophical works, including Theory of the Subject, Being and Event, Manifesto for Philosophy, and Gilles Deleuze. His recent books include The Meaning of Sarkozy, Ethics, Metapolitics, Polemics, The Communist Hypothesis, Five Lessons on Wagner, and Wittgenstein’s Anti-Philosophy.

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include Living in the End Times, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, In Defense of Lost Causes, four volumes of the Essential Žižek, and many more.

Country of final manufacture:

US

Main description:

For over a century, Richard Wagner’s music has been the subject of intensedebate among philosophers, many of whom have attacked its ideological—some say racist and reactionary—underpinnings. In this major new work,Alain Badiou, radical philosopher and keen Wagner enthusiast, offers adetailed reading of the critical responses to the composer’s work, whichinclude Adorno’s writings on the composer and Wagner’s recuperationby Nazism as well as more recent readings by Philippe Lacoue-Labartheand others. Slavoj Žižek provides an afterword, and both philosophersmake a passionate case for re-examining the relevance of Wagner to thecontemporary world.

Review quote:

“A figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us!”—Slavoj Žižek (in praise of Alain Badiou)

“An heir to Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser.”—New Statesman (in praise of Alain Badiou)

“Shaking the foundations of Western liberal democracy.”—Times Higher Education Supplement (in praise of Alain Badiou)