Simon Gros

In a 2009 lecture about Ring Der Ring des Nibelugen Slavoj Žižek developed a provocative and wide-ranging lecture on Richard Wagner, focusing on the fraught question of Wagner’s antisemitism and its relation to the operas themselves. Moving between personal anecdotes, cultural history, psychoanalytic theory, and close interpretive readings, Žižek challenged the simplified positions that either isolate Wagner’s prejudices from his art or reduce the music dramas to straightforward proto-fascist documents.

He reflected on the contested reception of Wagner in Israel, the shifting political uses of Wagner in Nazi Germany, and the uneasy moral question of whether one can—or should—still listen to Wagner today. Drawing on Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Adorno, and Hegel, Žižek argued for a non-reductive approach that reads Wagner’s works in detail, as sites of internal contradiction where ideology is both staged and undermined.

The lecture also explored Wagner’s recurring figures of wounded immortality, wandering, sacrifice, and death, connecting them to the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive. Combining philosophical rigor with anecdote, humor, and polemic, the event unfolds as an intense reflection on art, politics, interpretation, and the persistence of aesthetic power in historically compromised works, followed by audience discussion and exchange.