These last writings on Wagner make clear the force of his break from his earlier ambition to consider the political from a purely aesthetic perspective. This romantic aestheticization of the political had taken the form of portraying Germany as a new Greece in keeping with the defining tenet of German philhellenism. From the late eighteenth century, and with renewed intensity from the 1790s in the response to the course of the French Revolution, Germans of the idealist era came to think of Greek tragedy as the highest form of art, conveying an experience of the terror of destiny amidst now broken dreams of restoring ancient civic virtue. This was a new experience of a caesura of ancient and modern, and at the same of an epochal nexus upon which a new, modern tragic consciousness became possible. Unsurprisingly, Nietzsche had a scant, tendentious understanding of this French Revolutionary context in which a rebirth of tragedy in Germany became conceivable, though it was Hölderlin, his childhood hero, who had announced this dark rose dawn. Like many readers of Nietzsche, Badiou does not take into consideration this preceding German discourse on ancient and modern tragedy but with less justification as it directly pertains to his conception of the mimetic-antagonistic relation of Nietzsche’s act of epochal division to the Revolution.
Little Infinities
Ray Lester Fitzsimmons
