title: Five Lessons on Wagner
author:  Alain Badiou 
description: A figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us!Slavoj iek (in praise of Alain Badiou)<br /><br />An heir to Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser.<i>New Statesman (in praise of Alain Badiou)</i><br /><br />Shaking the foundations of Western liberal democracy.<i>Times Higher Education Supplement (in praise of Alain Badiou)</i>
zlib_text: FIVE LESSONS ON WAGNER
  
  FIVE LESSONS ON WAGNER
  ALAIN BADIOU
  Translated by Susan Spitzer
  With an Afterword by Slavoj Žižek
  
  First published by Verso 2010
  © Verso 2010
  Translation Susan Spitzer © 2010
  Afterword Slavoj Žižek © 2010
  All rights reserved
  The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted
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  Verso
  UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
  USA: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY  11201
  www.versobooks.com
  Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
  ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-481-7 (pbk)
  ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-465-5 (hbk)
  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
  Printed in the USA by Maple Vail
  
  Contents
  Translator’s Acknowledgements 
  vii
  Preface 
  ix
  Lesson 1
  Contemporary Philosophy and the Question of Wagner:
  The Anti-Wagne