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Notes
notes
1 Thomas Mann, “Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner” in Essays of Three Decades, trans. Helen Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1947) 311, 370; translation amended.
2 Richard Wagner, “The Valkyrie” in The Ring of the Nibelungen, trans. Andrew Porter (New York: Norton, 1977) 98; referred to hereafter as V. See also the plot summary of The Valkyrie after the notes.
3 Donald Davidson, “Incoherence and Irrationality” in Problems of Rationality (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004) 197.
4 Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: NLB, 1981) 45.
5 Ibid. 116.
6 Richard Wagner, “Die Walküre” in Die Musikdramen (Munich: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1978) 889.
7 The motif of the eye-kiss recurs in Thomas Mann's story “The Blood of the Walsungs.” Here, Sieglinde kisses her beautiful, delicate, brutal twin brother Siegmund on his “closed eyes,” a gesture of narcissistic removal in a bourgeois interior which feels itself, so to speak; see Thomas Mann, “The Blood of the Walsungs” in Stories of Three Decades, trans. Helen Lowe-Porter (London, 1946) 309. Jacques Derrida at one point links the theoretical question, the question of vision and of the light without which nothing can appear and be recognised, with the ethical question, the question of one's relation to the other and to oneself: “As long as you will not have touched me with your eyes, as long as you will not have touched my eyes as if they were lips, it will not be possible for you to say ‘a day’ or ‘one day.’ Nor ‘farewell’: good day, goodbye, greetings, take care of yourself, I pray that you will outlive me one day.” See Jacques Derrida, Le Toucher, Jean Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000) 13 – English translation: On Touching – Jean Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005).
8 In his lecture, “Identity and Difference,” Heidegger defines this “bringing out into view” [Eräugen] as “a catching sight of something, a calling that summons in the very act of seeing, an appropriation or enowning” (Martin Heidegger, Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1978) 24; my trans. The passage has been omitted in the existing English translation).
9 “Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner” 330.
10 Wagner, Siegfried, in The Ring of the Nibelungen 222.
11 Die Walküre 892; my trans.
12 In Search of Wagner 134.
13 Ernst Bloch, Geist der Utopie, 2nd ver. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985) 108; my trans.
14 Ibid. 118; my trans.
15 In Search of Wagner 117.
16 Ibid. 153.
17 Davidson, “Paradoxes of Irrationality” in Problems of Irrationality 170.
18 Ibid. 177.
19 Ibid. 181 (footnote).
20 Ibid. 185.
21 Davidson, “Deception and Division” in Problems of Rationality 208.
22 “Paradoxes of Irrationality” 187.
23 Ibid. 185.
24 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977) 204. In the doctrine of powers that he unfolds in his “Philosophy of Revelation,” Schelling interprets the idea of the Trinity in the following manner: “What happens here specifically is that the Father cannot show his true will openly and that he can only show the contrary, the opposite of what he really wants. Instead of a unity, he can only display a non-unity […] It is for this reason that a necessity is imposed upon him. He must place his true will elsewhere, transfer it to his son. What he wishes for straight away he can only achieve by way of a mediation, or of a second personality to whom he transfers his will.” (F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung, bilingual edition Italian/German (Milan: Bompiani, 2002) 544).
25 Bloch argues that Brünnhilde's fate is “sad,” not “tragic-necessary,” because it does not result from the conflict of an “authentic deed”; see Geist der Utopie 119; my trans.
26 “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” 203.
27 Mann, “Richard Wagner and the Ring” in Essays of Three Decades 364.
28 “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” 203.
29 Ibid. 253.
30 “Richard Wagner and the Ring” 353.
31 Williams Bernard, “Truth, Politics and Self-Deception” in In the Beginning was the Deed, ed. Geoffrey Hawthorn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) 156.
32 In his “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger defines the “essence of ethos” in Greek thought as the “open” space of human “abiding”; see Martin Heidegger, Brief über den Humanismus (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1981) 45; my trans.