Description: This is a pioneering attempt to rearticulate the relationship between music and the problem of mimesis, of presentation and re-presentation. Four "scenes" compose this book, all four of them responses to Wagner: two by French poets (Baudelaire and Mallarmé), two by German philosophers (Heidegger and Adorno).
Review Quotes: "Lacoue-Labarthe's work is a thought-provoking book: the reader embarks on an intellectual journey that draws connections between music, theater, aesthetics, philosophy, and history from ancient Greece to the present. . . . Lacoue-Labarthe offers a point of departure for a new aesthetic of art, one appropriate to the philosophical problems of the 20th Century."--Wagner Notes