JOHANNES HOFF

LIFE IN ABUNDANCE

SCHLINGENSIEF’S DECONSTRUCTION OF (POST-)MODERNISM

- draft version -

CAMILLE. What do you say, Lucile? LUCILE. Nothing. I love to watch you speak.

CAMILLE. And do you hear me too? LUCILE. Certainly! CAMILLE. Am I right?

Have you any idea what I was saying? LUCILE. No, none at all.

There are moments when we do not pay attention to what people are talking about;

when we do not hear but ‘see’ them speaking. However, it takes a person of

considerable unworldliness for this attitude to become a permanent state of affairs;

people like Lucile, for instance, the wife of Camille Desmoulins, a Jacobin whom his

own comrades-in-arms have sentenced to death, in Büchner’s drama Danton’s Death.

Even beneath the barred window of her husband’s death row cell, Lucile speaks the

seemingly naïve language of unworldliness:

Listen, people are pulling long faces and saying you must die. I can’t help laughing

at their faces. Die. What sort of word is that, tell me, Camille? Die. I must think it

over.

Lucile speaks as though the people with their long faces had nothing to do with her. But

that does not stop her from being more in touch with the world of her comrades than

they themselves are. As early as the second act, when it seems as though no one’s head

but Danton’s were at stake, Lucile glimpses something rolling toward Camille which

he, swept along by the enthusiasm of revolutionary fraternization, refuses to see:

LUCILE. When I think that they may take your head and … Camille, it’s nonsense,

isn’t it? I’m crazy? CAMILLE. Be calm. Danton and I aren’t the same person.

Lucile sees clearly, from the very beginning. But to the end she refuses to translate what

she sees into a message that would be adequate for the gravity of the situation. As

Camille declaims solemn phrases celebrating his own heroic death (“Gentlemen, I shall

serve myself first”), she hears the strokes of the clock. She wants to scream:

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LUCILE. And yet there is something serious in it. I must think. I’m beginning to grasp

it. … To die. Die. Everything has the right to live, everything—the little fly there,

that bird. Why not he? […] Everything moves. Clocks tick, bells peal, people walk,

water trickles, everything—except in that one place. No! It can’t be allowed to

happen. I shall sit on the ground and scream until everything stops in fright and

nothing moves any more.

Yet a blind scream is powerless to halt the ceaseless, clamorous creation of meaning.

And so all that remains to her in the end is what Paul Celan, in his speech on the

occasion of receiving the Büchner Prize in 1960, called a “word against the grain” or

“counter-word”:

CITIZEN. Qui va là? LUCILE [reflects a moment, then suddenly decides]. Long live the

King! CITIZEN. In the name of the republic! [The guards surround her and take her

away.]

Lucile’s “Long live the King!” not only disrupts the intentional creation of meaning—

the desire to communicate of those who churn out pathos-laden messages even in the

face of the scaffold. Her “counter-word” halts even the flow of the non-intentional

generation of meaning; that is the key point of this scene.

THE DECONSTRUCTION OF “PUPPET” AND “STRING”

According to Martin Heidegger and Marshall McLuhan, the transformative potential of

modern art is comparable to that of the modern light bulb. It opens up its own contexts

of association and action; it functions as a self-referential medium around which we can

congregate. Hence McLuhan’s theory-of-everything offered to the global village in the

media age: “The medium is the message.”1

Lucile’s counter-word is neither an intentional nor a self-referential medium. The

medium of her final words neither has a message, nor is it its message. It amounts to no

more than a brief moment during which the machine of ceaseless meaning production is

halted . It is easy to create something meaningful:

1 See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).

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But when there is talk of art, there is often somebody who does not really listen.

More precisely: somebody who hears, listens, looks … and then does not know what

it was about. But who hears the speaker, “sees him speaking” […] Here where it all

comes to its end, where all around Camille pathos and sententiousness confirm the

triumph of “puppet” and “string,” here Lucile who is blind against art, Lucile for

whom language is tangible and like a person, Lucile is suddenly there with her “Long

live the king!” […] It is a word against the grain, the word which cuts the “string,”

which does not bow to the “bystanders and old warhorses of history.” It is an act of

freedom. It is a step.2

Celan’s analysis of the dramatic scene is persuasive. But it speaks the language of an era

that regarded the dawn of McLuhan’s global village with skepticism, even aversion.

Hence the difficulty of translating its “potential for negation” into the language of a

village whose residents do not fear death if it provides an opportunity to congregate, in

the manner of a herd, around an “event”, or to become its central protagonist if only for

fifteen minutes. Andy Warhol was paraphrasing McLuhan when he prophesied in 1968

that, “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” In the age of “Lady

Diana,” “I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!” and “al-Qaeda,” even the most

unworldly actions and words are transmuted into poetic light bulbs that supply the

placeless inhabitants of the World Wide Web with fleeting community experiences.

It is impossible to produce a counterword in a post-modern global village. That is why

one would look in vain for such a gesture in Schlingensief’s art-blind oeuvre. The faith

in the decisive word is replaced, or so it would seem, by a “faith in embarrassment.” A

paradigmatic example of this faith is the theatrical happening titled Kaprow City (2006),

whose prehistory goes back to Schlingensief’s action 48 Stunden Überleben für

Deutschland [48 Hours Survival for Germany] during documenta X in 1997. During the

documenta action Schlingensief uncannily announced the death of Lady Diana before

the princess had died. A few hours later, Kassel police arrested him for “slandering the

memory of a dead person.” In Kaprow City, this event recurred now overpainted in a

way that turned the dead media princess into a thing, trivial and boring and

2 Paul Celan, “The Meridian,” in Collected Prose, trans. and introd. by Rosemarie Waldrop (New York: Routledge, 2003), 37–56, here pp. 39–40. I am grateful to Ingrid Anna for pointing me to this passage.

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embarrassing at once. Schlingensief’s arrest in 1997 could still have been interpreted as

an event of the “my fifteen minutes” type, but in 2006 the machine of event production

simply broke down. The Kaprow City installation, a monstrous and labyrinthine

complex the spectator had to enter alone, was not designed to provide the audience with

any experience of community. The beholder had to find her own way through this

moving structure; rather than discovering the collective time of a virtual event, each step

revealed nothing but a lonesome present time.

Up to a certain point, this scenario was consistent with the postmodern trend: Beuys’s

“Every human being is an artist” turned into Kippenberger’s “Every artist is a human

being.”3 Schlingensief’s art, however, was more radical. The dominant gesture, to the

very end, was that of an unworldliness blind to art. Instead of bowing, in an act of post-

modern irony, to the law of McLuhan and Lacan that the message even of a purloined

letter always “arrives,”4 his art made the spectator freeze in incomprehension. But more

than that, it captivated the beholder even as the message never “arrived,” because there

was something to be seen in Schlingensief’s art. Montaging the flotsam of a history of

art, cinema, literature, and music that had lost all orientation, and mixing in religious

symbolism to create a Gesamtkunstwerk decidedly bereft of all meaning, his art

allowed the spectator to see through the artifice of “puppet” and “wire” to what Celan’s

art-blind person sees: the person-like, the perceptible, the everyday.

The late Schlingensief’s Fluxus and ready-made projects, dedicated to his own illness,

are exemplary in this regard. For the ready-made is precisely that: an object alienated

from the context of its use that presents itself to the beholder as a speechless and

expressionless thing. Boris Groys has offered an excellent analysis of this strand in

Schlingensief’s art:

This is no longer about the transmutation of the mute world into language, but rather

about a transmutation of language into a thing. The artist has lost control of the flow

3 Harald Falckenberg, Frank Berberich, “Nach der Lust Kalte Gier. Die Konjunkturen des Kunstmarkts und die Chancen für Junge Künstler,” Lettre International 89 (2010), 106.

4 See Jacques Derrida, “The Purveyor of Truth,” in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 411–96.

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of language—and so he stops this flow […] because he has learned […] that there are

situations in which language fails for its own reasons.5

ACHIM, OR LIFE IN ABUNDANCE

Is that a sufficient interpretation? In Groys’s analysis, what allows “the thing” to

become person-like in Schlingensief’s work recedes behind the experiences of

negativity in illness and death or the petrified language of religious symbolism and its

indifference to meaning. But Schlingensief’s ready-mades were about more than the

gesture of iconoclastic negation—they were about the eighty-year-old opera-chorus

singer Elfriede Rezabek, for instance, singing the song of Isolde’s Love-Death from

Wagner’s Tristan in her frail voice (“How softly and gently he smiles, how sweetly his

eyes open—can you see, my friends, do you not see it?”),6 or about Achim von

Paczensky.

Achim was a patient at the state hospital at Teupitz in 1993, when Schlingensief cast

him for his film Terror 2000. As the postmodern Botox and art market was auctioning

puppies and teddy bears in the style of Jeff Koons’s balloon animals, Achim became the

favorite candidate of Schlingensief’s futuristic political party of the marginalized,

Chance 2000. Achim then co-directed the TV project Freakstars 3000 (2003), which

displayed the mechanisms of postmodern talent shows by staging such a show at the

Tiele-Winckler-Haus, a residential home for disabled people. Finally, in the Fluxus

oratorio A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within, Achim and Kerstin Grassmann shouted

“Avantgarde—Marmelade! Avantgarde—Marmelade!” (see also the photographs of

Achim in the Church of Fear under Prozession zur Auferstehung as well as Geschichte

der Kirche). When Achim died of a heart attack on December 26, 2009, an editor at

nachtkritik.de wrote:

What the show celebrated: a human being! And a human being with a disability to

boot! At bottom, Schlingensief was making fairly cynical use of strategies of mass-

media staging to benefit himself and his cause; it was presumably all the product of

5 Boris Groys, “Sprachversagen. Zur Arbeit des Künstlers und Theatermachers Christoph Schlingensief,” Lettre International 90 (2010), 114; and see Boris Groys, “When Words Fail,” in the present volume, pp. ##.

6 See http://www.mea-culpa.at/.

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cool calculation. And yet it made tears well up in my eyes. For Achim von

Paczensky’s sake.7

Schlingensief’s art played on the anti-humanist keyboard of a media economy that

offers no visibility for those who shed tears without the commercial extraction of ratings

gains. There is no key on this keyboard for sincere humanist messages. But that did not

stop the former altar boy from Oberhausen from using the means of art to let something

emerge into view. The decidedly unprofessional program of Schlingensief’s theatrical

productions is comparable to a “seriasure” that “serially” “drives” the spectator “into a

corner” (the corner Jacques Derrida described as a “stricture”8) in order to afford him

the opportunity to see something the scenario of “puppet” and “wire” does not provide

for—Achim, for instance, or Helga, Kerstin, Frank, and Elfriede. Something seems to

have driven Schlingensief time and again “to do art”; but to him this urge was part and

parcel of an articulation of life that, though it included the aspiration to art, included

also something else — healthy and sick people, merry and sad ones, boring and

embarrassing ones.

How serious, how blind to art this interest was became undeniable when Schlingensief’s

performances began to organize themselves around “the alien thing” within himself, the

cancer in his lung. According to Friedhelm Mennekes, his role at that point approached

that of John Paul II as he lay dying.9 Despite the billions of people all over the world

who watched the old man’s slow death, there was one thing the event was not: a

theatrical production controlled by directors who play god without taking an interest in

man. It was not even drama, but instead the plain and simple celebration of what all

Catholics celebrate on Sundays and Holidays: the liturgy. On Easter 2005, for instance:

The empty window is taken up by the figure of a little old […] man struggling with

the last bit of strength he retains. He puts his hand in front of his mouth, bursts into

tears, can barely lift his arm to give the blessing, forcing the few words the ritual

7 “Eine Rose für Achim” (Nachtkritik): http://www.schlingensief.com/weblog/?p=479; see also Schlingensief’s own obituary for von Paczensky at http://schlingenblog.posterous.com/achim-ist-gestorben-beerdigung-am-612010-auf.

8 See Jacques Derrida, “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” trans. Ruben Berezdivin, in Re-Reading Levinas, Robert Bernasconi, Simon Critchley (eds.) (Bloomington, In.: Indiana University Press, 1991), 11–48.

9 See http://www.domradio.de/aktuell/66811/schlingensief-grosser-zeuge-unserer-zeit.html.

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requires him to speak through a tube surgically inserted into his windpipe, producing

no more than an unintelligible rattling sound. The head of the Catholic Church […] It

is not a drama he is not involved in. Not a theatrical production. Rather […] it is

suffering: suffering before himself and the one in whom he believes, whose

suffering, dying, and overcoming of death are just now being consummated down

there, in the celebration of the Eucharist.10

As the first pages of the program notes from Mea Culpa document, Schlingensief felt

that this event strengthened his resolve to catapult himself into the position of the

“thing” (despite the defeatist attacks from the Catholic inner circles against his

experiment).11 And these projects, too, were not about staging a drama of suffering. The

merry-go-round of his productions revolved more recognizably than ever around a

Biblical motif: “life in abundance” (John 1:15, 10:10; Psalms 16:11).12

In A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within, this motif reappears during the Reading from

the Fifth Gospel according to Joseph Beuys: “By virtue of his suffering, the sufferer

who can do nothing at all fills the world with Christian substance.”13 Leaving aside the

metaphysics of suffering elaborated by the Reformation and by German Idealism, this

“substance” has no more to do with a masochistic mysticism of suffering than the

crucified Christ of the fourth gospel (John 19:34) does with Wagner’s Parsifal. The

point here is not to celebrate suffering and compassion as ends in themselves, but rather

to celebrate life even in suffering.

Schlingensief’s trenchant Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung [Cancer Diary] gets to the

heart of this affirmative strand of the Christian heritage. Long passages in the book

speak the language of Old Testament invective: “Mine eye mourneth by reason of

affliction […] Shall thy lovingkindness be declared in the grave? or thy faithfulness in

destruction?”, as the Psalmist already proclaimed (Psalms 88:9–11). Schlingensief’s

10 Gerhard Stadler, “Der Vorhang,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (May 31, 2005).11 See Burgtheater, Christoph Schlingensief. Mea Culpa. Heft 194 (Vienna, 2008), 5–7.12 John Paul II had already addressed the subject in 1984, in his Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris: “On

the Cross, Christ attained and fully accomplished his mission […] In weakness he manifested his power, and in humiliation he manifested all his messianic greatness.” Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II to the bishops …, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_11021984_salvifici-doloris_en.html (April 4, 2011).

13 See http://www.kirche-der-angst.de/.

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Diary pursues this line, speaking the language of the Daily Prayer at the Church of

Fear: “And yet Jesus isn’t there. And God isn’t there either. And Mother Mary isn’t

there either. It’s all completely dead. […] The whole petit-bourgeois shit is no longer

there. […] Amen.” And yet even in Schlingensief such invective has its context, as the

title of Schlingensief’s Diary makes perfectly clear: It Couldn’t Possibly Be as Lovely in

Heaven as It Is Here! We may revile God and the world; but when we are done reviling,

one certainty at least remains: the “here and now” is still better than the “fairylands”

that artists, philosophers, or theologians contrive. No “possible world” can compete

with this real one.

THE “UNMOVED MOVER”

AND BORIS GROYS’S READING OF SCHLINGENSIEF

To dismiss the importance of this Catholic aspect of Schlingensief’s world in the

interpretation of his work would mean to miss the nerve of his art. To be sure, his aim

was not to “make art”—“making” was alien to him, but neither was it his aim to take up

the position of an aloof observer vis-à-vis the spectacle of artistic activities.

That is why Boris Groys’s reading of Schlingensief strikes me as unsatisfactory; most

importantly because it falls for a distorted theology. According to Groys, God was a

director who created the world only to adopt the passive attitude of the “unmoved

mover” watching his self-moving creation. When this mythical “first mover” died, he

left a void, which, according to Groys, allowed artists to come into play; artists like

Schlingensief, for example, a director and action artist who sets gigantic

Gesamtkunstwerke in motion in order to become subsequently an “observer of his own

frantic activities.”14

Groys’s reading spikes this deistic framework with a shot of Buddhism: “We have to

work on not possessing any power, on not doing anything, not producing anything, not

fighting against anything, and instead approving of everything.”15 That could sound as

though Schlingensief had stood back from life. But the true object of Groys’s reading is

of course something else: the radical unworldliness of Schlingensief’s art, which he

14 Carl Hegemann, Boris Groys, “Metanoia. Der Künstler als unbewegter Beweger oder die Welt als ewige Ruhestätte,” Lettre International 90 (2010), 117.

15 Ibid.

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shares with Büchner’s Lucile. The likening of the attitude of unworldlines to the

perspective of an “unmoved mover” is utterly appropriate. What is problematic,

however, is the way Groys uses the technical term established in Western theology by

Thomas Aquinas.

Aquinas’s concept of movement relied on the act–potency schema of Aristotelian

physics. A seed is a flower in the state of “potency”; and such a flower “moves” to the

extent that it strives toward the “act” of blossoming. By no means, however, does this

imply that the flower freezes into a motionless crystal at the moment of blossoming.

Blossoming, thinking, or loving: according to Aquinas, these were “unmoved”

activities; only the path to the blossom was considered an instance of motion. However,

this does not mean that the act of blossoming was regarded as passive; much less so

God’s “pure act of being,” which coincided with “life in abundance.” Abstracting from

the Aristotelian terminology, this “act” could even be called motion in the highest

degree.16

Basing our discussion on this model, we can certainly compare Schlingensief to the

“unmoved mover.” But Schlingensief’s motionlessness never contrasted with his

“frantic activities.” He fell silent when life was effervescent; he became frantic when

the creative flux of life abated. And at all times he remained what he was—not a god,

but indeed what Saint Thomas called imago dei. Schlingensief’s anticipatory self-

obituary in the welcoming address to the Church of Fear aptly puts this fundamental

principle of the Catholic love of wisdom as follows: “He was who he was, no more, but

even so: who can really say that of himself?”

According to thinkers as diverse as Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart,

Nicholas of Cusa, and Kierkegaard, a consequence of the Fall of Man is that the human

being is irresistibly inclined not to be who he is. We tend to make ourselves at home in

a narcissistic world of the imagination or in “possible worlds.” That should give us

pause for thought. Schlingensief not only gave thought to the matter; the reflection on

the hysterical narcissism of our time was the engine that powered his art. And so his art

consisted, more than anything, in Christoph Schlingensief being himself of his own

16 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, Opera omnia (Editio Leonina), vol. 13–15 (Rome, 1918–1930), I.13.10.

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accord—“anyone who has ever tried and seen how difficult it is to drink a glass of milk

or write a symphony of one’s accord also knows: it is not an easy thing to do.”17

BEYOND ACTIVITY AND PASSIVITY

The desire to learn how to drink a glass of milk of one’s own accord explains the appeal

Meister Eckhart held for the late Schlingensief. In act four of his Zurich experimental

arrangement Sterben Lernen [Learning to Die] (2009), for instance, he engaged with

Eckhart’s sermons, which became part of the production.18 But it was not just the

Dominican’s paradoxical rhetoric that fascinated him in these texts, which did not

shrink from verbal provocation in order to call his over enthusiastic late medieval

brothers and sisters back down to reality. What fascinated him even more was that

Meister Eckhart’s articulation of the idea of “motionlessness” was far more rigorous

than those of postmodernist art theorists; for according to Meister Eckhart, even he who

does nothing still does far too much.

Following the Meister Eckhart scholar Reiner Manstetten, we can illustrate the point of

this paradox using the economic theorem of nonsaturation.19 Loosely put, this theory

assumes that our consumer behavior always follows the maxim that “more is better.”

But what does “more” mean? More is always what we do not have. Human behavior is

determined by preference decisions. The constant desire to have more is a logical

consequence of this principle. For any preference decision implies a negation: when I

decide to do this (to marry, to live, to buy an iPhone), I cannot have that (not marrying,

hanging myself, buying a different smartphone, etc.). And so we always decide in favor

of something (this) only to realize soon enough that we do not have something else

(that).

As early as the fourteenth century, Meister Eckhart concluded that he who wants

something wants nothing, for at the very moment he decides to want something there is

something else he does not want. There is accordingly only one way for us to break free

17 Georg Seeßlen, “Mein idealer Künstler zurzeit,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 53 (March 4, 2010), 38, as well as http://www.filmzentrale.com/essays/schlingensieflaudatiogs.htm (full text).

18 http://www.temporaere-leichenhalle.ch/.19 See Reiner Manstetten, “Negative Theologie und negative Anthropologie – zur Aktualität Meister

Eckharts,” Theologische Quartalschrift 181 (2001), 112–33, c. 6.

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of the unhappy consciousness of postmodern consumerist life: we must cease to want

this or that and instead want nothing.

So beware of conceiving of yourself as being this or that man in any particular way.

[…] Divorce yourselves of all “not”, for the “not” makes distinction. How so? That

you are not that man, this “not” makes for distinction between you and that man.20

We must decide, as it were, to become “Men Without Qualities.”21 Meister Eckhart calls

the required characteristic attitude toward life “Gelazenheit” (equanimity or, more

literally, the ability to “let” oneself and the world be) and the corresponding relation to

the world, “Abgeschiedenheit” (“detachment”). But such detachment by no means

implies utter inaction. Someone who does nothing still does “something”, for he does

this (being passive) as distinct from that (being active).

Detachment, then, is not the opposite of “frantic activities.” “Gelazenheit” can mean all

sorts of things; we must merely be able to “let them be.” In Groys’s analysis, by

contrast, the motion and bustle of life appears as an ongoing affair that competes with

the detachment of the “unmoved mover.” Thus he believes that the decision to “want

nothing” coincides with a movement of transcendence that negates active life: “I see

this will to transcend life in Schlingensief. […] He observes life; he, as it were, does not

live, he attempts to take up a position that lets something take place and then he looks to

see what happens.”22

Of course, there is a more complex background to this lopsided image of the “unmoved

mover” in Groys. For his intention is to read Schlingensief as a pre-eminent

representative of the (post-)modern religion of art. “Here, art conclusively becomes

religion.” Symptomatic of this development, Groys believes, is a diary excerpt included

in the program notes for Mea Culpa in which Schlingensief interprets his cancer as a

20 Sermon 46 (“Haec est vita aeterna”), in Meister Eckhart, Deutsche Werke, Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke, J. Quint (ed.) (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1976), II 382,3–7).

21 The title of Robert Musil’s magnum opus derives from Meister Eckhart. As more recent scholarship has shown, the text also contains numerous references to and excerpts from Meister Eckhart. See Niklaus Largier, “Robert Musil, Meister Eckhart, and the ‘Culture of Film,’ in Religion: Beyond a Concept, Hent de Vries (ed.) (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 739−50. In recent Musil scholarship, the theorem of “nonsaturation” is also called “optionalism.” See Bazon Brock, “Über die Dramaturgie der Verknüpfung von Anfang und Ende,” in Auf Leben und Tod. Der Mensch in Malerei und Fotografie. Die Sammlung Teutloff zu Gast im Wallraf, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum (ed.) (Munich: Hirmer, 2010), 14. I am grateful to Christian Bauer for pointing these matters out to me.

22 Groys, “Sprachversagen,” 116 (my emphasis); and compare in the present volume, p. ##.

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consequence of his work on Wagner’s Parsifal. With this interpretation, Groys argues,

Schlingensief transformed his own dying into a theatrical prop: “Schlingensief’s illness

thus loses its organic, worldly sources and becomes the consequence of the impact of art

on his body.”23 But this reading neglects Schlingensief’s ambivalent stance vis-à-vis the

modernist program of art as religion. Schlingensief’s view of Wagner is paradigmatic of

this stance, as the relevant passages from his diary show:

I have come to believe that it really is death-music, a dangerous music that celebrates

not life but death. It is venomous stuff that squirted out of Wagner. […] Open the

shrine, unveil the Grail! That’s quite enough. That really is plenty. I’m almost at the

point where I would say, yes, the Nazis had a lot of fun with that, that was exactly

their world. They could all march to that […]. That was their goal: one day they’d be

in a little courtyard, a gas can under their arms and a cyanide capsule in their mouths,

celebrating death.24

We should note, first, the convergence between this remark and Friedrich Nietzsche’s

harsh attacks on his erstwhile friend in The Case of Wagner, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the

Idols, and Nietzsche contra Wagner:

My objections to Wagner’s music are physiological objections […] that I no longer

breathe easily once this music operates on me […] Wagner makes people morbid

[…] In Bayreuth people are only honest in the mass, as individuals they lie […] they

renounce the right to their own tongue and choice, to their taste, even to their

courage, as they have it and use it within their own four walls with respect to God

and the world. […] In the theatre one becomes mob, herd, woman, Pharisee, voting

animal, patron, idiot—Wagnerian.25

To the late Nietzsche’s eyes, the nineteenth-century program of redemption through art

as religion seemed a variation on the illusory promises of the Christian heaven: “These

are the consumptives of the soul: hardly are they born before they begin to die and to

23 Ibid.24 Burgtheater, Christoph Schlingensief. Mea Culpa, 20; Christoph Schlingensief, So schön wie hier

kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein! Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2009), 171.

25 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner, in The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 3: The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, The Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, trans. Thomas Common (London: Fisher Unwin, 1899), 67–69.

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long for teachings of weariness and renunciation,”26 Zarathustra already explains, in a

passage that takes aim not only at modern Christianity but also at Schopenhauer, the

philosophical source of Wagner’s programmatic goals.

Against the Schopenhauerian “will to transcend life” Nietzsche posited the “yes” to life.

But this “yes” became enmeshed in self-contradictions because, to the end, Nietzsche’s

thinking cleaved to the modern conviction that saying “yes” had to originate in a

creative activity, and thus must negate “passive virtues.” Where Boris Groys,

championing passivity, negates activity, Nietzsche championed an unrestrained activism

that negates passivity. The “happiness of him who takes”27 was as alien to him as the

amoral happiness of unreserved assent—how else could he have hurled a moralizing

“contra” at his former comrade in Nietzsche contra Wagner?28

Christoph Schlingensief was the happy counterpart to Friedrich Nietzsche’s unhappy

consciousness. Neither did he eschew the “happiness of him who takes,” nor was his

thinking infected by the dialectic of saying no. “God speaks forever only yes; the devil,

nay: whence he cannot be one with God, with him be aye,” says Angelus Silesius.29 The

language of Schlingensief’s art is no different. There is no delete key, no “no”—it has

that in common with the language of God and that of dreams. And that is why it would

never have occurred to him to respond with a “contra” to Richard Wagner’s beguiling

music— Schlingensief’s father was a Wagnerian, after all. In his ears, the master’s

“death-sounds” were associated with childhood memories: as the father was listening to

The Valkyrie, almost drowned out by the noise of the household vacuum cleaner, the

tune from Walt Disney’s The Jungle Book could be heard blaring out from the child’s

room … That sort of thing could not possibly be bad per se?

But how can we put all of this together? The final act of Mea Culpa is indicative of

Schlingensief’s attitude toward the “Wagnerians.” As the father, who has already been

dead for a year and a half, tries to drag his son to heaven, the cancer-stricken son,

26 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), “On the Preachers of Death,” 39.

27 Ibid., “The Night-Song,” 92.28 For a deconstruction of this self-contradiction, see John Milbank, “Can Morality be Christian?,” in

The Word Made Strange. Theology, Language, Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997), 219−32.

29 Angelus Silesius, Cherubinischer Wandersmann, in Sämtliche poetische Werke in drei Bänden, vol. 3 (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1952), II 4.

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accompanied by the master’s death-sounds Nietzsche already denounced as “water

vapor”, exclaims:

I love you so much. But now you can leave, too. Get lost. Go away. Beat it. […] I’m

so happy that I’m still here. I have no desire to sit on some cloud.

The modern fable of “the heavens”30 was no less suspect to Schlingensief than the green

hill of Bayreuth. To him, both smelled of “fairyland.”31 But that did not stop him from

working with the material. Rather than negating Bayreuth, he subjected it to creative

transformation and metonymical displacement, to Ouagadougou, for example, where it

became Remdoogo. The green hill became an opera village in Burkina Faso, with a

school and a clinic, and teenagers playing soccer on the green lawn and disrupting the

solemn ceremony of art-as-religion with their noise. Remdoogo: that is the

Schlingensiefian montage of The Valkyrie and The Jungle Book on a grand scale; the

vision of a place firmly built in stone and clay where life absorbs art rather than the

other way around.

30 The premodern concepts of theosis (deification) or visio dei (vision of God) were focused not on an alternative ‘possible world’ but on the intensification of the present time. ‘This life’ was considered to be unredeemed only in so far as we have lost the gift of existing before God with unquestioning confidence here and now (or put another way, to drink a glass of milk without longing for something else). It is the obsession with ‘possible alternatives’ to this world that has turned it into a ‘fallen place’.

31 See Christoph Schlingensief, “Die Kirche ist ein Märchenpark,” Cicero (January 11, 2010), http://www.schlingensief.com/weblog/?p=481. An unabridged German version of this essay is in preparation, which relates to the Genealogy of the (post-)modern religion of art, and includes a critical discussion of Carl Hegemann’s romantic interpretation of Schlingensief.