ABSTRACT
With its emphasis on calculation over interpretation and sensation over representation, with its attempt to root artistic reception in the body—more precisely, in the nervous system—neuroaesthetics is emerging as our age's chief mode of transformative aesthetics. Aesthetic transformation has become neurological first and foremost; it is not so much that psychology has disappeared as that it has ceased to be separable from the inner electrical drama of the body. The key text here is Wagner's "Beethoven" essay of 1870, a work frequently seen as critical to Wagner's theoretical development but rarely read in the light of discourses of neurology. The work decisively marks Wagner's theoretical turn toward Schopenhauer, whose World as Will and Representation had a revelatory effect on him after first reading it in 1854. Wagner's double-sided understanding of the nervous system hardly marks a break with Schopenhauer—indeed, nowhere is Wagner more Schopenhauerian than in his fascination with the paradox of neurology.
