ABSTRACT
The simple citation of Jurgen Habermas’s thesis: Friedrich Nietzsche takes leave of modernity, teaches us this about the postmodernism debate: that it is not carried out in a process of hypothesis formation and falsification, of rational consensus-building in the Habermasian sense. Much could be said regarding the question of whether the notion of discursive plurality that Nietzsche posits is to be preferred to the Habermasian view of discursive homogeneity. Certainly this is one of the serious issues underlying the postmodernism debate. The explains the rattlesnake of Der Fall Wagner, which attaches to a semantic register as yet unmentioned. This tempter-snake, who presides over the Fall that Wagner eponymously is, cites the serpent of Genesis 3, whose seductive act and art engendered the value opposition good vs. evil. In other words, the phenomenon that carries the name “Wagner” is being read against the Nietzschean archetype of moralization.
