Wagner’s opera Tannhauser is not, as it is usually claimed, the conflict between the spiritual and the bodily, the Sublime and the ordinary pleasures of flesh, but a conflict internal to the Sublime itself, splitting the Sublime up. …Therein resides the unpardonable sin of Tannhauser: not in the fact that he engaged in a little bit of free sexuality, but that he elevated sexuality, sexual lust, to the level of the Absolute, asserting it as the inherent obverse of the Sacred.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2eLCwdl