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The Sound of Žižek

Musicological Perspectives on Slavoj Žižek

by Mauro Fosco Bertola (Volume editor)
Monographs XVI, 180 Pages
Series: Žižek Studies, Volume 2

Summary

Over the last three decades Slavoj Žižek has become an iconic figure of intellectuel engagé and his works have engendered ongoing reflection within as different academic disciplines as philosophy, literature or cultural, gender, postcolonial and film studies. But when it comes to music, things look different.
With an emphasis on the German modernist tradition from Wagner to Schönberg, a whole range of references to music are scattered throughout Žižek’s copious body of works. However, these efforts seem to go almost unnoticed within academia – at least on first glance. Looking more closely, one notices a subtle but nevertheless consistent adoption of Žižek’s theories within musicology, spreading across a broad range of topics and approaches. So, Žižek has become part of musicology, even if his presence is still uncharted territory.
The present volume, which appeals to musicologists and philosophers alike, intends to map different ways in which Žižek’s philosophy has been adopted in order to approach many of musicology’s core questions, from musical analysis to the opera studies, from contemporary music to the history of the discipline itself. At the same time it both reflects on and questions Žižek’s positions on musical aesthetics as expressed in his writings. Last but not least, the volume also features two essays by Žižek himself, reflecting his different approaches to writing about music.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Table of Contents
  • Foreword: If Žižek Be the Food of Musicology (Mauro Fosco Bertola)
  • Introduction: Slavoj Žižek’s Aesthetics of Music. From Romanticism to Modernism (Mauro Fosco Bertola)
  • I. Did Somebody Say Musicology? Žižek and Musicology’s Sublime Object(s)
  • 1. Musicology’s Second Death(s) (Carlo Lanfossi)
  • 2. The Sublime Object of Music Analysis (Amy Bauer)
  • II. Opera, Ontology and Capitalism
  • 3. C Major or E-Flat Minor? No, Thanks! Busoni’s Faust-Allegory (Slavoj Žižek)
  • 4. Post-Kantian Dreams. Kaija Saariaho’s Operatic Ontology and Its Dreamscapes in L’amour de loin (Mauro Fosco Bertola)
  • 5. Singing in the Age of Capitalist Realism. The Pervert’s Guide to (Post)Opera (Jelena Novak)
  • III. Music and the Political
  • 6. Cage, Reich, and Morris: Process and Sonic Fetishism (Samuel J. Wilson)
  • 7. Subjective Destitution in Art and Politics (Slavoj Žižek)
  • Contributors

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Foreword: If Žižek Be the Food of Musicology

Mauro Fosco Bertola

Well known to the wider public for his thought-provoking theses on Western politics and way of life as well as for his flamboyant use of pop culture and film references when formulating his philosophical insights, Slavoj Žižek has over the last three decades become an iconic intellectuel engagé. Like Voltaire, who in his day consciously used the then-fashionable larmoyant style to better reach his audience (Goulemot 2005: 96), Žižek readily adopts a plethora of different registers and formulates or at least nuances his thoughts contingently, depending on the context in which they are expressed. The result is something very close to the Lacanian process of passe. In the passe, the message the analysand intends to transmit to the analyst is structurally distorted by the intervention of two witnesses, even though they are entrusted with passing on the precise message to the analyst. The truth of the message is thus by no means equal to the true message. What matters is not what the analysand originally said, but the distortions and misperceptions unconsciously contributed by the witnesses: “these distortions are the [analysand’s, MFB] truth” (Butler/Stephens 2006: 3). Correspondingly, Žižek’s “work both demonstrates and speaks at every level of the truth of this contingency or distortion. […] Žižek’s real point is that no philosophical Truth can ever exist apart from its exemplification, that is, its enunciation” (Ibid.: 3–4). His pronouncements are thus outright anamorphoses referring to an impossible gap that only (and only retroactively) exists within the horizon of the different contexts and distortions out of which the very pronouncements originate. Ultimately, “there is always a difference between Žižek and himself or Žižek and what he says. And it is this difference that is Žižek, that is what Žižek is ←vii | viii→saying, rather than anything he actually says” (Butler 2016: 1). In its endless attempts to split other theoretical/ideological frames, Žižek’s philosophy is structurally split from itself. It is an ‘impossible’ object that can never be spoken of, and its aim is nothing but to shift the very frame within which the discussion takes place.

All this makes theoretical reflection on Žižek’s work a difficult task. We are always at risk of stiffening his insights and depriving them of their heuristic potential, rendering them frozen, as it were, in the form of a few apodictic truths. This difficulty notwithstanding, Žižek’s works have engendered ongoing reflection within different academic disciplines, from philosophy (Gabriel/Žižek 2009; Johnston 2018) to psychoanalytically oriented cultural studies (Khader/Rothenberg 2013; Sbriglia 2017) and film studies (Flisfeder 2012). This has stimulated a lively debate on mainstream approaches within the humanities, such as gender studies or postcolonial theory. But when it comes to music, things look different.

A whole range of references to music are scattered throughout Žižek’s copious body of works. From short reflections on Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven and Dmitri Shostakovich to more substantial writings on Robert Schumann (in The Plague of Fantasies 1997), Richard Wagner (in particular the monograph Opera’s Second Death 2002, together with Mladen Dolar), Arnold Schönberg (in Absolute Recoil 2014) and Sergei Prokofiev (in Sex and the Failed Absolute 2019), Žižek seems consistently interested in exploring the repertoire of Western classical music, with an emphasis on the German modernist tradition from Wagner to Schönberg. However, his efforts in the musical domain seem to go almost unnoticed within academia—at least at first glance. Other than one special edition of the International Journal of Žižek Studies on the topic of Žižek and music (Butler/Bertola 2017), a short discussion of his views on Wagner and Schumann (Watkins 2012) and a substantial review of Mladen Dolar’s and Žižek’s monograph on opera (Morris 2003), there is to date no substantial scholarly engagement with Žižek’s music-related reflections.

Looking more closely, however, one notices a subtle but nevertheless consistent adoption of Žižek’s theories within the field of musicology. From David Schwarz’s psychoanalytical approach to music (Schwarz 1997 and 2006) to Lawrence Kramer’s reflections on opera and modernity (Kramer 2007) or Yayoi Uno Everett’s analysis of Kaija Saariaho’s operas (Everett 2013 and Everett 2016), from J. P. E. Harper-Scott’s reflections on the “quilting points” of musical modernism (Harper-Scott 2012) to Seth Brodsky’s monograph on music after 1989 (Brodsky 2017), Žižek’s theories have spread across a broad range of topics and approaches. Žižek has become part of ←viii | ix→musicology, even if his presence—odd as it may seem—is still uncharted territory. Who is working with Žižek’s theories, and to what extent? What parts of his philosophical system have been most fruitful for musicology? Is Žižek’s philosophy within musicology a tool for ideological critique or does it offer structural insights? And if so, of what kind? And what of Žižek’s own music-related writings and his attempt to compare his philosophical theses to structural musical elements?

The present volume, which will certainly not be exhaustive, intends at least to offer a first forum for reflecting on these and similar questions. It aims to offer an initial overview, at the same time enriching the panorama of previous publications mentioned above. To achieve these aims, the volume is structured along two lines of enquiry which move in opposite directions but also continually intersect, to different degrees, within each of the chapters:

(1) From musicology to Žižek: The first major goal of this volume is to map the different ways in which Žižek’s philosophy has been adopted within musicology in order to innovate the discipline’s approach to many of its core questions. To that end, the volume addresses topics such as the role and function of musical analysis (Amy Bauer), approaches to complex musical genres like opera through the lens of metaphysics (Mauro Fosco Bertola) or politics (Jelena Novak), the link between music and fetishism (Samuel J. Wilson) and the development of the discipline of musicology itself (Carlo Lanfossi). By bringing together musicologists based in different countries, from the UK and the US to Germany, Italy and Portugal, the volume offers a compelling overview of the thematic and geographically broad appeal of Žižek’s theories within musicology and highlights differences as well as overarching commonalities between the discipline’s various national traditions.

(2) From Žižek to musicology: The second line of enquiry structuring this volume relates more closely to Žižek’s own musical writings. Both in his musical predilections (early German romanticism, Wagner, and Schönberg’s modernism) and in his philosophical approach to music —which in a very Adornian way seeks to highlight strong structural parallels between philosophical tenets, the compositional texture of a musical work, and social reality—Žižek reveals a (mostly unacknowledged) debt to the German musical-philosophical tradition. The overall structure of this volume, with its focus on Western classical music, contributions centred on musical analysis and a section dedicated to exploring the link between music, ontology and politics, both reflects on and questions Žižek’s approach. In my introduction, I also directly tackle Žižek’s positions on musical aesthetics, highlighting his specific ontology of music and his understanding of the romantic and modernist periods. The volume also features two essays by Žižek himself, ←ix | x→on Ferruccio Busoni and Dmitri Shostakovich respectively, which have not previously been published in English. These two chapters are particularly interesting for how they reflect Žižek’s different approaches to writing about music: in the chapter on Busoni’s Faust, we see a more culturally oriented approach, as the differing treatments of the Faust legend in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and in Busoni are examined. When writing on Shostakovich, Žižek engages more closely with the music itself—in this case, the Russian composer’s last two symphonies—framing its aesthetical as well as political (or, as Žižek would put it, revolutionary) content.

Before more thoroughly introducing each chapter, I shall say a few words on a quite troubling signifier figuring prominently in the title of the present volume: “musicology”. Debates on what musicology has been, is, and should be are rich and as old as the discipline itself (as Carlo Lanfossi’s chapter in this volume perfectly exemplifies with a Žižekian twist), and this volume cannot go into this discussion to any great extent. Some readers will surely be disappointed not to find their kind of musicology within these pages. Ethnomusicology, popular music, music in film, gender-related inquiries—all these flourishing and enormously enriching musicological approaches are not represented here. I am profoundly aware of this lack, but—aside from the banal constraints of my own domain of expertise—there are at least two (in my opinion) good reasons for it. For one, in this first attempt at approaching Žižek from a strictly musicological/disciplinary perspective, this volume somehow follows the primary subject area of Žižek’s own music-related writings, i.e. what we might call ‘the great Western tradition of art music’—what the Germans still call Kunstmusik, as opposed to Unterhaltungsmusik (‘entertainment-music’).

Of course, this is a narrow understanding of music, and I by no means subscribe to its normative power. Indeed, the present volume extends the temporal (and, somehow, geographical) limits of the paradigmatic ‘from Bach to Schönberg’ (with Shostakovich and Prokofiev thrown into the mix) which Žižek’s writings advocates.1 From Steve Reich and Kaija Saariaho to Sebastian Rivas, the volume stresses the relevance of Žižek for understanding contemporary music and opens geographical boundaries by including the USA. By offering chapters on music analysis and the history of musicology itself, the volume also proposes further areas in which Žižek’s theories can ←x | xi→be successfully put to work. On behalf of all the contributors, I can affirm our strong belief that the value of Žižek’s reflections for understanding music reaches far beyond the self-professedly “classical, and definitely ‘Eurocentric’” canon of Žižek’s musical taste (Žižek 2017: 272) as well as the temporal, geographical and aesthetical boundaries of the present volume.

The second and last point to be made with respect to the problem of musicology is that this volume is neither an attempt to establish what musicology is or should be, nor the pursuit of some doxa or ‘correct’ interpretation of Žižek’s music-related reflections. In both cases, the overall goal of this volume remains the same as that of one of my previous, though cross-disciplinary, attempts at mapping out the topic of Žižek and music (Butler/Bertola 2017). To paraphrase my closing words of the introduction to that attempt, the truth of ‘Žižek and music(ology)’ exists only as difference—only in its own distortions. Most Lacanianally, my ultimate aim with this volume is to set free the pleasure of discovery, that enjoyment ‘curving the space’ of our academic engagement with music and at the same time shifting the very musicological framework in which it takes place. Let Žižek be the food of musicology, again and again.

***

Allow me now to give a brief overview of this volume’s chapters and overall structure. By considering various music-related texts which Žižek has written over the last 25 years, the introduction intends both to reconstruct the contours of his understanding of music per se and its deep ties to subjectivity as well as to delineate the main tenets of his theories of musical romanticism and modernism. The goal is to outline Žižek’s music-aesthetical approach as well as his views on the history of European classical music composed over the last 200 years. At the same time, the introduction provides the basic knowledge needed to tackle the later chapters.

The first section, “Did Somebody Say Musicology? Žižek and Musicology’s Sublime Object(s)”, deals with the significance of Žižek’s theories and writings for addressing core elements of musicology and its discourses, such as its development as an academic discipline entangled with different national traditions and the role of musical analysis. Carlo Lanfossi’s contribution, “Musicology’s Second Death(s)”, considers recent developments in US musicology and the interrelated history of Italian musicology after the Second World War. Adopting Žižek’s ideology critical perspective, Lanfossi outlines the contours of a musicological Real inherent in the discipline itself; a Real, which hunts musicology from within, all through its history. In her chapter, “The Sublime Object of Music Analysis“, Amy Bauer ←xi | xii→takes on board Žižek’s famous insight regarding the role of so-called sublime objects in constituting ideological fields in order to approach one of the central and most controversial domains of musicology: music analysis. Bauer considers conflicting analyses of Franz Schubert’s Lied Der Doppelgänger and outlines how music theory and analysis must be understood not as tools of ex post rationalisation limiting the emotional and compositional power of musical works, but rather as the retroactive cause of this very power and its ability to continuously disrupt the given sonic order.

Under the title “Opera, Ontology and Capitalism”, the second section of the volume focuses more closely on opera, the musical genre to which Žižek has dedicated most of his music-related reflections. The section’s individual chapters explore different ways in which Žižek’s theories offer new heuristic perspectives in one of musicology’s most innovative domains over the last three decades, the so-called opera studies. The section opens with an essay by Slavoj Žižek on a composer (Busoni) and a work (Doktor Faust 1924) that he has never written about before. Exploring Busoni’s complex analysis of Goethe’s masterwork and reading it against the backdrop of modern German culture, the essay fully reveals the potential of Žižek’s philosophy to take a culturally oriented approach to music, as well as its capacity to innovate from within the hermeneutic tradition of cultural studies. The chapter by Mauro Fosco Bertola, “Post-Kantian Dreams: Kaija Saariaho’s Operatic Ontology and its Dreamscapes in L’amour de loin”, reflects on a successful opera from 2000 by the contemporary Finnish composer. By focusing on the topic of dream, which features prominently in the opera, and reading the work in the context of its interrelation with both Wagner’s dream theories and his Tristan und Isolde, Bertola adopts a clear Žižekian perspective in showing how Saariaho’s work articulates anew the ties of the operatic genre with metaphysics. The opera consequently represents a milestone for reflecting on where the modernist aesthetic stands at the turn of the 21st century. In “Singing in the Age of Capitalist Realism. The Pervert’s Guide to (Post)Opera”, Jelena Novak focuses on the problematic category of realism within opera and considers some recent examples of so called ‘CNN operas’, from John Adams’ Nixon in China (1987) to Aliados by Sebastian Rivas (2013). By approaching her subject from a Žižek-inspired ideology-critical perspective, Novak also appropriates Žižek’s successful formula of “The Pervert’s Guide to...”, mixing short analyses of poignant operatic excerpts with broader reflections on the intermingling of operatic realism and ideology. In short, Novak is able to explore the potential of a Žižekian approach not just at the theoretical level but also with respect to form and rhetoric of presentation.

←xii |
 xiii→

The third and last section of the volume, “Music and the Political”, is dedicated to the question of the political dimension of music and music-making and to showcasing Žižek’s philosophy as the perfect tool for unearthing the deep political meaning of the acoustic. In “Cage, Reich, and Morris: Process and Sonic Fetishism”, Samuel J. Wilson reflects on the links between the psychoanalytical and Marxist theories of fetishism and some main developments in Western art music since the 1960s. Specifically, he embraces Žižek’s reflections on a specific kind of postmodern fetishism which inverts Marx’s and Freud’s understanding of the concept, fetishising not the object but its ephemeral production. Considering the music of composers like John Cage, Steve Reich and Robert Morris, Wilson explores how their music aims to make audible the production process itself: instead of emphasising an accomplished acoustic object, the music openly displays the different techniques involved in bringing about the sonic result. The last chapter consists of another previously unpublished article by Slavoj Žižek, titled “Subjective Destitution in Art and Politics”. Žižek starts by reflecting on Shostakovich’s last two symphonies. If in his 14th symphony an old and seriously ill Shostakovich explores the topic of death from a grim and hopeless standpoint, in his 15th symphony—Žižek argues—the composer finds the musical means to traverse the existential experience of ‘being-towards-death’. Thus, in this last symphony, Shostakovich opens up a weird musical space in which death encounters its uncanny double—not life, exactly, but undeadness. Lacanian psychoanalysis has a specific name for this dimension: subjective destitution. Against this background, Žižek probes further: how does subjective destitution work, not only in the case of Shostakovich but more generally in art and in politics?

***

This volume, which for various reasons was long in the making, would have never been possible without the generosity, commitment and perseverance of its contributors. I am deeply grateful to all of you, and I hope the result will be a satisfying reward for all the effort you put into this project. A very special thanks goes to Slavoj Žižek, who—for the second time—generously contributed two chapters to a publication of mine, making the present volume even more valuable and once again signalling mit Wort und Tat (‘with words and deeds’) his own commitment to the cause of a philosophical approach to music. Last but not least, great thanks are due to Rex Butler and Antonio Garcia for their support and encouragement in carrying out this project. And now, the curtain rises!

Mannheim, April 2022
Mauro Fosco Bertola

Details

Pages
XVI, 180
ISBN (PDF)
9781433178993
ISBN (ePUB)
9781433179006
ISBN (MOBI)
9781433179013
ISBN (Hardcover)
9781433178986
DOI
10.3726/b20311
Language
English
Publication date
2023 (January)
Keywords
Slavoj Žižek Musicology Philosophy Music Psychoanalysis Aesthetics Jacques Lacan Opera Modernism Romanticism Contemporary Music The Sound of Žižek Musicological Perspectives on Slavoj Žižek Mauro Fosco Bertola
Published
New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Oxford, Wien, 2023. XVI, 196 pp., 4 b/w ill.

Biographical notes

Mauro Fosco Bertola (Volume editor)

Mauro Fosco Bertola studied philosophy in Italy and musicology in Heidelberg. He is the author of Die List der Vergangenheit. Musikwissenschaft, Rundfunk und Deutschlandbezug in Italien, 1890-1945 (2014) as well as co-editor of Žižek and Music (2017) and An den Rändern des Lebens. Träume vom Sterben und Geborenwerden in den Künsten (2019). He is currently leading a DFG-funded project on the presence of dream in contemporary musical theatre at the University of Tübingen.

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