The Sound of Žižek

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.

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.

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’).

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.

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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.

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 21^st 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.

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 14^th symphony an old and seriously ill Shostakovich explores the topic of death from a grim and hopeless standpoint, in his 15^th 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?

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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