Evidently, both Mozart and Wagner
were Lacanians without explicitly knowing it. 
All of their operas, at the most foundational of levels, deal with
central metapsychological concepts and themes: 
the libidinal underpinnings of love, the relation between voice and
subjectivity, the status of the symbolic big Other, the differences between
biological and psychical death, and the compulsive nature of the drives (just
to name a few of the notions touched upon by both Dolar and Žižek). Is it, in response to initial disbelief, really
so hard to view pieces like Così fan
tutte and Tristan as artistic
struggles with precisely the same truths aimed at by psychoanalytic
thought? According to received Hegelian
wisdom, art, along with religion, is simply philosophy that doesn’t know itself
as such, theory that isn’t fully conscious of its nascent-yet-essential
theoretical self-identity. In this
light, all that philosophical engagements with the cultural-aesthetic domain
innocently do is help make pieces of art equal to their Concept (Begriff). What’s more, Lacanianizing the opera is so especially easy,
since, as Žižek points out in the introduction to his set of contributions,
“the logic of retroactive restructuring of the past through the intervention of
a new point-de-capiton” often forces
the past to be seen exclusively through the lens of what it subsequently gives
rise to and/or what supercedes it in the present—“A truly creative act not only
restructures the field of future possibilities but also restructures the past,
resignifying the previous contingent traces as pointing toward the present”
(pg. 103-104). So, even if one refuses
the swallow the portrayal of Mozart and Wagner as unconscious Lacanians avant la lettre, one is nonetheless free
to embrace what these two authors offer here as the product of a “creative
act,” a demonstration of the interpretive possibilities stemming from the
decision not to be held hostage by trifling matters such as the simple
historico-chronological considerations that obsess most scholars.

The first half of the book consists
of Mladen Dolar’s sustained reflections on Mozart’s various operas (Žižek
chooses to focus primarily on Wagner). 
He begins with some general considerations. In his view, music straddles the line between two sides of a
traditional Platonic dichotomy, namely, between, on the one hand, the
transcendent/sublime (i.e., the disembodied, rational, ideational sphere of
pure formality) and, on the other hand, the sensuous/corporeal (i.e., the
tangible, material realm of the living body). 
This is especially true of a musical genre like opera, where the
conceptual “form” of linguistic articulations is rendered in the almost
tangibly viscous medium of resonant song. 
Thus, for example, those moments in an opera where the meaning of the words
in the libretto becomes incomprehensible to the listener (assuming, of course,
that the listener normally understands the language of the given opera) are not
accidental or without value. From a
Lacanian standpoint, these moments highlight the vacillating relationship
between speech and voice. “Speech”
refers to the enunciated, language-level content of speaking. Alternatively, “voice,” which Lacan
sometimes refers to as the “object-voice” (in the collection Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, Dolar
has an essay on the object-voice), designates the irreducibly material vehicle
for the performance of meaningful speech acts—and, naturally, Lacan emphasizes
how the medium sometimes interferes with the message, how the voice itself can
disrupt speech. However, after
stressing the borderline status of music during this phase of introductory
stage setting, Dolar later argues, citing Kierkegaard, that music itself is
“beyond language”; the object-voice eclipses the ephemeral virtuality of the
signifiers it’s usually forced to subtend in the linguistic modus operandi of the parlêtre. Does opera succeed in occupying both sides of these theoretically
familiar divides, or is it an art form that necessarily favors one side over
the other? Does music invariably and necessarily
overpower the meanings and organizations tied to language? If so, why?

Dolar proceeds to track down a
series of interesting philosophical themes in the operas of Mozart. Don Giovanni, for instance, serves as a
condensed representation of the historical conflict between an old,
aristocratic order preserving hierarchical privilege versus the democratic,
anti-authoritarian spirit of the Enlightenment. The character of Don Giovanni himself is, at one and the same
time, both the Freudian Urvater, the
ferocious, insatiable “primal father” of the Totem and Taboo myth who enjoys unfettered sexual access to all
women, and also the figure of the autonomous subject who plays the lead role in
the dramatic rise of modern, post-aristocratic social systems. And, Dolar uses this interpretation to
implicitly suggest that the ideological framework of democracy is itself
plagued by an unresolved (and, perhaps, irresolvable) contradiction: the truly autocratic aristocrat who refuses
to modulate the exercise of his authority by tempering his desires according to
considerations for those he rules is the epitome of an autonomous subject; and,
an autonomous subject who makes no compromises on his/her desire cannot but
strike a contemporary “democratic” spectator as a horrible tyrant. Although contemporary societies in the West
appeal to the Enlightenment myth of absolute autonomy as a cornerstone of their
practices, this is a liberté that can
only be accepted through a dilution vis-à-vis
its combination with égalité and fraternité (the latter two put a
soothing, familiar human face on what Žižek elsewhere refers to as the
disturbing “abyss of freedom”). 
Similarly, Dolar uses Mozart’s treatment of love in Così fan tutte to analyze the strange co-mingling and coalescence
of two themes in modern thought. 
Paradoxically, within Enlightenment discourse, a fascination with and
emphasis upon the human individual as a deterministic, machine-like mechanism
simultaneously accompanies the trumpeted emergence of the figure of the
autonomous subject. At the very moment
when man is declared free, an acute sense of man’s automatistic nature is
intensified.

Dolar further develops these ideas in two
directions. First, opera often
addresses what Dolar calls the “logic of mercy.” Frequently, an aristocratic authority’s gesture of forgiveness
resolves the tensions at play in an opera, permitting a forbidden, hampered
love to finally flourish and be accepted through recognition by the organic
whole of the community. In classic
psychoanalytic fashion, Dolar rightly observes that something is obfuscated
here: the terrifying visage of the
capricious, tyrannical master is artistically concealed, veiled behind the
comforting image of the forgiving, benevolent facilitator of the amorous interpersonal
bond. Obviously, anyone who is in a
position to grant mercy is likewise equally in a position to arbitrarily impose
his will. Second, near the end of his
essay, Dolar poses the larger question at stake in his analyses: what (to cast the problem in the Lacanian
language used by Dolar) can and should the balance be between the two poles of
the “subject” (i.e., the autonomous individual agent) and the “big Other”
(i.e., the symbolic, communal matrix, the reified socio-legal framework)? Dolar asks, “Does the logic of autonomous
subjectivity, which got rid of its Other through the Enlightenment,
suffice? If the fantasy of the Other
fell to pieces and was debunked as an illusion, is assuming that one could simply
construct the new world on the shoulders of the autonomous subject similarly an
illusion? Does not this subject require
the Other, too, without which it risks falling apart? Do we not lose subjectivity itself when the Other is
abolished? What status can be ascribed
to the Other now?” (pg. 87). Dolar
maintains that the operas of Mozart stage, in various ways, a reconciliation
between subject and Other, between the emerging Enlightenment figure of the
free individual and the manifestations of the old institutional order with its
hierarchies and authoritarian bent. 
Perhaps the larger lesson that Dolar wants readers to walk away with
from this particular exercise in cultural interpretation is that, whenever a
discourse claims to elevate the autonomous subject to a position of preeminence
“above” or “outside” the socio-symbolic constraints of a mediating,
trans-individual system, one should always ask: In what ways does this repressed big Other return? How does this Other covertly make its denied
presence felt in terms of subjectivity’s supposedly independent, self-adequate
status? What role do cultural products
play in re-introducing disguised versions of the big Other within ideological
frameworks pretending to found themselves upon a myth of the absolutely free
subject?

Whereas Dolar sticks closely to Mozart’s operas,
carefully dissecting the librettos and engaging with details in the scholarly
literature, Žižek seizes the opportunity of discussing Wagner to tie together a
plethora of different themes and issues. 
It seems that, for Žižek, what makes a cultural product intellectually
worthwhile is the degree to which it can serve as a kind of Rorschach ink
blot—he once spoke of the movie The
Matrix in exactly these terms—onto which can be projected various
conceptual knots. Given the rapid-fire
tour through a range of theoretical matters offered by his contribution,
isolating a single argumentative thread and labeling it as the guiding concern
is difficult. So, at the expense of
exegetical accuracy, only a few of the topics that appear in Žižek’s section of
the book will be discussed here.

Borrowing the title from a book by Jean Laplanche,
one could say that Žižek is most interested in investigating “life and death in
psychoanalysis and the opera.” As he rightly
observes, the death drive, properly conceived, has nothing whatsoever to do
with some biologically determined longing for a return to a pre-organic
state. Freud himself generally
misunderstands the meaning of the very Todestrieb
that he is the first to uncover and identify, presenting it as an insistent
desire for annihilation in death on the basis of questionable analogies between
the single-celled organisms of biology and the human psyche of
metapsychology. For Žižek, the death
drive is, in fact, the psychoanalytic concept-term for precisely the opposite,
namely, for a kind of undead immortality (one of the precursors for this take
on the death drive is Lacan’s “myth of the lamella,” in which the libido is
portrayed as a kind of indestructible monster that parasitically attaches
itself to its psychical host). The
“deadly” dimension of the drives lies in their ability to break with the
rhythms and cycles of the natural, biologically defined body and its interests
in regulating various urges and compulsions for the sake of
self-preservation. In becoming fixated
upon certain forms of intense, excessive enjoyment (i.e., jouissance), drives begin to compel conduct that disrupts the
balanced moderation sought by the ego in its ongoing struggle to compromise
between pleasure and reality. 
Frequently, Trieb subverts the
self-preservative calculus of the organic individual, rendering all drives, in
a way, “death” drives.

What does this have to do with Wagner? Žižek asserts that Wagner playfully and
artistically manipulates the Freudian opposition between Eros and Thanatos. The dividing line between life and death,
between the vital intensity of sexuality and the cessation of all lived
tension, is blurred in the Wagnerian universe. 
Wagner’s protagonists wander around searching for death, and this death
marks the resolution of the conflicts in these operas. However, interpreting Wagner vis-à-vis the standard Freudian notion
of the death drive qua desire for
annihilation in death is, according to Žižek, a serious error. The Wagnerian hero, during the unfolding
musical drama, is already firmly caught in the clutches of the Todestrieb, stuck in a painful,
repetitive cycle involving longing, passion, desire, and so on. This seemingly interminable condition of
being condemned to a roller coaster of fluctuating affective intensities
(something Žižek characterizes as a “living death”) is precisely what Wagner’s
characters aim to escape from, fleeing happily into the embrace of biological
death as a means of finally finding relief from an unbearable state of endless jouissance. Hence, the hero’s desire for demise isn’t, in and of itself, the
death drive incarnate. Instead, this
demise is sought after as the last and only means of evading the Todestrieb, as a desperate bid to
transcend a horrible Liebestod and
attain an eagerly anticipated Nirvana.

Žižek here succeeds in tracking down a fantasmatic
structure equally operative in both Freudian psychoanalysis and Wagnerian
opera. In both genres, there are places
where ecstatic sexual release, physical death, and blissful Nirvana are strung
together (despite the significant differences between each of these notions) as
a series of supposedly interchangeable, equivalent terms. From a Lacanian perspective, these are all
thematic, metaphorical stand-ins for jouissance,
various depictions of an “ultimate enjoyment” lying on the horizon of the human
libidinal economy (jouissance falls
under the heading of the Lacanian register of the Real, a register which, due
to its epistemological inaccessibility, ends up being represented as a series
of contradictory elements within a given system of symbolization—hence, this
Real jouissance appears as, at one
and the same time, both sexuality and mortality, as both the most intense vitality
and the absolute zero of death). In
texts such as Civilization and Its
Discontents, Freud sometimes risks implying that, if it weren’t for a
series of contingent obstacles raised by socio-historical reality, human beings
would be able to happily and unproblematically wallow in their base sexual and
aggressive pleasures. And, Wagner
directly depicts, in the culminating points of his operas, the subject’s total
and complete immersion/dissolution into a peaceful night.

At various points in his essay, Žižek flirts with
the idea that the hard, fantasmatic kernel animating aspects of the work of
both Freud and Wagner is the stubborn, insistent belief that, so to speak, jouissance exists. This ultimate fantasy is the “transcendental
illusion of desire,” the conviction that, beyond the contingencies of the
subject’s empirical environment and his/her diluted, banal pleasures, lies some
amorphous manner of “enjoyable enjoyment.” 
Speaking of the opposition between excessive fixations upon partial
objects and sexualized “intersubjective” relationships, Žižek remarks that,
“the persistence of the partial objects, these islands of noncastrated jouissance, renders sexual relationships
impossible, condemning them to the ultimate failure; on the other hand, the
specter of sexual relationships sustains a gap that forever prevents the
subject from attaining full satisfaction in the imbecilic jouissance of partial objects” (pg. 175-176). Elsewhere, he maintains that, “We cannot
simply ‘fully immerse ourselves into the immediate pleasure of what we are
doing’—if we do that, the pleasurable tension gets lost” (pg. 211). The return of this repressed truth reveals
itself in Wagner since, when the characters at long last attain what they yearn
for as the final, ultimate moment of consummation with their enjoyment, they
literally die (i.e., they cannot live to enjoy what they’ve obtained). In short, eliminating the tension driving
the protagonist along is equivalent to destroying the character
him/her-self. Thus, Wagner’s operas,
from Tristan to Parsifal, raise an interesting question—“Is the only approach to
the real the lethal, transgressive experience of going beyond the (symbolic)
limit, or is another approach possible?” (pg. 176).

Although ostensibly centered on an analysis of
specific operas, Opera’s Second Death
engages with an extremely wide range of topics and issues: psychoanalysis, aesthetics, politics,
ethics, and philosophy (among others). 
For instance, reading Žižek sometimes feels like the intellectual
equivalent of going to an all-you-can-eat buffet and devouring everything
available. It’s perversely pleasurable
while it lasts, and leaves one feeling slightly guilty afterwards. He has a talent for making theory feel a
little too enjoyable. Shouldn’t reading
nuanced works on psychoanalysis and philosophy be tedious and painful? A refreshing aspect of the Slovenian
school’s approach to Lacan and other related matters is the implicit contention
that theory can be fun, and, moreover, that it ought to be about something
other than itself. The Slovenian school
avoids, as is all-too-typical in the humanities, getting caught in a scholarly
literature “hall of mirrors” effect, wherein theory is always about other
theorists, piling commentary upon commentary and thus indefinitely deferring
the encounter with a reality outside this self-enclosed, meta-discursive
circuit. An integral aspect of the
overall Žižekian project is the rigorous construction of what Freud outlines as
the “psychopathology of everyday life.” Žižek and Dolar attempt to show that
the highest and most abstract concepts of psychoanalysis and philosophy, if
they do indeed possess a degree of truth, must be capable of shedding light on
the most immediately accessible manifestations of the human psyche in today’s
social context. Otherwise, why would
one bother engaging with theory? If it
says nothing about quotidian experience and contemporary culture, then what
descriptive function does it fulfill? 
Who or what is it describing? 
More academics should ask themselves these questions.

© 2002 Adrian Johnston
 

Adrian Johnston recently completed a
Ph.D. in Philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook. His dissertation was Time Driven:
Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive.

Categories: Psychoanalysis