An Introduction
HUNTER HUNT-HENDRIX
The Ridiculous Excess
of Mercy
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
The Portrait of a
Russian Gay Gentleman
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
The Young Woman
and a River
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
C Major or E Flat
Minor? No, Thanks!
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Introduction: On Music Drama
[...]If the music drama unites poetry and music, the task of the poetry is to take truth beyond language into the realm of feeling, and the task of the music is to amplify feeling and exist unmediated as will. This task follows from the nature of the romantic subject, which, born of the collision between Brahman and noumenon, is identified as will, and is resolved through the principle of sufficient reason into a non-willing. A successful music drama is one that represents a condensed action as myth and sets it to music to which it is entirely adequate.
Music drama is essentially oriented towards the future. If the romantic attitude participates in feeling with respect to knowledge, with respect to ethics it participates in yearning. The poet-musician is planting the seed of a world to come. Just as poem is the masculine principle and music is the feminine principle, such that the poem is a seed and the music is an egg, there is a corresponding relationship between the entire music drama (the seed) and the future (the egg). The music drama yearns for a future which cannot yet exist but which will exist some day by virtue of the art which is its seed.[...]