The Ridiculous Excess
of Mercy

Slavoj Zizek

 

[...]What is crucial here is the link between the assertion of subjective autonomy and the “answer of the Real,” the mercy shown by the big Other: far from being opposed, they rely on each other, i.e., the modern subject can assert its radical autonomy only insofar as it can count on the support of the “big Other,” only insofar as his autonomy is sustained by the social substance. No wonder this gesture of “autonomy and mercy,” of mercy intervening at the very point of the subject’s assertion of full autonomy, is discernible throughout the history of the opera, from Mozart to Wagner: in Idomeneo and Seraglio, the Other (Neptune, Basha Selim) displays mercy at the very moment when the hero is ready to sacrifice his/her life, and the same happens even twice in The Magic Flute (the magic intervention of the Other prevents both Pamina’s and Papageno’s suicide); in Fidelio, the trumpet announces the Minister’s arrival at the very point when Leonora puts her life at stake to save Florestan; up to Wagner’s Parsifal in which Parsifal himself intervenes and redeems Amfortas precisely when Amfortas asks to be stabbed to death by his knights.

What occurs between Monteverdi and Glück is thus the failure of sublimation: the subject is no longer ready to accept the metaphoric substitution, to exchange “being for meaning,” i.e., the flesh-and-blood presence of the beloved for the fact that he will be able to see her everywhere, in the stars and the moon, etc.—rather than do this, he prefers to take his life, to lose it all, and it is at this point, to fill in the refusal of sublimation, of its metaphoric exchange, that mercy has to intervene to prevent a total catastrophe. And we live in the shadow of this failed sublimation till today.[...]

 

art: Albert Herter, Orphée et Euridice, 2012

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