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Eating the Text, Defiling the Hands Specters in Arnold Schoenberg's Opera Moses and Aron Edith Wyschogrod "A masterpiece always moves, by definition, in the manner ofa ghost," its mode of temporalization, its timing, always out of joint, spectrally disorganizing the "cause" that is called the "original," Derrida tells us. l Can there be an "original" describing an event that has already occurred but that re-arises spectrally in the gap between theophany and inscription, the space between the golden calfand the tablets ofthe law (Exodus 32:19-20), between the idol as a physical artifact and writing? These questions are raised in the context of Arnold Schoenberg's opera Moses and Aron,2 a masterpiece that, moving between music and text, purports to explore the relation of the Absolute as idea to the image that is alleged to manifest it. The complex of tensions between idea and image are brought forward through an innovative combination of speech, vocal, and instrumental music that I shall call Schoenberg's theoSOnICS . In what follows, I consider the relation between Moses, who insists upon the word in its ideality, and Aron, who maintains the necessity for its transposition into phenomenal manifestation, and the reversals their positions un245 E'attJl}the Text, Defiling the Hands Specters in Arnold Schoenberg's Opera Moses and Aron Edith Wyschogrod "A masterpiece always moves, by definition, in the manner ofa ghost," its mode of temporalization, its timing, always out of joint, spectrally disorganizing the "canse" thai is called the "original," Dcrrida tells us.l Can there be an "original" describing an event that has already occurred hut thai fe-arises spectrally in the gap between theophany and inscription, the space between the golden calfand the tablets ofthe law (Exodus 32: 19-20), between the idol as a physical artifact and writing? These questions arc raised in the context of Arnold Schoenberg's opera Moses and Aron,! a masterpiece that, moving be. tween music and text, purports to explore the relation of the Absolute as idea to the image Ihat is alleged to manifest it. The complex of tensions between idea and image are brought forward through an innovative combination of speech, vocal, and instrumental music that I shall call Schoenberg's theosanies . In what follows, I consider the relation between Moses, who insists upon the word in its ideality, and ATOn, who maintains the necessity for its transposition into phenomenal manifestation, and the reversals their positions un245 Edith Wyschogrod dergo. The complex of questions posed and suspended by the Mosaic traditions of phenomenality and ideality as manifested in the calf and the tablets, I argue, returns in Schoenberg's work as spectral re-enactments ofolder Jewish and Christian traditions exemplified in the comments on Moses in Maimonides ' Guide for the Perplexed and in the brief remarks on Moses in Augustine's Confessions. I turn also to the process of semiotic idealization itself, i.e., the progressive understanding of textual inwardization first manifested in acts of ingesting the text described in a number of biblical passages. In what can be viewed as a countermove, I then consider a rabbinic tradition that contends that sacred food must be segregated from sacred text and that each confers sacred defilement, a "defiling of the hands." Against this backdrop, Schoenberg 's Moses is shown, to borrow Derridean terms, as "the founder ofthe spirit of a people, ... the figure of a revenant-survivant, a Ghost survivor" (SoM, 146). I maintain further that the effort to create a transcendent object in phonic and musical sound alters the Maimonidean and Augustinian perspectives that have been brought into Schoenberg's theosonics so that the feared images return to fissure the word. The unintended preservation ofthese older traditions re-arises spectrally not as an effort to perpetuate the past but, as the Frankfurt School's Theodor Adorno might put it, "at the vanguard of the new ... in the interstices of the new.'" I shall forgo the temptation to examine the "ana-chronique" specter of Freud's Moses that haunts many contemporary accounts of Moses. Instead I shall focus upon the spectral re-arising ofJewish and Christian interpretations of Moses as they infiltrate Schoenberg's theosonics. A God without Images It is not possible to enter into the complex intellectual and artistic influences on Schoenberg's work, nor to do more than allude to Schoenberg's innovative compositional techniques. It is however useful to note that Schoenberg attended closely to Schopenhauer's account of the relation between Idea (Vorstellung...

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