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. Ruins and (Un)forgetfulness: A Genealogy of the Musically Sublime In ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’’ Michel Foucault (re)introduced a concept in philosophy and the writing of history that he had derived from Friedrich Nietzsche: genealogy.1 Foucault presented this concept as a history -writing against the grain insofar as it no longer starts from timeless values and realities lying in wait behind the stories of the past. Genealogy, for Foucault, was no longer naı̈ve, in that it no longer searched for the pure origin of things but rather showed how such origins were constituted out of incoherent fragments, accidents, errors, and failings. Insofar as genealogy had to do with descent, this was a descent in terms of dissemination: ‘‘to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion . . . it is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents.’’2 Foucault’s envisioned practice of genealogy was, of course, very much aimed at uncovering power structures, power struggles, and other instances of ‘‘petty malices’’ at work in the values and morals we so easily tend to take for granted as pure and eternal.3 Though this chapter will not be explicitly concerned with Foucauldian analyses of domination and subjugation, Foucault ’s concept of genealogy—with its stress on accidents and failings—is nevertheless a suitable concept to frame the chance descent of the musically sublime in nineteenth-century German (music) philosophy. This descent will start here (not as a hard beginning but as a moment of intersection) with a casual and playful gesture in Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, which suggests the possibility of a musical ruin—the equivalent of a building without symmetry (WW II, , ). Little more than an accidental aside, this gesture nonetheless found its way into the aesthetic writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner. Mutated , the musical ruin would even inform the idea of a specifically musically sublime. A product of chance and creative misreadings, this idea represented  A Geneaology of the Musically Sublime  perhaps little more than a Foucauldian ‘‘unstable assemblage of faults, fissures , and heterogeneous layers.’’4 It was, in any case, far from being a solid, unequivocal model for a sublime that could only make its appearance by musical means. Even so, this assemblage would co-facilitate the rise of Wagnerian absolute music and indeed become its legitimization. As I will show, such music was to be a music disconnected from the sensible world, without ‘‘plastic’’ forms and without rhythmic regularity: a music that would have come to ‘‘itself ’’ in the formlessness and rulelessness of the sublime. A Frozen Cadenza: Music as Will and Ruin In Towards a Newer Laocoön, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing—through an intertextual dialogue with Burke’s Enquiry—elaborated on a binary opposition between the spatial (painting, sculpture, architecture) and the temporal (literature and music) arts.5 The opposition, it must be stressed, is not so much absolute as regulative: Towards a Newer Laocoön explores the limits of the different art forms by exploring the degrees in which they can (in the sense of being able and being allowed to) become terrible without actually becoming revolting. Can art represent terrible things and events without distorting itself so that it is no longer pleasing to behold—can it be painful in a pleasurable way? In Towards a Newer Laocoön, this is a privilege reserved for the temporal arts. While sculpture and painting (in conformity to classical laws) must never leave the bounds of the beautiful, the temporal arts can, according to Lessing, evoke the terrible without becoming formally revolting. In Arthur Schopenhauer’s art-philosophy, this distinction between the spatial and temporal is still commonplace, even though the ghost of intermediality is here already an intrusive presence. This ghost violates both medial boundaries and articulations of meaning dependent on these boundaries. Indeed, in the second part of The World as Will and Representation the problem of medial confusion is in effect a tropological fusion of medial functions in the commonplace cliché ‘‘architecture is frozen music’’ (WW II, , –). As Schopenhauer contends, this is a dysfunctional cliché, a Wortwitz at best, since the temporalization (music) of the spatial (architecture), and vice versa, is a contradiction within the terms. Indeed, insofar as The World as Will and Representation follows Lessing’s formal distinction between the arts, it remediates the latter and turns it...

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