Axiom and Durcharbeitung: Lyotard's Analysis of Schoenberg

Hysterical anxiety signals not that the god is too far away but thathe is too close, even if it is with his back turned as Hölderlin said.      Jean-François Lyotard, "Clouds"

O Word, thou Word, that I lack!      Moses, in Arnold Schoenberg's Moses und Aron

Perhaps Arnold Schoenberg and Jean-François Lyotard are two figures at odds with one another. What, after all, could Schoenberg, the prophet of musical modernism—the "conservative revolutionary" whose ambition sought a musical plenum—have in common with Lyotard, the "postmodern" philosopher who never ceased to critique the nostalgia and danger of totalization? As Peter Szendy puts it in Listen: A History of Our Ears, Schoenberg wants his listener "to hear everything"—and, one might add, to do so in the strongest possible sense: not only to hear everything in (his) music, but also to hear "everything," to hear in (his) music a unity that approximates a mystical conception of God (2008, 127). How can such a gesture not find itself at odds with Lyotard, the thinker who, in the final sentences of "Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?" writes, "Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable" (1984a, 82)? On one side, then, is a composer who demands a total comprehension, and on the other, a philosopher who attends to that which irreducibly escapes comprehension's grasp.

One might not expect, therefore, to see Schoenberg appear very often in Lyotard's writing. Yet this composer is something of a fixture for him, appearing as early as 1972 and 1973 (with "Several Silences" and "Adorno as the Devil") through to The Differend in 1983, and even appearing in the 1990s in the late essay "Music and Postmodernity." The evolution of this figure over more than two decades of Lyotard's thought is complicated. In the essays from the early 1970s, for instance, Lyotard is rather critical of Schoenberg, but by the 1980s and 1990s this approach softens somewhat, presumably in part because by then Lyotard had accepted Pierre Boulez's serialism as a viable approach to avantgarde music (more on this below). Despite this shift in emphasis, in the critical reception of Lyotard's writing on music, Schoenberg is almost ubiquitously addressed—if he is addressed at all—as a figure to be criticized or even dismissed.¹ This makes sense if one concentrates on the two essays from the early 1970s, which constitute, by far, Lyotard's most sustained engagement with Schoenberg's work, and which are quite critical of it (especially "Adorno as the Devil"). However, if one accounts for some of the observations made in Lyotard's later writings on music, which hold serialism in higher esteem, then his earlier readings of Schoenberg should probably not be understood as a simple rejection of the "modernist" composer by the "postmodernist" philosopher.

From this point of view, this article will focus on Lyotard's early interpretation of Schoenberg's Moses und Aron in "Several Silences," rereading it in terms of his later, psychoanalytically inflected theories of art and music. Bringing these aspects of his work together will demonstrate the extent to which Lyotard provides a complex account of Schoenberg's music, one that is not simply dismissive of it, and that, retroactively, might even be said to prefigure aspects of his later thought. In the first two sections of this article, therefore, I will describe some of Lyotard's later positions on psychoanalysis, art, and music. First I will outline his idiosyncratic notion of an artistic anamnesis as he develops it in relation to Freud's concept of Durcharbeitung, or "working through." In the second section I will examine Lyotard's theory of "the inaudible" and its connection to a manner of composition that he calls "axiomatic." The third section will go on to discuss Schoenberg's own theory of art and the unconscious. Doing so will allow for a more capacious presentation of Lyotard's psychoanalytic reading of Moses und Aron in the fourth section, where I will demonstrate how Lyotard understands Schoenberg's work...