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Epilogue: On Affirmation As Christian Asplund is right to emphasize in an article in which he compares the aesthetics of Cage, Bach, and Messiaen, the music of the last composer does not appeal to a sense of interiority in the way Bach’s music does. It seems as though in Messiaen’s music the vertical plane of stained-glass windows is answered by a planar experience that leaves all interiority behind . Inspired by Gilles Deleuze, Asplund notes, ‘‘Rather than delving or diving into a squalid, striated space of darkness within, Messiaen wants to ascend to a smooth, infinite space of light above, an expanding beyond oneself rather than a retraction within.’’1 Hence, what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write about music in general seems especially true of Messiaen’s: ‘‘Music is never tragic, music is joy. But there are times it necessarily gives us a taste for death; not so much happiness as dying happily, being extinguished.’’2 The music of dazzlement induces a transport along lines of flight that pass through the subject’s senses (sound-color) and lead toward a cosmic plane of immanence, an almost tactile texture of transfigured sensibility. Here, death is an event that already seems to have taken place. It returns one’s senses to a position that they may have occupied long before the invention of subjectivity. Or it may put them in a new position, among the repetitive deaths of the subject that we have been witnessing and that we shall witness. As I have argued, this happy dying does not imply a death of the will to affirmation. On the contrary, Messiaen’s music, far from exemplifying a Christian music of asceticism or contemptus mundi, remains deeply affirmative . In this respect, Messiaen’s work is remarkably close to the spirit of Friedrich Nietzsche, who scorned the dark recesses of the German soul and favored the southern qualities of Bizet’s Carmen. Although Messiaen arguably owes a great deal to Wagner, his affinities seem closer to the sun-stricken lands of the Mediterranean than to the nebulous swamps of the Teutonic imagination. The dialectic of abstinence and redemption that structures Parsifal is answered in Messiaen by a joyous Yes-saying. For Messiaen’s music is 179 180 Epilogue: On Affirmation ultimately a music of Yes (Amen): it celebrates, it affirms, it surrenders to something (rather than submitting itself ). It is tempting to interpret the music of dazzlement in terms of blackout and negative theology. Such, however, is not the nature of affirmation in Messiaen. As I have tried to argue, his reading of dazzlement is overwhelmingly positive, even in regard to the sensuous aspects of this experience. Rather than involve a leap into blind nothingness, it embraces and affirms a bright and colorful remainder. The summit of dazzlement is, as Messiaen explained while standing in the Saint-Chapelle, an all-violet haze that is clearly perceived despite being overly intense and saturating. Experiencing this, we have not left the world of the senses, and, in Messiaen’s account of the continuity between life and death, we presumably never will. Hence, if there is, as Paul Griffiths suggests, a ‘‘saintly naı̈veté’’ in Messiaen , it would be that his music affirms an exteriority that cannot be accounted for in terms of spirituality.3 The sensuous remainder testifies to a materiality that will always remain heterogeneous to the logic of the spirit. To affirm such an exteriority is to say Yes to the materiality of art, and to the uncanny hybrid called religious music. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes in his comment on Hegel’s philosophy of art, and particularly on its inability to conceptualize Christian art, ‘‘The moment of art in religion cannot remain a moment. Irresistibly it autonomizes itself, and it does so, perhaps, because it is precisely the moment of the thorough autonomy of manifestation—of an autonomy that no longer retains anything of interiority or of spirituality as such.’’4 Messiaen courts—again, ‘‘the temptation of temptation’’—the risk of affirming that which falls outside of the realm of the spirit, and he does so with apparent certainty. Perhaps it is wisdom. And finally, what about the listener? The relation to an outside, to an element that cannot be incorporated, neither by the intellect nor by the spirit or the emotions—what does all this mean to the ear that is supposed listen...

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