The old philosophical dream: to purge language of song to allow language to stand upright. But then what of pure music? Pure seduction, one might suppose, pure seductiveness: the song of being and not that which interrupts being. But this is interesting: the song of being – the song is linked not to the cosmos (the order of the world, kosmos), but what, for Levinas, destroys that order and to which the cosmic is always exposed. The stars are blown out; a blank dark sky: this is the sky above music, pure music (Levinas mentions Xenakis – irony that the composer lost half his face to war) as also above disaster.
Ultimately, music, for him, gives way to the arhhythmical chaos of what he calls the il y a: the ‘there is’ of being, without reason, without fate, which permits the human being no tragic grandeur. Irrecuperable experiences – those which deprive the one who endures them of herself, her grasp upon herself, that minimal reflexivity which would permit her to remember what has happened. Blank-eyed, wandering, she would be like the Muselmanner (racist epiphet) of whom Levi writes (and Agamben after him): the living dead, those alive, barely alive, and not at all for themselves, in their death.
Those Blanchot, reading Antelme, will call the Other, who have fallen below the level of need. Levinas is horrified by song, by music, by the singing of language because it seems to him to be linked to the cosmic order which periodically returns each to the horror of living death. And for Blanchot? ‘Perhaps we know the disaster by other, joyful names’. It is in joy we can know that night in which the stars are blown out. That same night of which he writes in the famous ‘primal scene’ at the heart of The Writing of the Disaster (The Disaster Writes – another translation of the title).
Is there what could be called the night of song? That night to which the song attunes itself and lets sing? For Heidegger, there might be a song around whose singing a people might form. A people attuned by this singing and the sacred precinct in which it is sung – by this singing and the temple that is its locus, that temple with the statue of a god at its heart. What, though, of a song which would scatter a people? The song of their undoing and scattering by the four winds? Song of the obscure and of the movement of obscurity. Such are the songs, perhaps, of The Palace Brothers’ Days in the Wake (perhaps; perhaps not).
Adorno’s famous dictum, that it will have been impossible to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz can perhaps be understood in a different sense. If it is implicit to the cosmic, to the order of the cosmos, that Auschwitz could return (the return of all horrors), then we are never after Auschwitz – never, that is, the inheritors of an event that would be absolute singular and removed from all other events. This is perhaps what Levinas would write; and he would also write of the relation to the Other as that which would break the dominion of being. What if that claim is unconvincing? What if it is, rather, the relation to the unknown as it interrupts the reflexivity inherent in being as it might be revealed, for example, in song, in music, or more broadly in art?
This may seem mysterious. What form what this interruption take? That which would permit the listener, the participant at the performance to return to herself. Then would the Dionysian, the orgiastic, the ecstatic be the model for the interruption of being? Perhaps. Now think of Klossowski, and of his account of the Eternal Return. To will the Eternal Return is to be altered at the moment of willing. You change even as you affirm the Eternal Return. A threshold is crossed; you are no longer the one you were. Now think of Bataille’s atheistic mysticism – subject and object collapse each into the other; the arms of the subject are wrapped around the object not so they fuse, but that in this embrace each plunges into a kind of nothingness. I’ve put it vaguely …
But what if such ecstasies are impossible for us? What if too much has happened and there are too many horrors around us? What if ecstasy is distrusted? I have always loved that Levinas includes places unemployment among the disasters of the twentieth century at the beginning of Proper Names. What if there’s a kind of unemployment, the omnipresence of the everyday which crushes the soul once capable of ecstasy?
Once, young, I liked a lyrical music. Now, old – but I am not using these words chronologically, that is, to do with calender years – I like that music which registers a kind of crushing or contorsion. Innocence: the cosmos is open, infinitely open. Experience: confirmed over and again is the horror of the cosmos. Confirmed is war and desperation; tyranny and the impossibility of peace; suffering and corruption. Experience: open to you is only the chance of finding that niche into which you might hide yourself and hope to go unnoticed. Horror of a world always about to fly apart. Music of age: Shostakovich, crushed Shostakovich of the 15th Symphony or the 15th String Quartet. Across that music, falling like black rain, the steadiness of horror like steady rain. Falling without respite – horror after horror. Until all there is of music is the dark body which bears the horror. Until music is only that surface across which horror falls, calm rain.
There is a music which knows of the limits of the cosmic. Which endures the horrors that have happened and the horrors that are to come. That spreads itself beneath a sky without stars, in which the stars have been blown out. What, then, of Klossowski? What of that ecstasy that is not the ecstasy of the Same? Bataille cycled past the bloated corpses of horses in the ravaged countryside. Blanchot writes of the same ravagement which was due not to the forces of natural destruction, but of a retreating army. He was put up against the wall to be shot; he was not shot, but he learnt that others, the sons of local farmers had been killed that day. He was saved, he wondered to himself, because he was taken to be a Seigneur, an aristocrat. Thereafter it was the death of those farmer’s sons which stayed with him as though he were living his life in their place.
Marvellous that Shostakovich wrote of the death of those around him, of the murder of Jews, of the murder of Russians, of those disappeared. Their death was commemorated in vast, lugubrious symphonies which were not always devoid of joy, but in which joy was a hollow laughing, madness laughing at itself and above all the night that was the disappearance of the world. Stalin was not a natural force, a natural catastrophe but a man like any other and one who gathered around him an army of those who were likewise touched with a banal megalomania. But the possibility of Stalin is inscribed into the cosmic. Messiaen will sing of the cosmos, of the all; Shostakovich will not. It becomes impossible in him. Song laughs in him. Rossini is made to laugh in his music, laughing at itself and at the imposture that music is. Music laughs at itself, but it is weary laughter, a laughter of one crushed and one contorted.
So is Shostakovich close to the law of the cosmos. Close to it and not carried away by it. Close, crushed, even as a kind of singing lifts itself from what is crushed.
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