The End of Abstraction and the Beginning of the People
On Law and Representation in Arnold Schoenberg's Moses und Aron
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21322220 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Adi Nester (University of Colorado Boulder, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 93 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 19-36 |
| Publication date | 2020-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The German Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0016-8831 • E-ISSN: 1756-1183 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/gequ.12121 |
| OpenAlex | W3006131680 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 13 |
This essay links the crisis of representation in modernist art with the problem of political representation in Arnold Schoenberg's unfinished opera Moses und Aron . It reads the opera in light of Schoenberg's unpublished political drafts concerning the nature of democracy as well as against the writings of political theorists such as Schmitt, Hobbes, and Rousseau, and proposes an understanding of the opera‐fragment as Schoenberg's own attempt to study the concepts “Law” and “the People” as abstract ideas whose particularized representation involves an inevitable corruption of the ideas behind the representation. Thus the compulsion to represent that which cannot be represented in the opera is translated into two separate problems: the embodiment of an abstract law through its interpretation in particular cases, and the question of representing a heterogeneous group through a unified concept like the People as well as the group's diverse demands as the general will
Abstraction · Art history · Democracy · Epistemology · Interpretation (philosophy) · Linguistics · Opera · Political science · Politics · Representation (politics) · Sociology · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · History · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Political Theology and Sovereignty
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |