What do you think?
Rate this book
Opera's Second Death
Opera's Second Death is a passionate exploration of opera - the genre, its masterpieces, and the nature of death. Using a dazzling array of tools, Slavoj Zizek and coauthor Mladen Dolar explore the strange compulsions that overpower characters in Mozart and Wagner, as well as our own desires to die and to go to the opera.
246 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2001
14 people are currently reading
236 people want to read
About the author
Slavoj Žižek
640 books7,568 followersSlavoj Žižek is a Slovene sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic.
He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution, abolished in 1992).
Since 2005, Žižek has been a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Žižek is well known for his use of the works of 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture. He writes on many topics including the Iraq War, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, post-marxism, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock.
In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País he jokingly described himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist". In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! he described himself as a "Marxist" and a "Communist."
He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution, abolished in 1992).
Since 2005, Žižek has been a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Žižek is well known for his use of the works of 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture. He writes on many topics including the Iraq War, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, post-marxism, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock.
In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País he jokingly described himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist". In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! he described himself as a "Marxist" and a "Communist."
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 27, 2010
My only serious complaint is that the book doesn't treat Massenet's Thaïs. Imagine what Žižek and Dolar could have done with this?! My only other complaint: in the chapter "Run, Isolde, Run!," there's a consideration of other possible ending to Tristan and Isolde, which betrays no awareness of the varient endings already available in the medieval tradition. There's an Italian ballad, I believe, where Mark shows up and Tristan kills him. For example.
Essentially a long commentary on the Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, with extended considerations of Wagner's Parsifal, AND the trial of Joan of Arc, this is perhaps the most "medieval" or "medievalist" of Žižek's books. It's strange, then, that it doesn't get cited in Cinematic Illuminations, given that book's attention to the grail as an 'anamorphic blot' disturbing the screen in, for example, Rohmer's Perceval le Gallois, and Syberberg's Parsifal.
If you've stopped halfway through, keep at it: the Žižek clichéd jokes and mapping of Hegelian/Lacanian triads (here he is on Joan for instance, "Do we not encounter hear, yet again, the Lacanian triad of the Real-Imaginary-Symbolic: the Real of the hallucinated voices, the Imaginary of the dress, the Symbolic of the ecclesiastic institution?"), in other words, the Žižekian automatism, gives way, shockingly, to close (and accurate?) readings of the above operas plus a few others, including Rosenkavalier, Cosi fan Tutte, Fidelio, more Wagner, Turendot ("a monstrously perverted version of a Kantian ethical machine, whose message to us is "You can, because you must!"), and a few obscure atonal modernist pieces. Also surprising: the book's feminist critique of Wagner's idealized attachment to the Feminine Thing (which means the sacrifice of actual women), its sympathy with Derrida and with Butler on Antigone ("Antigone is a "living dead" not in the sense (which Butler attributes to Lacan) of entering the mysterious domain of ate, of going to the limit of the Law; she is a "living dead" in the sense of publicly assuming an uninhabitable position, a position for which there is no place in the public space").
One of my favorite bits is their reading of the opening of Der Rosenkavalier: "This anti- (or, rather, post-) Wagnerian thrust is nicely rendered in the opposition between Octavian and the Marschallin in the very first scene: while, in a mockingly Wagnerian mood, Octavian babbles about the dissolution of the frontier between Me and You in the love act, about his wish to remain immersed in the night and avoid the day," the Marschallin just says, here, hide behind this screen. To read this opening as an extension/subversion of Tristan and Isolde! Brilliant!
..and here's a typical moment: "e have here four attitudes towards sexual love: the Wagnerian deadly immersion into the unremitting jouissance of the Night; the Meistersinger-Rosenkavalier resigned "wisdom," acceptance that time passes, rendered in a "half-imaginary, half-real" dreamy Mozartean mode; Shostakovich's brutal naturalism of the vulgar daily life - "just the story of an ordinary quiet Russian family whose members beat and poison each other," as Shostakovich himself put it sarcastically; and, finally, Schulhoff's assertion of the "undead" spectral compulsion as the ultimate dimension of sexual love."
Essentially a long commentary on the Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, with extended considerations of Wagner's Parsifal, AND the trial of Joan of Arc, this is perhaps the most "medieval" or "medievalist" of Žižek's books. It's strange, then, that it doesn't get cited in Cinematic Illuminations, given that book's attention to the grail as an 'anamorphic blot' disturbing the screen in, for example, Rohmer's Perceval le Gallois, and Syberberg's Parsifal.
If you've stopped halfway through, keep at it: the Žižek clichéd jokes and mapping of Hegelian/Lacanian triads (here he is on Joan for instance, "Do we not encounter hear, yet again, the Lacanian triad of the Real-Imaginary-Symbolic: the Real of the hallucinated voices, the Imaginary of the dress, the Symbolic of the ecclesiastic institution?"), in other words, the Žižekian automatism, gives way, shockingly, to close (and accurate?) readings of the above operas plus a few others, including Rosenkavalier, Cosi fan Tutte, Fidelio, more Wagner, Turendot ("a monstrously perverted version of a Kantian ethical machine, whose message to us is "You can, because you must!"), and a few obscure atonal modernist pieces. Also surprising: the book's feminist critique of Wagner's idealized attachment to the Feminine Thing (which means the sacrifice of actual women), its sympathy with Derrida and with Butler on Antigone ("Antigone is a "living dead" not in the sense (which Butler attributes to Lacan) of entering the mysterious domain of ate, of going to the limit of the Law; she is a "living dead" in the sense of publicly assuming an uninhabitable position, a position for which there is no place in the public space").
One of my favorite bits is their reading of the opening of Der Rosenkavalier: "This anti- (or, rather, post-) Wagnerian thrust is nicely rendered in the opposition between Octavian and the Marschallin in the very first scene: while, in a mockingly Wagnerian mood, Octavian babbles about the dissolution of the frontier between Me and You in the love act, about his wish to remain immersed in the night and avoid the day," the Marschallin just says, here, hide behind this screen. To read this opening as an extension/subversion of Tristan and Isolde! Brilliant!
..and here's a typical moment: "e have here four attitudes towards sexual love: the Wagnerian deadly immersion into the unremitting jouissance of the Night; the Meistersinger-Rosenkavalier resigned "wisdom," acceptance that time passes, rendered in a "half-imaginary, half-real" dreamy Mozartean mode; Shostakovich's brutal naturalism of the vulgar daily life - "just the story of an ordinary quiet Russian family whose members beat and poison each other," as Shostakovich himself put it sarcastically; and, finally, Schulhoff's assertion of the "undead" spectral compulsion as the ultimate dimension of sexual love."
January 19, 2011
A funny, insightful, half-political and half-psychoanalytical dissection of the history of opera through the classics (mostly Mozart and Wagner). I would say it deserves to be read by any serious scholar of Enlightenment politics and arts. Though I'm a fan of Zizek, and I read this book because of his name attached to the title, I actually thought that Dolar's parts were better. But there's plenty of good stuff throughout the book. Recommended.
March 3, 2025
great book. interesting excerpts:
‘the act of mercy is proof of love beyond the law, it demands love in return, and the true medium of love is music' (22)
Die Zauberflote: Page 79 on Pamina, Ariadne's lament, 'I myself shall lead you; love will guide me!'
Page 118: By killing oneself, one commits a mortal sin by way of abrogating the divine gift of life, so one can non longer be buried in hallowed ground and with the proper rituals...[]... Thus, suicide condemns one to eternal life: to the undead existence (or, rather, insistence) of those who are not allowed to find peace in death. obscene immortality
Page 132: marital kisses without love and extramarital fleeting affairs are two sides of the same coin - they both shirk from combining the real of an unconditional passionate attachment with the form of symbolic proclamation
Great section on Wagner's sexualized politics. Private sphere enters public sphere
Last section:
Page 223: That is to say, the key enigma of Nietzsche's final madness is this: why did nietzsche have to take recourse to what cannot but appear to us as ridiculous self-aggrandizing ("Why I am so brilliant?")? This is an inherently philosophical deadlock that has nothing whatsoever to do with any private pathology: his inability to accept the nonexistence of the big Other. (Within these coordinates, suicide occurs when the subject perceives that the megalomaniac solution doesn't work.) And it is only within this horizon that Isolde will no longer have to run.
‘the act of mercy is proof of love beyond the law, it demands love in return, and the true medium of love is music' (22)
Die Zauberflote: Page 79 on Pamina, Ariadne's lament, 'I myself shall lead you; love will guide me!'
Page 118: By killing oneself, one commits a mortal sin by way of abrogating the divine gift of life, so one can non longer be buried in hallowed ground and with the proper rituals...[]... Thus, suicide condemns one to eternal life: to the undead existence (or, rather, insistence) of those who are not allowed to find peace in death. obscene immortality
Page 132: marital kisses without love and extramarital fleeting affairs are two sides of the same coin - they both shirk from combining the real of an unconditional passionate attachment with the form of symbolic proclamation
Great section on Wagner's sexualized politics. Private sphere enters public sphere
Last section:
Page 223: That is to say, the key enigma of Nietzsche's final madness is this: why did nietzsche have to take recourse to what cannot but appear to us as ridiculous self-aggrandizing ("Why I am so brilliant?")? This is an inherently philosophical deadlock that has nothing whatsoever to do with any private pathology: his inability to accept the nonexistence of the big Other. (Within these coordinates, suicide occurs when the subject perceives that the megalomaniac solution doesn't work.) And it is only within this horizon that Isolde will no longer have to run.
Want to read
October 18, 2010nduwe ebook-nya. masiyo ra diwoco.
January 23, 2013
Zizek-good, Dolar-bad.
February 15, 2016
My lack of opera acumen is what prevents me from giving it 5 stars; it might be a 5 star book.
to-keep-reference
March 2, 2016Una relectura de Tristán e Isolda de Wagner.
Visión de Paralaje Pág.301
Visión de Paralaje Pág.301
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews