Harmony, Sacrifice, and Agamben’s Messianic Time

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, harmony, the sacred, and even time were seen as impediments to artistic freedom, though for the ancients, harmony was the integrating force of the cosmos. Giorgio Agamben’s recent writings on the sacred and on messianic time shed new light on the emergence of polyphony. He warns that capitalism, subsuming sacral power, reduces art either to spectacle or to object for consumption.