The Musical Semiotic

Abstract

KRISTEVA, DON GIOVANNI, AND FEMINIST REVOLT One listens to it: Mozart, Schoenberg. One gives it shape: Don Juan, the ideal . . . hero, seductive because he is the master who defies fathers and the connoisseur of women never satisfied with one alone, transforming in a series of mistresses the silenced passion for a mother, and his love for the father - in a reciprocal murder; always ambivalent, law and transgression, terror and fascination. . . . [In] Don Juan . . . with music by Schoenberg. . . . Schoenberg would have been able to find the solution to the debate he himself called a false one, between his Moses and his Aaron [sic]: between (divine) menace which strikes with imageless thunder and the gaiety of the idolaters seduced by the golden calf.1 Implying that Schoenberg's Moses und Awn was doomed from the outset because it maintained a strict opposition between "imageless" law and sensuous experience, Kristeva posits Mozart's Don Giovanni as a privileged example of the interaction between what she calls the "symbolic" and "semiotic" domains, respectively. Although she frequently refers to musical works and the "musicality" of the semiotic, Kristeva is constantly talking around it, using music to illustrate her theories without ever giving a clear, positive definition of what she considers "music" to be; beyond stating that it is exemplary, she does not give a detailed account of how and why music functions as an example. Furthermore, the fact that the translator doesn't know that Schoenberg's Aron is not just any Aaron reveals that the role of music in Kristeva's work remains largely undertheorized.2 Following Kristeva's lead in taking Don Giovanni as the pinnacle and privileged example of "music" and "musicality," I explore how the music of the opera functions in order to provide a more refined, nuanced understanding of the relationship in which Kristeva sets the semiotic and the symbolic. Understanding the limit between the semiotic and the symbolic as analogous to the blurry, osmotic border separating the "purely musical" Moses from his "extramusical" brother Aron, I illustrate how the semiotic is not, as some have argued, either a "pure" or "originary" state excluded from and ineffectual in the symbolic, nor is it completely reducible and incapable of resistance against this other sphere. If every attempt at purification is already self-subversive, then Kristeva's use of "the feminine" and "the maternal," however problematic they may, at times, be, nevertheless open upon ways to reconfigure these images and recuperate Kristeva's imperfections, as it were. In light of the role the feminine/maternal plays in Don Giovanni, I argue that Kristeva revolts against Freud: turning his conception of the feminine back upon itself, Kristeva uses it to open onto new ways of thinking and experiencing that revolutionize psychoanalytic constructions of "femininity." Speaking for and through her patient Matthew, Kristeva clarifies that by "music" she means "classical, of course,"3 for it is Mozart's Classical tonality, not Schoenberg's serialism that exhibits the semiotic-symbolic dynamic that she finds at work in avant-garde literature. Hence, it is no surprise that Mozart is Kristeva's primary musical reference: stating that "it was not until Mozart came along with the 1787 Prague production of his opera buffa, [that] Don Giovanni . . . found within music the direct language of amoral eroticism,"4 she defines "music" in terms of Don Giovanni's amorous rebellion.5 Here, Don Giovianni's musicality is explicitly tied to revolt, for, as I will discuss shortly, Mozart's musical representation of the Don associates him with the "maternal" or "pre-Oedipal" domain, the "immature" feminine Oedipus complex that lacks proper resolution. Kristeva provides a rather insightful and extensive reading of Don Juan, but she never makes more than a few general remarks about Don Giovanni, usually some particularly cliched and rudimentary comment about "Mozart's joyful and stately music. …