Яким Петров

“Shipwreck with a Witness: Music and Fascism in Thomas Bernhard’s “The Loser”” is an attempt to think the multifaceted relations between music as an art and practice, and fascism as a desire as well as a political, existential, aesthetic, etc. condition and phantasm. These relations are explored through a close reading of Thomas Bernhard’s novel “The Loser” which is a fictional account of a doomed friendship between Bernhard‘s unnamed narrator, a fictionalised version of Glenn Gould, the infamous piano virtuoso, and Wertheimer – a caricature of the equally infamous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. It is through them that Bernhard addresses the problems of madness, desire for eternity and totality, the hatred of diversity and the Other, etc. By unpacking the dense logic and meaning of the above through ideas by Deleuze, Brassier, André Michels, etc., the text addresses the crucial figure of witnessing a transcendental trauma (fascism) qua event. Finally, the article engages with the theoretical and practical (ethical) importance of examining not just the relation between fascism and music but also the problem of the return of fascism within contemporary culture.

The article focuses on the provocative thematization of forgiveness in Shakespeare’s final completed play. Interpreting the fractures and tensions of the main character, the study employs some of Jacques Derrida’s key ideas on the problem of forgiveness. The close reading of Prospero’s position within the economy of power and desire in “The Tempest” also outlines a conceptual field where legal theory, literature, and Lacanian psychoanalysis are intertwined. Their productive encounter discloses certain (non)written structures that regulate and direct a subject’s desire and social relations. In light of modern-day collapse of these matrices and their symbolic order, the article is a conceptual wager to resist their disappearance, albeit from a seemingly distant point of view.