Shipwreck with a Witness: Music and Fascism in Thomas Bernhard’s “The Loser”

“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.