Slavoj Žižek Examines the Perverse Ideology of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy

Beethoven’s icon­ic Ninth Sym­pho­ny pre­miered in Vien­na in 1824, at “a time of great repres­sion, of ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive nation­al­ism” as the old orders fought back against the rev­o­lu­tions of the pre­vi­ous cen­tu­ry. But it’s dif­fi­cult to imag­ine the com­pos­er hav­ing any nation­al­ist intent, what with his well-known hatred of author­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly impe­ri­al­ist author­i­ty (and par­tic­u­lar­ly of Napoleon). Even less obvi­ous is the impu­ta­tion of nation­al­ist ten­den­cies to Friedrich Schiller, whose poem, “Ode to Joy” Beethoven adapts to a glo­ri­ous cho­rus in the fourth move­ment. Schiller’s poem, writes Scott Hor­ton in Harper’s, “envi­sions a world with­out mon­archs” in which uni­ver­sal friend­ship “is essen­tial if humankind is to over­come its dark­er moments.” And in his take on the ubiq­ui­tous piece of music, con­trar­i­an the­o­rist Slavoj Žižek acknowl­edges in the clip above from his lat­est film, A Pervert’s Guide to Ide­ol­o­gy, that the Ninth is gen­er­al­ly tak­en for grant­ed “as a kind of an ode to human­i­ty as such, to the broth­er­hood and free­dom of all peo­ple.”

And yet Žižek , being Žižek, draws our atten­tion to the Ninth Sym­pho­ny as a per­fect ide­o­log­i­cal con­tain­er, by ref­er­ence to its unfor­get­table use in Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange, as unspar­ing a look at humanity’s “dark­er moments” as one might find on film (excerpt above). Kubrick (and com­pos­er Wendy Car­los) drew on a long, dark his­to­ry of asso­ci­a­tions with the Ninth. As evi­dence of its “uni­ver­sal adapt­abil­i­ty,” Žižek points to its well-known use by the Nazis as a nation­al­ist anthem, as well as by the Sovi­et Union as a com­mu­nist song; in Chi­na dur­ing the Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion, when almost all oth­er West­ern music was pro­hib­it­ed; and at the extreme Apartheid right in South Rhode­sia. “At the oppo­site end,” Žižek says, the Ninth Sym­pho­ny was the favorite of ultra-left­ist Shin­ing Path leader Abi­mael Guz­man, and in 1972, it became the unof­fi­cial “Anthem of Europe” (now of the Euro­pean Union). The tow­er­ing piece of music, Žižek claims, enables us to imag­ine a “per­verse scene of uni­ver­sal fra­ter­ni­ty” in which the world’s dic­ta­tors, arch-ter­ror­ists, and war crim­i­nals all embrace each oth­er. It’s a deeply dis­turb­ing image, to say the least. Watch the full excerpt for more of Žižek’s exam­i­na­tion of the ide­o­log­i­cal weight Beethoven car­ries.

via Bib­liokept

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In His Lat­est Film, Slavoj Žižek Claims “The Only Way to Be an Athe­ist is Through Chris­tian­i­ty”

Slavoj Žižek’s Pervert’s Guide to Ide­ol­o­gy Decodes The Dark Knight and They Live

The Mak­ing of Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness