Schubert’s mise-en-abîme
Reading Copjec’s Literacy of Desire as One Already Spoken For
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.46.2.07Keywords:
Joan Copjec, desire, Jacques Lacan, music, Franz SchubertAbstract
In honor of the thirtieth anniversary of Joan Copjec’s important and influential text, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, this essay explores how the psychoanalytic conceptualization of desire operates musically as much as linguistically. If the unconsciousis structured like a language, then music is structured like a desire for a language to be already spoken for. Franz Schubert’s evocative lieder literally speak about music’s capacity to capture and tarry with desire as a force always to be reckoned with.
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