BEETHOVEN AND THE TEST OF FAITH

Abstract

Hélène Cixous’s engagement with faith is a significant but overlooked facet of her work. Focusing on Beethoven à jamais ou l’existence de Dieu [Beethoven Forever or the Existence of God] (1993), this article contends that Cixous envisions faith as the ground and horizon of both artistic creation and love. To illustrate this point, the author focuses on Cixous’s idiosyncratic portrayal of Ludwig von Beethoven. Her representation of Beethoven as an impassioned lover and artist runs against the grain of the canonical depiction of the composer as a “great man” or a “heroic individual,” as found in the writings of Romain Rolland and Sigmund Freud. For Cixous, love and writing both stem from an unpredictable, joyful event that infinitely exceeds our understanding. Both are predicated on a state of “active passivity” that clears the ground for the event of passion and creation to occur without predetermining what it will be.

Keywords:

• Cixous
• Beethoven
• Kierkegaard
• Rolland
• Freud
• faith

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Freud advances that Leonardo’s genius, his dispassionate approach to science, stemmed from his “cool repudiation of sexuality” (Leonardo da Vinci 16).

2 Freud writes that he is “almost incapable of obtaining pleasure” from music: “Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am affected and what it is that affects me” (“The Moses of Michelangelo” 211).

3 This echoes Cixous’s statement in “Love of the Wolf” that “[t]he wolf is the truth of love, its cruelty, its fangs, its claws, our aptitude for ferocity […] But happiness is when a real wolf suddenly refrains from eating us” (78).

4 The word “cleave” denotes well what love means for Cixous, insofar as to cleave means both “to hold on firmly to something” and “to separate.”

5 Cixous feels a close proximity to Abraham:

From the absolute viewpoint (God and no one else) Abraham is Justice and Innocence personified. From the general (society, law, morality) viewpoint, he is an assassin, an infanticide, etc. I myself have always felt that, I’ve always had my soul in these two spheres … (Cixous and Jeannet 148)

6 It may well be the case that Beethoven is one of Cixous’s “Ideal selves.” As Cixous argues, human beings are

blind people who run straight ahead, summoned by the Ideal self: that’s to say by a figure, over there in front. And this “Ideal self” (what a fine proper noun: it sounds like the name of a racehorse), we don’t know who it is […] it’s someone fine, someone grand, whom we imitate, whom we try to imitate, whom we don’t catch up with. (“In the Beginnings There Were Many” 35)

7 As Cixous argues in an interview with Derrida, “the secret is not a diamond, it is in a state of continual secretion, it constantly augments itself: never can an author reach its heights” (“From the Word to Life” 178).

8 In Rootprints, Cixous affirms that she cannot write “otherwise than by letting [her]self be carried away on the back of these funny horses that are metaphors” (Cixous and Calle-Gruber 28).

9 The narrator doesn’t specify if she hears Beethoven’s music, his voice, or the signifier “Beethoven.” Cixous often remarked, however, that for a long time she used to listen to music while writing, in order to steal music’s energy. It might be the case in Beethoven Forever.

10 The catachretic mane is also a reference to Kafka’s “The Wish to be a Red Indian.”

11 As Mireille Calle-Gruber writes, dashes provide “words along with enough space to make them sound, resound in the echo chamber preserved by writing” (83). This process opens up syntax and prevents the words from “vanishing amidst the chain of meaningful propositions as soon as they are read” (87).