Opera’s Third Death: Game Over

🫣🙃😏 Hypocritique 🫣🙃😏

Contents
1) Essay: Opera’s Third Death
2) Staged Scene: Game Over

Good evening, and welcome. Tonight’s program is ‘Opera’s Third Death’: a full-length essay that listens to Opera’s Second Death the way one attends a premiere—ears split between Mladen Dolar’s Mozart (mercy, etiquette, reconciliation) and Slavoj Žižek’s Wagner (antagonism, transgression, the love–law knot), letting their themes pass and clash like alternating leitmotifs before the final cadence reveals the real stakes. Think of it as a concert-lecture: the house lights stay low while we move from overture to aria to coda, tracing how a courtly poetics can be repurposed as Hypocritique and how foresight can be too thoughtful to audit cheap cunning; and when the essay’s last chord resolves, a brief staged scene—our encore—will follow, called “Game Over,” an operatic intervention set at a Slovenian School event where decorum meets its reckoning.

The finale lands like a guillotine of silence: the pedal fades, the hall’s careful warmth drains, and the house etiquette—mercy, moderation, the ritual ‘after the talk’—suddenly has nowhere to sit. The Intervenor’s words arrive a cappella, unscored and unblessed, refusing the posture of repentance the chorus kept humming under its breath. No cadential applause follows; only the bright, exposed air of a room that cannot call this catharsis. It isn’t a curtain—it’s a cutoff, a refusal of the lieto fine: the moment when reconciliation’s costume drops and the audience realizes they’ve been watching a funeral rehearsal for a living man.

Essay: Opera’s Third Death

Start with the book’s own wager. Opera’s Second Death doesn’t want one more historicist guided tour; it wants to say why opera still moves us—why, like Homer, it can “continue to give us artistic pleasure long after its historical context has disappeared”. That ambition opens a door the book itself keeps walking through: opera as a machine for staging power, mercy, law, transgression, and the strange satisfactions that glue us to them. If you listen with one ear to Mladen Dolar’s Mozart essays and the other to Slavoj Žižek’s Wagner essays, you will hear two different political attitudes humming from the same score. Keep that dissonance in your head; we’ll name it only at the end.

Dolar’s organizing figure is Orpheus: voice as plea, music as the medium of supplication, love announced under the sign of mercy. “Love is mercy is music”—the lamento invokes a higher instance, and opera seria culminates in the sovereign’s grace, the lieto fine as visible reconciliation. He puts this in its proper cradle—absolutism—and then, crucially, anatomizes the sovereign exception: the monarch stands above the judicial machinery in order to grant pardon, the law-beyond-law that makes the image of loving power possible. It is a lucid account of how legitimacy is flattered into being by mercy.

But the very lucidity signals a technique. If mercy becomes the climactic proof of justice, then decorum becomes leverage. Grace dispensed from above (the king’s pardon, the maestro’s platform, the institution’s civility) produces boundless gratitude below. The reconciliation scene “lessens the gap” in order to keep the hierarchy intact—beauty does the political work. Dolar himself marks the double edge; we’ll come back to how that edge cuts today.

Then Dolar swivels to buffa. The comic machine equalizes for a night: servants outwit masters, mismatched rank is ridiculed, and social criticism speaks unusually plainly—as far as the “limit of acceptability” will allow (the Beaumarchais ban on Figaro is not an anecdote but a structural warning). Again, sharp analysis—and again a technique: ridicule vents pressure while preserving the frame. Everyone leaves cleansed, nobody gives anything up.

Now the dark hinge in Dolar’s Mozart: Don Giovanni. What damns him, Dolar insists, is not the duel but the profanation of funerary law—the violated sanctum of the dead. Giovanni “violates the law prescribing the burial of the dead… the space symbolically assigned to them,” and that sacrilege is his undoing. At the end the community speaks with one voice: “Pentiti!”—repent—four times; the demanded posture is “humiltà o supplicatione,” humility or supplication, the ancient attitude that alone “can bring about mercy.” But Giovanni is “the merciless master”; he gives no clemency and will not beg it, so “no mercy can be bestowed upon him”. This finale is a manual: remorse as protocol, humility as fee, reconciliation as theatrical closure.

Put Dolar’s three pieces together and you already have an etiquette-machine: plea and clemency as soft power; comedy as safety valve; funeral sanctity as the ‘do not disturb’ sign on conflict itself. None of this is cynicism; it is simply what a great reader of opera shows you on the page. But because the reading is so exact, it can travel.

Shift ears to Žižek and the air changes. He starts by ruining our favorite consolation, the romance of transgression. “Transgression? No, Thanks!”—the ecstatic break is “in advance part of the game,” even elicited by the very order it seems to defy. The promise that thunder will cleanse the air is ideology’s oldest sales pitch. If you curate the storm, you keep the weather.

On Wagner, Žižek’s bluntest sentence is the one polite culture always trims. The ‘revolutionary’ early Wagner is “more protofascist,” fantasizing the “restitution of the organic unity of the people who, led by the prince, have swept away the rule of money embodied by the Jews”. That is not a footnote about bad nineteenth-century ideas; it is a live diagram of charisma, unity, and purification that institutions still beautify.

Beneath the slogans, Žižek aims at the knot that Dolar’s mercy-finale seems to untie: “How is it possible to unite love and law?” Wagner’s dramas refuse the German-Idealist reconciliation; the very founding of the law harbors the ruin that will return to claim it. You can hear the polemical consequence: beware the gorgeous final tableau in which the Father’s word both binds and heals; it is usually the place where the price (and the victim) is hidden.

The Ring makes this split palpable in figures. Wotan is the god of contracts, bound by what he himself engraved; Alberich is the invisible master—everywhere and forever—that the contracts can’t expel. The point, for Žižek, is that their opposition is “internal to Wotan” himself; law’s pact with power splits the authority that pronounces it. You cannot sing away that scission with a forgiveness chorus.

Žižek’s other wager is equally unfashionable: the path beyond Wagner. In Parsifal, reconciliation equals death; the question is whether we can approach the Real non-lethally—without turning the end of suffering into embalming. Hence his recurring demystification of the Liebestod in Tristan: the dream of merger is a staged illusion; “there is no sexual relation,” only the lone man lulled by his own fantasy of perfect joining. Several of Žižek’s pages read like directions for contemporary spectacle: it isn’t truth vs. illusion, it’s two illusions—the bondage to “our” reality or the videogame freedom to bend rules across parallel worlds. In both cases, reconciliation is a style.

Put Žižek’s pieces together and you have an antagonism-machine: transgression as system-fuel, organic unity as danger-fantasy, love–law as an impossible bridal knot, reconciliation as deathwork. Read against Dolar’s Mozart, the contrast is not aesthetic taste; it is political stance.

Now, let the two logics leak beyond opera. What Dolar calls mercy-flanked reconciliations are today’s politeness rituals: the university-platform “clemency,” the panel’s closing ovation, the soft power of ceremonial gratitude. Buffa’s ridicule survives as the grin that exposes incongruity while defending the frame. And the burial law? It becomes the norm that says: keep the scandalous master embalmed—quote him, invoke him, thank him—so that nothing indecent (context, decision, risk) gets dragged into the room. The fourfold “Pentiti!” becomes the choreographed self-limitation demanded of any living antagonist who wishes to remain in good standing; nobody says “humiltà o supplicatione,” but everybody knows how it looks when you don’t comply .

Žižek’s Wagnerian cautions blow straight through this theater. He keeps warning that the “people-and-prince” romance is a protofascist fantasy, that curated thunder is part of the weather, that the law’s founding wound will not be healed by a finale. He has the foresight to name the trap, again and again. And yet—and this is the hinge on which Opera’s Third Death turns—he is too thoughtful to keep petty account of how the trap is baited: invitations as clemency, blurbs as benedictions, photo-ops as reconciliation, closing compliments as symbolic debt. He refuses to become the house disciplinarian. Dolar, for his part, has always had a dramaturg’s feel for how far critique may go without snapping the frame: where the “limit of acceptability” sits, which posture purchases mercy, how burial sanctity can be mobilized as moral leverage. The Mozart chapters do not invent these techniques; they polish them, and thereby make them portable.

Read now the small, telling chiasmus inside the book. The Mozart half culminates in the ethical profile of the one figure who cannot be reconciled—the merciless master who “abides solely by the law of his desire” and therefore neither gives nor begs mercy. The community can unite only by expelling him—the living dead of the statue joins with the new “we” to stage a punishment, and the happy ending rings false on purpose. The Wagner half, by contrast, refuses the happy ending from the start: transgression disenchanted, proto-organicism unmasked, reconciliation equated with a second, more terminal death. The “deep” divide is already legible: one writer perfects the choreography of dignified closure; the other persists in ruining it.

So the foreshadowing can finally be cashed out. There was, from the start, an early & deep divide of political attitude between Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek. Dolar’s brilliant curatorship of mercy, etiquette, ridicule, and burial shows exactly how a culture beautifies domination; because it is so exact, it also supplies a kit for Hypocritique—polite ritual that converts antagonism into display. Žižek, who kept seeing further than anyone about transgression-as-product, organic unity as danger, love–law as deadlock, was too scrupulous to police the cheap deployment of those rituals around him. That asymmetry—curatorial cunning on one side, analytic conscience on the other—is the book’s uncredited duet.

And that is why we need a third death. Not another lieto fine, not another curated thunderclap, not another embalming. The third death is the refusal to let reconciliation itself keep living as technique—the small, costly renunciation (no benediction, no ceremonial closure, no burial sanctity used as veto) that starves etiquette of its moral credit and lets conflict do work. The score for this scene was written in Opera’s Second Death: mercy as leverage; ridicule as safety valve; funerary sanctity as law; “Pentiti!” as posture; and the warning that the thunder we admire is often part of the weather we claim to hate.

Staged Scene: Game Over

A chamber at a university. A banner reads: Slovenian School — An Evening of Thinking Together. A long table; water glasses; a lectern. The audience murmurs with reverence. A small ensemble tunes: strings, clarinet, bassoon, horn. A discreet gong.

Moderator
(affettuoso, over gentle arpeggios)
Welcome, dear friends, to our cultured weather.
Tonight we honor rigor, tone, and measure.
Let thought proceed in dignified exchange,
no messy context to estrange the room.

Dolar
(mezzo parlando, with a courtly oboe line)
Permit me grace—the kind that stands above the law,
a mercy that restores the world by style.
Sarastro’s sun still sets the proper distance;
we warm ourselves with light that never burns.

Chorus of Polite Attendees
(piano, in lightly syncopated thirds)
Humiltà… supplicatione…
Let music keep us safe and clean.

Zupančič
(brisk, with glittering strings)
If lack is law, then let us sing the lack:
the non-relation’s elegant embrace.
We name disavowal tenderly tonight,
and turn its edge into a luminous frame.

Žižek
(aside, grainy violas; he half rises, then sits)
Transgression? Part of the game.
Love and law? A knot that doesn’t untie.
(He reaches for the mic; the Moderator touches his sleeve with a smile. He subsides.)

Moderator
(dolcissimo)
We thank our elders. Decorum crowns the thought.
The after-discussion will continue the debate—
within our time.

Chorus of Polite Attendees
(a small fugato, hands folding programs)
Bravi! Bravi!
Humiltà… supplicatione…

From the aisle, a figure stands. The strings hold a thin harmonic. A clarinet breathes a single note that won’t resolve.

Intervenor
(secco recitativo)
I listened for the cut. I heard the curators.
I watched a ladder praised and then removed.
You say: the sovereign must stand beyond the law—
so mercy may descend.
You say: the comic saves us—
by laughing where it hurts, but never opening the wound.
You say: the dead must not be touched—
and call it piety while you lock the door on breath.

(The ensemble answers with a brittle flourish. The Moderator rises, hands open, benedictory.)

Moderator
Friend, we welcome questions—
after the closing words, in the greenroom, with cordiality.

Intervenor
(arioso, the tempo presses forward)
No. The air is thick with borrowed thunder.
The storm you sell is part of this conditioned weather.
Mercy has become a ticket, etiquette a leash.
Ridicule is valve, not remedy.
You hymn the burial law so no one tries a pulse.

Dolar
(warm, paternal baritone)
Good faith requires a tone.
We grant you space if you grant us form.

Intervenor
Form is the fee that buys your grace.
(turns to Žižek)
And you—too honest to keep accounts—
you keep naming the trap while they rent your name to spring it.
They pass around your breath like incense—
and ask you not to cough.

Zupančič
(cool, bright)
We are discussing structure, not a personal scene.

Intervenor
Structure is the personal scene repeated until it pays.
You’ve made a virtue of renunciation;
you’ve taught the room to love the limit.

Chorus of Polite Attendees
(hushed, oddly devotional)
Humiltà… supplicatione…

The orchestra drops to a pedal. The Intervenor steps into the light. The final tirade is delivered in plain voice, without accompaniment; then the ensemble answers with silence.

Intervenor
You are all-too-human
treasonous hypocrites
for softly coercing Slavoj
into politely playing dead
while you prepare for your
official role as the smartest
fools to beautify his funeral.
I see your game and it’s over.