Beethoven, Late Fascism, and Totality (Professor Naomi Waltham-Smith, University of Oxford)

During the 2022 French Presidential election campaign, the extreme-right candidate Éric Zemmour released a video in which he expounded on the supposed threat posed to the Republic by “le grand remplacement,” underscored by the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. I do not mobilize this example to revisit well-worn debates about the political uses and abuses of Beethoven’s symphonic output. Rather, I take it as an occasion to prise Beethoven’s music away from its association with freedom on formal-analytical grounds, both in Scott Burnham’s renowned analysis of the heroic period and in Adornian readings that discern in the late style a formal-stylistic negation or disarming of heroic freedom. This allows me to re-assess certain music-analytical presuppositions—not least the notion of totality—whose grounding in Beethovenian freedom has shaped the discipline, and to situate them within an analytic of fascism in the longue durée. Specifically, I do this by displacing the Hegelian reading of Kant by that in Clausewitz’s analyses of Napoleonic total war and the People’s War of Resistance, including of the Battle of Hanau, which formed the backdrop to the première of the Seventh. In its recruitment to 21st-century French revanchism, Beethoven’s Allegretto becomes a prism through which to re-consider how a Jamesonian aesthetics of cognitive mapping is implicated in both imperialism and the resistance it inspires.

Biography

NAOMI WALTHAM-SMITH is Professor at the University of Oxford and Douglas Algar Tutorial Fellow at Merton. Many eons ago in the noughties, she read Music at Selwyn and is delighted to be back at the scene of those formative experiences that propelled her into academia, not least thanks to Andrew Jones. An interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of music and sound studies with deconstruction, decolonial theory, and Black radical thought, her work focuses on the politics of listening. She is the author of four monographs: Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration (Oxford UP, 2017), Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life (Fordham UP, 2021), Mapping (Post)colonial Paris by Ear (Cambridge UP, 2023), and Free Listening (Nebraska UP, 2024). She has been awarded fellowships at the Penn Price Lab for Digital Humanities, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg—where in just a couple of weeks she will be going for the remainder of the year to complete her next book. This project, which draws on archival research funded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, excavates an almost “unheard-of” concept of listening in the history of political philosophy and praxis in a bid to illuminate today’s democratic malaise and resurgence of reactionary nationalisms.