Opera's Second Death

[Dave Monroe]

>From Slavoj Zizek and Mladen Dolar, Opera's Second
Death (New York: Routledge, 2001), "If Music Be the
Food of Love," pp. 1-101 ...

"Freemasonry tries to enforce ideas of the
Enlightenment in an anti-enlightenment form: on the
one hand, the elevation to universal humanity and
reason and on the other, secret lodges, sects of the
initiated, an clandestine conspiracies--the very
opposite of a reasonable and universal public, which
Kant described as the most important framenwork of the
enlightenment.... the access to universality was
reserved for the chosen and initiated, who tried to
maintain their exceptional and privileged position. 
Secret signs, mystic symbols, invocations, secret
codes, codified initiation rites, new Cabala--all
these abound in great quantities.  The representatives
of the Enlightenment themselves became a secret sect
that strove to lead humanity to reason and progress,
becoming a self-appointed avant-garde in the service
of historic reason....
   "The unitiated and the unenlightened reamin
outside, as the very people who were supposed to
compose the universal community.... the subordinates
assign themselves an inferior status and remain in
"minority by their own guilt," die Selbstverschuldete
Unmundigkeit, as Kant ahs incomparably out it .... 
Even more, the subordinates are satisfied with their
subordination; they occupy a position corresponding to
their nature and abilities, from which they don't want
to part...." (p. 83)

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