Opera’s Second Death is not simply a philosophical reflection on opera, but as a sustained theoretical experiment in which opera is treated as a privileged site for thinking some of the most intractable problems of modern philosophy: death and repetition, enjoyment and loss, subjectivity and its dissolution, the relation between symbolic order and bodily excess, and the peculiar temporality produced when music interrupts narrative causality. The book’s ambition lies in its refusal to reduce opera either to a historical genre whose conditions of possibility can be exhaustively reconstructed, or to a reservoir of illustrative examples for psychoanalytic concepts developed elsewhere. Instead, opera is approached as a formal apparatus that actively produces conceptual effects, effects that cannot be fully captured by external theoretical frameworks without themselves undergoing transformation.
The work unfolds from a deceptively simple provocation: opera is obsessed with death, yet this obsession cannot be adequately explained by reference to plot conventions, melodramatic excess, or historical circumstance. What is at stake is not the frequency with which operatic characters die, but the peculiar way in which death is staged, deferred, repeated, or transformed through music and voice. The book’s guiding claim is that opera introduces a second death that exceeds biological finitude and narrative closure. This second death is not a metaphorical embellishment of the first, nor a symbolic doubling imposed from without. It arises immanently from the operatic dispositif itself: from the way singing suspends action, from the way music interrupts causality, and from the way the voice detaches itself from the body that emits it. Opera, on this account, is not a genre that tells stories about dying; it is a form that compels subjects—both fictional and real—to inhabit a space beyond ordinary mortality, a space structured by repetition, fixation, and excessive enjoyment.
At the core is the concept of the second death, drawn from Lacanian psychoanalysis and radicalized through operatic analysis. The distinction between a first, biological death and a second, symbolic death serves initially as a heuristic device, allowing the authors to differentiate between the mere cessation of life and a more radical break in the subject’s relation to meaning, desire, and enjoyment. Yet this distinction is never treated as stable or exhaustive. From the outset, the second death is presented not as a clearly delimited event but as a structural possibility inscribed within the operatic form itself. Opera, the authors argue, does not simply represent death as a narrative outcome; it produces death as a formal operation that reorganizes time, voice, and subjectivity from within.
This production is inseparable from opera’s peculiar relation to temporality. Operatic time is neither the linear time of narrative progression nor the cyclical time of myth. It is a time repeatedly suspended, stretched, and folded back upon itself by musical repetition. Arias halt dramatic action at precisely the moment when action should accelerate. Musical motifs return obsessively, not to advance the plot, but to insist upon something that cannot be resolved within it. Death, within this temporal economy, ceases to function as an endpoint. It becomes a horizon that structures the entire experience without ever being definitively reached. The second death names this transformation of finitude into a condition of interminable approach, a death that is endlessly rehearsed rather than simply undergone.
Methodologically, the book proceeds by a careful interlinking of close operatic analysis and conceptual construction. Its argumentative movement does not follow a linear progression from premises to conclusions. Instead, it advances through a series of returns, detours, and rearticulations that mirror the very logic it attributes to opera. Early conceptual gestures are taken up again later in altered form, displaced by new emphases, and partially undone by their own implications. This compositional strategy is not incidental. It reflects the authors’ conviction that opera resists definitive theoretical capture, and that any adequate philosophical account must allow itself to be transformed by the object it seeks to explain. The text thus stages its own internal second death, as initial frameworks are gradually rendered insufficient and replaced by more refined, yet more fragile, configurations.
The authors’ insistence that opera operates at the level of drive rather than desire is crucial here. Desire, oriented toward an object whose fulfillment is deferred, presupposes a symbolic economy in which lack can be articulated and managed. Drive, by contrast, circulates around a loss that cannot be symbolized as an object, deriving enjoyment from repetition itself. Opera’s musical structures, with their insistence on return rather than progression, align it structurally with drive. Death scenes that extend far beyond biological plausibility are not excesses to be explained away by convention. They are manifestations of a deeper formal logic in which enjoyment persists precisely where life, in any empirical sense, should have ceased.
This persistence finds its most concentrated expression in the operatic voice. The book devotes sustained analytical attention to the voice as an object that cannot be reduced to linguistic meaning or expressive intention. In opera, the voice detaches itself from the body, producing a remainder that resists assimilation to narrative function. This detachment becomes especially pronounced in scenes of death, where singing continues at the very moment when speech, breath, and bodily agency should fail. The voice thus marks the site at which the subject survives itself, no longer as a living organism, but as a carrier of enjoyment that exceeds life. The second death emerges here not as annihilation, but as a paradoxical survival beyond survival, a persistence of vocal enjoyment after the collapse of empirical vitality.
The book’s analyses of Mozart occupy a central position in articulating how this logic operates within a framework often perceived as harmonious, balanced, and reconciliatory. Against readings that emphasize closure and Enlightenment optimism, the authors uncover a persistent undercurrent of compulsion and symbolic violence. In Le Nozze di Figaro, reconciliation appears as an achieved ideal, yet even here it depends upon a suspension of antagonism that remains fragile and provisional. The social harmony staged at the opera’s conclusion does not eliminate conflict so much as defer it, masking unresolved tensions beneath a musical surface of balance and grace.
This fragile equilibrium is progressively destabilized in Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte. Don Giovanni is not merely a libertine punished for transgression; he embodies a refusal of symbolic reconciliation itself. His death does not restore order in any straightforward sense, because the enjoyment he incarnates cannot be reintegrated into the social field. The descent into hell marks a second death in which the subject is annihilated symbolically before biological death can acquire meaning. Così fan tutte radicalizes this logic further by dissolving the stability of personal identity and fidelity. Love appears not as a moral bond but as a structural function, transferable from one subject to another without remainder. Here, death takes a less literal but no less radical form: the symbolic death of the subject as a unique bearer of desire.
Die Zauberflöte occupies a transitional position within this trajectory. Its attempt to reconcile Enlightenment rationalism with mythic and mystical elements does not resolve the tensions exposed in the earlier operas. Instead, it reconfigures them, producing a synthesis that remains unstable. Reason and myth coexist without fully integrating, and the promise of enlightenment is shadowed by ritualistic repetition and symbolic opacity. The second death persists here as a structural undercurrent, manifesting not in explicit annihilation but in the subject’s submission to a symbolic order whose foundations remain obscure.
Žižek’s engagement with Wagner intensifies and transforms these insights by situating the second death within a radically expanded musical and temporal framework. Wagnerian opera is characterized by an extension of musical time that pushes repetition toward stasis. In Tristan und Isolde, death ceases to function as a climactic event and becomes the organizing principle of the entire drama. The endless deferral of resolution, the suspension of harmonic closure, and the obsessive return of leitmotivic material produce a temporal experience in which living itself assumes the character of dying. The Liebestod does not conclude this process; it reveals it retroactively as the logic that has governed the opera from the beginning.
In this context, the death drive is seen not as a destructive impulse opposed to life, but as the force that sustains enjoyment beyond the limits of meaning. Isolde’s final song dissolves the symbolic coordinates that previously structured desire, entering a space of pure repetition in which subject and object, life and death, no longer function as oppositions. Parsifal displaces this logic into a register of spiritual redemption, yet without neutralizing its underlying tension. Redemption appears not as the restoration of order, but as a transformation of enjoyment itself, a reorientation of the drive rather than its abolition.
Throughout these analyses, the book insists on a reciprocal movement between concept and example and the book maintains a delicate balance between philosophical abstraction and textual fidelity. Operatic examples are not treated as mere illustrations of pre-existing concepts. Instead, they function as sites of theoretical production in their own right. The authors repeatedly allow operatic details to challenge and refine their conceptual apparatus. This reciprocal movement is particularly evident in the treatment of operatic compulsions. Characters return obsessively to certain motifs, actions, or relationships, even when these returns lead inexorably toward destruction. Such compulsions are not framed as psychological pathologies to be explained away. They are presented as structural features of the operatic form, revealing how enjoyment attaches itself to repetition rather than to well-being. Operatic details are not treated as illustrations of psychoanalytic theory; they actively reshape the theory brought to bear upon them. Musical gestures, vocal excesses, and dramaturgical anomalies repeatedly force conceptual revisions. Compulsion, repetition, and fixation are not explained away as psychological pathologies of fictional characters. They are presented as formal features of opera itself, revealing how enjoyment attaches itself to repetition rather than to well-being or moral resolution.
This formal logic extends beyond the stage to implicate the audience. Opera spectators return repeatedly to works whose outcomes are already known, deriving enjoyment not from surprise but from reenactment. This ritualized repetition mirrors the structure of drive identified within the operatic text. The audience participates in the same economy of anticipation, fulfillment, and loss, submitting itself to a collective encounter with death that is both pleasurable and unsettling. Opera thus emerges as a social institution that organizes enjoyment around the repeated staging of finitude.
As the book progresses, the initial distinction between first and second death becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. Rather than preserving a clear binary, the authors allow the two to intersect and contaminate one another. Instances arise in which biological death acquires symbolic force only retroactively, or in which symbolic death precedes and conditions empirical annihilation. The second death reveals itself not as a discrete phenomenon but as a structural tendency permeating operatic form to varying degrees. This indeterminacy is not treated as a theoretical failure. It is embraced as fidelity to opera’s resistance to conceptual closure.
The notion of the second death also serves as a critical tool for rethinking the audience’s relation to opera. The book insists that the operatic experience implicates the spectator in the same structures it analyzes on stage. To attend the opera is to submit oneself to a ritualized encounter with death that is both pleasurable and unsettling. The audience repeatedly returns to works whose outcomes are already known, deriving enjoyment not from surprise but from the reenactment of familiar catastrophes. This repetition mirrors the drive structure identified in the operatic text. The spectator, like the operatic character, participates in a cycle of anticipation, fulfillment, and loss that resists closure. Opera thus emerges as a social institution that organizes collective enjoyment around a shared confrontation with finitude.
The book’s compositional structure mirrors this movement toward indeterminacy. As the book progresses, earlier conceptual distinctions are gradually destabilized. Early chapters establish a relatively stable conceptual framework, drawing clear lines between narrative death and operatic death, between desire and drive, between representation and enjoyment. Subsequent sections complicate these distinctions through increasingly detailed analyses and theoretical refinements. By the time the argument approaches its later stages, the reader is confronted with a landscape in which initial coordinates have been reconfigured. Concepts no longer function as fixed points of reference but as vectors of tension, pulling the analysis in multiple directions simultaneously. This internal displacement is one of the book’s most significant achievements. It demonstrates, in practice, the impossibility of a final, totalizing theory of opera.
The separation between first and second death, initially presented as a clarifying heuristic, becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. Instances arise in which the two deaths intersect, overlap, or collapse into one another. Concepts cease to function as fixed points of reference and instead operate as vectors of tension. The text undergoes its own internal second death, sacrificing initial certainties in order to remain responsive to its object. This complication is not treated as a theoretical failure. It is embraced as evidence of opera’s resistance to neat categorization. The second death is revealed to be less a discrete phenomenon than a structural tendency that permeates operatic form to varying degrees. This shift marks a significant displacement within the book’s internal logic. What begins as a relatively determinate concept evolves into a more fluid and elusive principle, capable of accounting for a wide range of operatic effects without exhausting them. This refusal of synthesis is reinforced by the book’s ending, which reopens rather than resolves the questions it has posed. Death, enjoyment, and operatic form remain bound together in a relationship clarified but not stabilized.
The outer framing of the work reinforces this refusal of closure. Rather than concluding with a synthesis or a definitive statement, the book ends by reopening the questions it has posed. Death, enjoyment, and operatic form remain bound together in a relationship that is clarified but not resolved. The second death persists as a productive problem rather than a settled solution. This ending does not signal incompleteness in a negative sense. It affirms the authors’ commitment to a mode of philosophical inquiry that remains faithful to the complexity of its object. Opera, as the book presents it, demands a thought that is willing to undergo its own transformations, to risk its own conceptual deaths in the process of understanding.
Opera’s Second Death offers a rigorously constructed account of opera as a form uniquely capable of staging the deepest tensions of subjectivity and finitude. By remaining largely internal to its operatic material while allowing that material to transform psychoanalytic and philosophical categories, Žižek and Dolar articulate a model of thinking that is neither reductive nor eclectic. Opera emerges not as a historical relic but as a dynamic apparatus whose fascination with death is inseparable from its formal logic, and whose capacity to organize enjoyment around repeated loss continues to exert a compelling force on audiences who return, again and again, to witness the same deaths sung anew.
Simon Gros 
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