Abstract

In “Ars Nova,” a short essay written in 1963, Blanchot defends the “new music” of Arnold Schönberg and his school against its critics and hails it as an exemplary contestation of culture conceived as an attempt to conceal the groundlessness of human existence. The fragmentary and dissonant nature of the “new music” has the power to unmask culture’s pretence of order, meaning and harmony. It embodies the potential of modernist art to unsettle all established conventions standing in the way of an authentic, radical interrogation. Blanchot develops his argument by way of a discussion of Adorno’s theory of modernist music. The affinities and divergences revealed in Blanchot’s reading of Adorno’s work shed light on their respective understanding of the disruption enacted by the “new music.” A close analysis of Blanchot’s essay discloses the role of this confrontation with Adorno’s dialectical theory and points to the political and poetic ramifications of a complex and hitherto largely neglected category in Blanchot’s thinking about art: the diabolical.