Lecture by Michael Steinberg

On November 15 th, Michael Steinberg (Brown University) delivered a talk entitled, “The Uses of Disenchantment: Secularity in History and Theory,” co-sponsored by the Institute for German Cultural Studies and the Society for the Humanities. He opened with a discussion of a scene in Verdi’s Falstaff, an opera based on Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor. Following Harold Bloom, who once identified the figure of Falstaff as an embodiment of “immanent secularity,” Steinberg argued that this opera can be read as a representation of musical modernity in that it showcases instability, the absence of a “home” key, and syncopation, all of which are characteristics of what Steinberg identified as the “secular.” Secularity, however, resists crude periodization, and must be understood instead in terms of commonalities that underscore all modern thought: the notion of emancipation, the “dialectic of distance,” repetition with difference (Freud), critique, and a turn to materiality, all in one. In this sense, Verdi’s opera is both a metaphor and a literal symptom of this very condition.

Steinberg then moved toward a brief discussion of the new wave of “post-secularism.” His most comedic moment was perhaps when he read the blurb on the back of a book that praised the book as if it were holy scripture. This, Steinberg argued, seemed more indicative of a change in the Zeitgeist than the content of the book itself. One student asked how he would situate Verdi’s opera within in an Italian context, to which Steinberg replied that it fits very well into Italian notions of modernity, especially if one understands this as the mixing in the old with the new. Steinberg concluded his talk with the suggestion that secularity may also be understood as the ability to embrace adulthood, citing certain political figures as prime examples of the opposite of this phenomenon. (Ari Linden)