Schubertov mise-en-abîme

In honor of the thirtieth anniversary of Joan Copjec’s important and influential text, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, this essay explores how the psychoanalytic conceptualization of desire operates musically as much as linguistically. If the unconscious is structured like a language, then music is structured like a desire for a language to be already spoken for. Franz Schubert’s evocative lieder literally speak about music’s capacity to capture and tarry with desire as a force always to be reckoned with.