MOSS seminar: Revolutionary sex in Walton's 'Troilus and Cressida'

Guest seminar by J.P.E. Harper-Scott (RHUL)

William Walton's opera Troilus and Cressida is an unexpectedly arresting intervention in the ideological field of sexuality and gender. Drawing on theories of sex, love, pornography, and communism by Jacques Lacan, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben, this paper argues that the circling of desire around the structural impossibility of a sexual connexion leads Troilus and Cressida to challenge culturally mandated scripts for normative heterosexuality in modernity. Paying particular attention to the pornographic interlude in which they consummate their love and the paradoxical deepening of their commitment to one another through Cressida's betrayal of Troilus, it suggests possibilities for conceiving a revolutionary love. Such a love, rather than acting out possibilities already culturally encoded in a particular sexuality or gender, can have the effect of creating new forms of human subjectivity.

J.P.E. Harper-Scott is a senior lecturer at RHUL. He has written widely on Wagner and post-Wagnerian operatic and symphonic music. His third book, The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism, is out in August from Cambridge University Press.