Definititions (courtesy of Wikipedia)

Augenmusik: Describes graphical features of scores that when performed are unnoticeable by the listener.

Humoresque: is a genre of romantic music characterized by pieces with fanciful humor in the sense of mood rather than wit.

For me, the idea of Schumann’s, Humoresque, 1894 is really interesting. Zizek describes it as “…a song, without the vocal line…”By considering the musical notation, a third “virtual” intermediate level between the first and third levels, (which are played by the left and right hand) is created. For structural reasons it is impossible to be played, it becomes a nonvocalised internal melody. It is seen as a third line between the higher and the lower parts of the piece, between the right and the left hand. It is created as a link between the two parts.

Zizek suggests that this third line should be read as an “inner voice,” added by Schumann in the written score, to create a piece of music which becomes stripped of its main melody. Unless I misunderstand, Schumann has given form to the idea of absence. The silence exists in a representational form, in the annotated musical staff. Zizek suggests it exists only as “Augenmusik”, or “music for the eyes, in the guise of written notes.” This is a kind of paradox, it exists on paper, but the nature of silence and absence suggests something of the intangible.

The link to ideas of Really Existing Socialism can be seen in this quote: “In Really Existing Socialism, the explicit ideology of socialist democracy was sustained by a set of implicit (unspoken) obscene injunctions and prohibitions, teaching the subject how not to take some explicit norms seriously and how to implement a set of publicly unacknowledged prohibitions.”