This paper presents the results of a genetic study of Antagonisme, a chamber work composed by Xavier Darasse on a text by the philosopher Alain Badiou for the 1965 concours de composition at the Conservatoire de Paris. Darasse and Badiou began work on Antagonisme in the autumn of 1964, making it an important early work in the output of both figures. Antagonisme is Darasse’s first composition in a contemporary idiom, while its première coincided with the completion of Badiou’s first theoretical article, “L’autonomie du processus esthétique.” The sketches, manuscripts, and letters relating to the work held at the Médiathèque Hector Berlioz present the researcher with an unparalleled opportunity to consider the interaction of competing philosophical and musical priorities during a collaborative creative process.

The paper begins by presenting the philosophical and musical stakes of the composition. The former is established through a reading of Badiou’s text and letters within the context of debates around Marxist and structuralist aesthetics at the École Normale Supérieure, in particular among the group of students gathered around Louis Althusser. The latter is established through an analysis of the score and sketches that reveals Darasse’s remarkable experiments with his analysis teacher Olivier Messiaen’s technique of interversion. In his first letter to Darasse, Badiou suggests that Darasse’s music ought to contradict the narrator’s conception of music while “exceeding it each time” [en la dépassant à chaque fois]. Darasse contradicts the narrator’s image of music by obscuring and revealing the work’s two distinct tone rows through rhythm and texture, but how does he exceed it and why does it matter that it is refuted within musical rather than linguistic discourse?

The answer may be found in “L’autonomie du processus esthétique,” which is a riposte to the Marxist association of art and ideology. The article was written in the context of a seminar delivered at the ENS on Althusser’s invitation. Badiou asserts the autonomy of modes of aesthetic production, musical apparatuses such as the tonal system that are dissolved and reinvented through a series of works. When Badiou writes to Darasse that he wants the music to exceed the text, he is urging Darasse to engage in his own musical dialectic that— while proving the ideology of the narrator wrong—validates his own theory of music. Darasse appears to conform to Badiou’s “game plan” through the use of original permutational techniques derived from Messiaen’s works. Darasse explores the reciprocity between conventional dodecaphonic transformations and Messiaen’s interversions at every formal level of the work, from its large-scale form down to its precompositional materials. The lessons learnt through this analysis of Antagonisme have implications for the analysis of Messiaen’s own works.

Given the absence of any testimony from Darasse as to his intentions when composing the work, the study seems to commit an intentional fallacy that the rest of the paper seeks to address. To what extent is authorial intention important when analysing Darasse’s use of interversion in Antagonisme? The evidence does not exist to assert that Darasse’s use of interversion was an intentional response to Badiou’s text, much less a response to “L’autonomie du processus esthétique”. However, the paper argues that there is value in considering how Darasse’s music reflects upon Badiou’s text independently of his intentions. The paper does not argue that any interpretation of the work is equally valid, but that music and philosophy can be evaluated here as independent and objective bodies of thought.

The rationale behind this argument draws, perhaps controversially, on two notions from divergent philosophical fields. The notion of “situation,” drawn from Badiou’s later work, provides a model for examining Darasse’s use of competing compositional techniques as a strictly musical truth procedure. Karl Popper’s “problem situation” considers how Darasse balances the conflicting musical and theoretical priorities presented to him by Badiou and by the academic context of the work’s production. “Divergent” is the key term here, as Popper’s adoption in the English-speaking world and his absence from the French literature— occurring as Antagonisme was being composed—is symptomatic of the divergence of analytic and continental philosophy around the use of mathematics and logic. Indeed, Popper was hailed for purging analytic philosophy of Marxism and psychoanalysis precisely when Badiou was emerging as the philosophical standard-bearer of French Maoism. However, the thinkers’ common interest in music and logic may be read in their agreement on one point: The partially-autonomous existence of objective contents of thought, in particular of musical thought. Badiou will speak of “truths” and Popper will speak of “world three objects,” but they both assert that musical thought, once it is produced, has unexpected consequences for its own structure and the material world. This paper argues that philosophy partially defines Darasse’s problem situation when composing Antagonisme, while Darasse also grapples with the narrower musical situation of the Conservatoire de Paris in the mid-1960s.

This paper does not suggest that Popper and Badiou may be reduced to one another, far from it. In Popper’s perspective, influences from any number of fields may determine a compositional outcome, but musical materials themselves are incapable of radical change. But where Badiou would argue that a situation always contains the possibility of the emergence of the new, he is still committed to a hermetic view of the musical situation that forecloses any interruption from outside the musical materials—philosophical interruption included. This study of Antagonisme is presented as an example of how musicology may function as a mediator of these two ontologies of music, at once more immanent than Popper’s problem situation and more contextual than Badiou’s musical situation.