ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights how the negation of tonal closure in Arnold Schoenberg's freely atonal works calls into question the ontotheological presumption of a way of thinking that dares to totalize time. The notion that the negation of tonality's principal mainstay jeopardizes the continuity of a series of developments that mark out the course of Western art music's inexorable advance admittedly flies in the face of Schoenberg's view of his own historical importance. Schoenberg's negation of tonal music's nomic schemata immediately raises the question as to how renouncing tonal closure intensifies his music's expressive force. The anticipation of dissonances' resolution clearly figures prominently in the operation that draws a tonal configuration from a series of heterogeneous elements. Schoenberg's monodrama Erwartung is an explosive testament to the expressive forces unleashed by his renunciation of a tonal center. Erwartung's apparent reversal of the Hegelian ideal seems to amount to the radical negation of tonality's ontotheological thrust.
