ABSTRACT
This chapter engages Lacan’s concepts of desire and fantasy, partially refracted through Slavoj Žižek’s writings, with James Hepokoski’s and Warren Darcy’s Sonata Theory as it relates to Schubert’s instrumental music, in particular, his last String Quartet in G major, D. 887. By charting the events in the work against Lacan’s graph of desire, the author argues that Schubert can be shown to be the supporter of an ideological system of which he has hitherto been regarded as a principal critic.
