This book studies the working efficacy of Leonard Cohen's song Hallelujah in the context of today's network culture. Especially as recorded on YouTube, k.d. lang's interpretation(s) of Cohen's Hallelujah embody, acoustically and visually/viscerally, what Nietzsche named the 'spirit of music'. Today, the working of music is magnified and transformed by recording dynamics and mediated via Facebook exchanges, blog postings and video sites. Given the sexual/religious core of Cohen's Hallelujah, this study poses a phenomenological reading of the objectification of both men and women, raising the question of desire, including gender issues and both homosexual and heterosexual desire.

Babette Babich is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University in New York City. She is author, among other books, of La fin de la pensée? Philosophie analytique contre philosophie continentale (2012) and Words in Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche and Heidegger (2006). Editor of eight book collections, she is also executive editor of New Nietzsche Studies.

Contents: Prelude: the Hallelujah effect on the internet; The Hallelujah effect, Cohen's secret song and the music industry; Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah and other Hallelujahs: from Handel's Hallelujah Chorus to the Hallel Psalms; On male desire and music: misogyny, love, and the beauty of men; 'Covering' Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah: music makes the song from John Cale to k.d. lang; 'You don't really care for music, do ya?'; Performance practice and the Hallelujah effect; Interlude: Adorno's phenomenology: radio physiognomy and music; Interlude: Mousiké techné; The spirit of music in The Birth of Tragedy: Nietzsche's phenomenological investigations of music and word; Nietzsche and Beethoven: on the 'becoming-human of dissonance'; Bibliography; Index.