“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.”

–Edvard Munch

Only in a world with a concept of “soul” can soullessness be predicated. As “soulless” is the antonym of “soulful”, it indicates a lack in the place of a plenitude, the emptying-out of a vessel made to be filled. A creature entirely without soul would not have cause to speak of a gap or void within itself: it could contain no such emptiness. A soulless elegy seems like a contradiction in terms: what is there to elegize about a soulless being, or how could one soulless being elegize another?

Soulfulness in music means, amongst other things, emotional expressiveness: passionate involvement, the ability to be moved and to move. To have soul, to be soulful, are properties of warm, vital, animated beings. The expressionism of Munch’s “The Scream”, or Sch?nberg’s Erwartung, does not express this vital warmth; indeed, it hardly seems to refer to any recognisable emotion, but rather to a state beyond emotion in which the very ability to feel is radically affected, either by paralysis or by derangement. Soul music expresses a state of being, a sublime intensity of emotion; expressionism expresses a condition of being in which the self is inescapably immured, frozen in an expression of horror.

Only in racist fantasy is soul music purely voluptuous, an expression of sensuality for its own sake: soul is disciplined as well as sublime, prophetic as well as hedonistic. Soulfulness is the will to live, and live well: an insurgent vitalism, which resists death and for which this resistance is, in Alice Walker’s words, “the secret of joy”. What expressionism seeks to do is isolate this resistance, to show it drained of strength, or stretched to breaking point, and faced with the inevitability of its own total defeat, for which the ultimate contemporary figure is the anticipated heat death of the universe. Malicious envy is certainly a possible motive for this: the despair of the privileged may be a kind of impotent attempted psychic violence against the intolerable, irrepressible vitality of others whom they despise. It is also possible, however, to see in the extremities depicted by expressionism an attempt at the conceptual purification of resistance.

Try to imagine the music of Joy Division as “soul” music; by this I mean not only imagining Aretha Franklin covering “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, although one can see how that might work, but also imagining Joy Division themselves, icily technocratic Martin Hannett production and all, as already immanently soulful, as soul musicians making soul music. This is only possible on condition that one hears Ian Curtis’s “heart and soul / one will burn” as indicating the crux of a necessary decision, the decision to let the heart be broken and burned in order that the soul may rise from its ashes. You can lose your heart - and you will, over and over again - but the soul is immortal, in the strict sense that its existence is ratified by the decision to risk and lose oneself, a decision that no circumstance can compel and no mortal rationale justify.