Music, Meaning and Materiality: Nancy’s Corps Sonore

This chapter explores the role of music in Nancy’s broader sensuous philosophy, focusing largely on À l’écoute as well as his (rarely considered) writings on rock and techno, highlighting the divergent ways in which different genres are approached – Western high art music is often assumed to tell us something about music’s (timeless, universal) essence, whilst popular genres such as rock and techno are more expressly linked to particular social and historical contexts. In À l’écoute, Nancy utilises music to explore the sensuous (and non-visual) domain that philosophy has traditionally ignored or paid scant attention to in order to consider other ways in which we might ‘know’, find or make meaning in the world, and in so doing aims to destabilise binary oppositions that emerge in vision-oriented (phallogocentric) thought. The concluding analysis, however, contends that Nancy’s analysis still depends on a set of hierarchized binary oppositions, with vision and language linked to paternal law and the symbolic, and music and sound linked to the body and emotions, and an earlier pre-symbolic space (that is then mapped onto the maternal-feminine).

From Parnassus to Bayreuth: Staging a Music which is Not One

The final chapter brings together all three thinkers and demonstrates the way in which they all – albeit in different ways – inherit and deploy aspects of a Romantic and idealist conception of music. It considers their writings on Wagner in order to ascertain more clearly how their different positions play out over a shared question: to what extent is Wagner’s music fascist or anti-Semitic? Rather than seek to solve this problem, the chapter argues that their positions on this question relate to their a priori understanding of the relationship between music and philosophy, their broader political-philosophical commitments, and their characterization of what is ‘essentially’ musical. The chapter also draws on Irigaray’s work in order to show how both Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe reinstate a gendered foundationalism (specifically the musical maternal-feminine which logically and chronologically precedes the symbolic, language, and culture) that is so at odds with their broader projects; by contrast, though Badiou never identifies music ‘itself’ with the feminine, the way in which he constructs ‘truth’ nonetheless rehabilitates a certain feminine exceptionalism alongside a pervasive misogyny in his work. The concluding analytic argues for multiply intersecting planes of mediation and a non-reductive approach to both music and gender that refuses to attribute a single essence to either.

‘Catacoustic’ Subjects and the Injustice of Being Born: Lacoue-Labarthe’s Musical Maternal Muse

This chapter approaches two texts in detail, both of which explicitly focus on the relationship between music and philosophy: ‘L’Echo du sujet’ – a well-known essay from the early collection Typographies I (1979) which theorises a ‘catacoustic’ subject (rooted in a proto- or pre- subjective musico-rhythmic element) – and Le Chant des Muses (2005), transcribed from a talk aimed at teenagers given towards the end of his life. As well as critiquing the alignment of the maternal-feminine with the musical, the chapter probes at Lacoue-Labarthe’s construction of this essentially rhythmical/emotional – and constitutively nostalgic – subject and locates in this gesture his own autobiographical impulse. The chapter also develops from the thinking on tonality outlined with Nancy, to develop a critique of the assumed notion of the musical work: a static, total, bound and autonomous object which obscures its means of production and the labour required for its (re)production (regardless of whether it is actually performed, as such). Finally, in the way that Lacoue-Labarthe expressly puts this into relation to education, socialisation and environment, the chapter argues that there is an important political and ethical value to Lacoue-Labarthe’s conception of a ‘catacoustic’ subject.

Prelude

Without music life would be a mistake. Nietzsche1 Il y a d’abord la question de la musique, laquelle, étrangement, n’est jamais la question de la seule musique. Lacoue-Labarthe2 Selon une très ancienne, très profonde et très solide équivalence–peut-être indestructible –, c’est [la musique] un art féminin, et destiné aux femmes ou à la part féminine des hommes. C’est un art, en tous sens, hystérique. Et c’est pour cette raison, essentiellement, que la musique est l’hystérie. Tout au moins une certaine musique....

Music, Mousike, Muses (and Sirens)

The first chapter opens with a famous excerpt from Sartre’s La Nausée where the musical ‘object’ is positioned as resolutely independent of the material props upon which the reproduction of its sounding depends (the gramophone/record), whilst also mapping specific identities (the Jew and the Negress) and their attendant sufferings onto nothing more than its sounding. Thus Sartre, via Roquentin, highlights the way music seems to be both material and immaterial, mediated and autonomous, real and ideal, and deeply and viscerally human but also beguilingly transcendental. It develops this issues that arise from this well-known passage to sketch out some of the key issues in any thinking about music, introducing crucial tropes and associations as well as drawing on the musicological literature that has sought to deconstruct in critical and political ways what it is we mean (or often do not mean) when we think or speak about ‘music.’ Key considerations include music’s essence, definition and location, as well as its emotional and psychological impact (its effect and affective capacity more broadly), its similarities and differences with language, and the roles of composers, performers, listeners and, of course, technology, alongside music’s relationship to identity, society, culture and politics.

Encore: After Music

What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more […] The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means....

Midwives and Madams: Mus(e)ic, Mediation and Badiou’s ‘Universal’ Subject

The focus of this chapter is largely on Badiou’s delimitation of what counts as music: he insists on an a priori commitment to an understanding of music that locates its essence (or more accurately for Badiou, its ‘truth’) not in its sounding, the experience of listening or playing, or in its effects, but only in its formal procedures – a move that derives from a specific historical construction of music which makes the actual happening of music (whether live, recorded, imagined, etc.) irrelevant to philosophy. As a result, Badiou’s playlist of musical ‘truths’ runs from the architectonic innovations of Haydn and sonata form at the end of the c18th through to the post-tonal continuation of Schoenberg’s legacy: truth, musically speaking, exists in Europe between about 1780 and 1950. Consequently, this chapter argues that it is more specific than simply validating the musical products of elite Western culture; it is specifically limited to those produced under the ideology of ‘absolute music’. Finally, though Badiou never identifies music with any feminine essence, the chapter traces the subterranean misogyny embedded in his philosophy of ‘truth’, and argues that his musical – and broader – thinking remains problematic from a feminist perspective.