Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Abbreviations
- Prelude
- 1 Music, Mousike, Muses (and Sirens)
- 2 Music, Meaning and Materiality: Nancy’s Corps Sonore
- 3 ‘Catacoustic’ Subjects and the Injustice of Being Born: Lacoue-Labarthe’s Musical Maternal Muse
- 4 Midwives and Madams: Mus(e)ic, Mediation and Badiou’s ‘Universal’ Subject
- 5 From Parnassus to Bayreuth: Staging a Music which is Not One
- Encore: After Music
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - ‘Catacoustic’ Subjects and the Injustice of Being Born: Lacoue-Labarthe’s Musical Maternal Muse
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Abbreviations
- Prelude
- 1 Music, Mousike, Muses (and Sirens)
- 2 Music, Meaning and Materiality: Nancy’s Corps Sonore
- 3 ‘Catacoustic’ Subjects and the Injustice of Being Born: Lacoue-Labarthe’s Musical Maternal Muse
- 4 Midwives and Madams: Mus(e)ic, Mediation and Badiou’s ‘Universal’ Subject
- 5 From Parnassus to Bayreuth: Staging a Music which is Not One
- Encore: After Music
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Pas de femme, donc, si j’ai bien lu. Fors la mère bien entendu. Mais cela fait partie du système, la mère est la figure sans figure d’une figurante. Elle donne lieu à toutes les figures en se perdant au fond de la scène comme un personnage anonyme. Tout lui revient, et d’abord la vie, tout s’adresse à elle et s’y destine. Elle survit à la condition de rester au fond.
DerridaThis chapter approaches two texts by Lacoue-Labarthe, both of which focus– more or less explicitly– on the relationship between music and philosophy. The first, ‘L’Écho du sujet’, is from the well-known collection Le Sujet de la philosophie: Typographies I (1979) and is, Derrida claims, the ‘déploiement le plus impressionnant’ [‘most impressive unfolding’] of a theme that runs across Lacoue-Labarthe's work: that of ‘l’autos et de son rapport-à-soi comme rythme’ [‘the autos and its self-relation as rhythm’]. The second text, which is far less well-known– in fact, I would venture to say, almost entirely unknown– is a succinct but lucid transcript of a talk given through the ‘Petites conférences’ series at the Nouveau Théâtre de Montreuil: Le Chant des Muses: petite conférence sur la musique (2005)Aimed, as it is, at a young and non-specialist audience, the style and register are apposite to the context and are thus the absolute opposite of the rigorously academic and exceedingly technically and philosophically dense ‘L’Écho du sujet’; and yet very little, theoretically, is found in one that isn't in the other. Indeed, both focus on several clear themes: the (essential) relationship between music and philosophy; the subject's relationship to sound/sonority and, ultimately, the specifically musical; the fundamental link between music and language, as well as teasing apart the supposedly ‘musical’ aspects of language itself (prosody, diction and lexis). And, most obviously, both apparently reach the same conclusion: that the specifically musical aspects of the ‘catacoustic’ subject– the subject that is given to ‘itself’ pre-specularly through echo, rather than through reflection– is profoundly and inescapably linked to the maternal.
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- Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020