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
4 - Midwives and Madams: Mus(e)ic, Mediation and Badiou’s ‘Universal’ Subject
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
[L]e cinéma c’est d’abord l’invention d’une technique
Badiou[W]e are used to associating ‘technology’ largely with twentieth-century music: Theremins and synthesizers, and the tools of electronic music. But oboes and violins are also technologies. Acknowledging this simple fact might make us question the values and ideas that we have come to attach to certain technologies. Even more importantly, though, the history of the orchestra shows the indivisibility between technology and aesthetics.
Emily DolanThe question of technology, of modernity, of techne is in my opinion not a very important question. There are always technical questions, but there is no capital newness in the question of technology. There is no direct ethical question of the relation between ethics and technology. Ethical questions, for me, are questions in the field of truth.
BadiouFollowing the neo-Heideggerian infused poetics of many leftist French philosophers (Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe included), a distinctly different (counter-)movement can be traced in the work of Alain Badiou. Whereas Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe remain committed to the essentially Nietzschean-Heideggerian (and latterly Derridean) overthrow of Platonic metaphysics, Badiou, though arguably a post- (rather than anti-) Heideggerian, purposefully and clearly provocatively identifies himself not only as a neo-Platonist, but as the twenty-first-century's heir to Plato. Indeed, amidst his extensive and ceaselessly proliferating œuvre we find his acclaimed ‘hyper-translation’ of La République de Platon, a text that seems to confirm, as François Laruelle argues, the suspicion that Badiou sees himself (or asks us to read him) in relation to Plato the way that Lacan saw himself in relation to Freud: as a rereading or making available of its fundamental truth. As a result, though Badiou is quite evidently a soixante-huitard through and through– and indubitably the trace of his enduring fidelity to those events is written into his philosophy in a much more explicit way than with Nancy or Lacoue-Labarthe– we find a commitment in Badiou to philosophical principles that seem to run against the grain of much continental thought in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: to truth, universality, science (largely as mathematics), ‘great’ art, and to a rigorous, rational and organised philosophical system.
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- Information
- Music, Philosophy and Gender in Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Badiou , pp. 126 - 182Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020