Deconstruction

Abstract

This essay explores the complex, yet intimate relation between music and philosophy, arguing that this opposition has always already gone into deconstruction. If the tradition of Western philosophy from Plato to contemporary Continental thought has founded itself through the exclusion of music as its other, this essay explores how philosophy might let music be in its singularity without appropriating it and reducing it to the order of the concept. It focuses in particular on the approaches to music and listening found in the thought of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Giorgio Agamben, locating music at the thresholds between sound and sense and between sensation and signification.