Music, Philosophy and Gender in Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Badiou

Abstract

This book looks at the way music is used, characterised and understood in the work of Nancy, Labarthe and Badiou. Despite the differences in their philosophical-theoretical positions, they all invoke music – both directly and indirectly – to negotiate their relationship to ontology, politics, ethics and aesthetics. The book situates these texts in a longer genealogy of musico-philosophical interactions and also brings them into dialogue with recent musicological approaches, thus showing how an inherited idea of what music ‘is’ is often assumed rather than critically re-evaluated. It argues that though music is instrumentalized by progressive thinkers as a way of shifting theoretical/philosophical paradigms, it nonetheless does so in a way that has a strong sense of continuity with previous thinking on music. Secondly, the book highlights the way in which music in its metaphysical-ontological guise is often conceived as synonymous with Western high art classical music (which is itself constructed as absolute and transcendent, and ontologically independent of its means of (re)production or context) whilst non-literate, popular, folk and world musics – on the occasions that they are addressed and not simply ignored or denigrated – are notably considered almost exclusively in terms of their social-cultural or technological contexts. Finally, the book demonstrates that much of this takes place through a simultaneous instrumentalization of gender as an organisational category for philosophy, and one which all too often has the consequence of sending women – along with music – to the beyond of pre-, inter-, or post-signification.