RESONANCE/DISSONANCE: SONOROUS, RHYTHMIC AND UNIVERSAL SUBJECTS

This final chapter highlights more clearly both the irresolvable differences as well as the points of contact or resonance between the works of the three philosophers previously considered: Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe and Badiou. Despite the unequivocal dissonance between the post-metaphysical destabilisation of the possibility of universal philosophical truths in the Nancy-Lacoue-Labarthian approach and the neo-Platonism of Badiou, this chapter also aims to show, even more forcefully than in the previous chapters, the way in which all three– albeit in different ways– inherit and deploy aspects of a Romantic and idealist conception of music in their work; it also foregrounds the way in which this often relates to an essentially psychoanalytic model of the subject. Consequently, it demands that closer attention be paid to the way in which music is instrumentalised as a metaphor for progressive thinkers in a manner that has a tendency to reinforce, rather than challenge, both inherited conceptions of what music is and also certain hierarchical binaries– most especially, though by no means only, in regards to the continued enlisting of gender as an organisational category for philosophy.

However, this chapter also aims to emphasise what is most useful in each of these thinkers’ work to the philosophy of music, namely: Nancy's insistence on sensuous and aesthetic experience as meaningful in and of itself, rather than possessing a meaning that needs to be located elsewhere; Lacoue-Labarthe's (and sometimes Nancy’s) implicit but underdeveloped attention to music as techne, both as a technology in its normative sense, but also as a technique of the self– as a mode of training, forming, conditioning or shaping; and, finally, Badiou's conception of the évenément, and the way in which the event actively impels a subject (to a kind of labour/commitment that perpetuates the ‘truth’ of the event).