I am well aware of the challenge raised by the organisers of this volume, which is devoted to the relationship that an author who has never or almost never taken music for an object entertained with this art and the thought regarding it. Responding to this challenge supposes two operations more or less knotted together: showing by example that its problematic finds in this domain a privileged application, and analysing the reasons why the author has not proceeded on his own behalf in this application. The contributions in this volume have generously responded to the first requirement and I thank the authors wholeheartedly. It is necessary that I attempt to respond to the second.

How is it that I have not spoken, or have spoken so little, about music? It is necessary first of all – and many contributions have done this – to sensibly relativise this diagnostic. It assumes that one looks for music where it should normally be: in works that clearly announce that they are occupied with art or aesthetics. It does not figure in Aisthesis or barely so – only in the detour of Appia and his mise en scènefor the Ring, which itself remained on paper. But the other great canonical art, painting, only appears by way of the detour of Hegel's gaze on two paintings by Murillo for which I have no particular affection. Nor do I have any for the Belvedere Torso with which the book starts and which is present more or less explicitly in a number of these scenes. My personal tastes have no bearing on the choice of these episodes. Katharina Clausius playfully suggests an explanation of the absence of music in Aisthesis as due to an insensitivity or a secret hatred that I have inherited from Fénelon via Jacotot. And she reminds us that the latter’s book Musiquedoes not speak about music at all. But in fact, I have not frequented Fénelon's texts apart from what was strictly necessary to understand Jacotot's usage. This is to say that he hardly had the capacity to communicate these sentiments on music to me – sentiments all the more complex because the same Mentor who condemns, in keeping with the Platonic tradition, softening music, takes, in another episode, the Orphic lyre to charm the Phoenician sailors by singing of the misfortune of Narcissus or the death of Adonis.