In conclusion, then, this book has sought to analyse and identify the way certain ideas about what music ‘is’ inhabit recent and contemporary philosophy– focusing especially on writers whose aims are guided by their own deeply critical agendas to challenge certain key assumptions of their own philosophical forebears. For Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, music tends to be figured as the Other of language (and therefore representation/ signification); for Badiou, music is accorded no special status vis-a-vis language but is one domain within the condition ‘Art’ in which (eternal, universal, generic and feminine) truths can be created. It has been important to note, also, that these considerations often come hand in hand with the invocation of gender as an organising category for philosophy. In both instances, then, the (metaphorical) musical-feminine is aligned, encore, with the beyond of the symbolic, signification, or the world as it appears (and in which we live); at the same time, ‘music’ is something to which these philosophers aspire–or which offers, in its essence, some liberatory potential beyond the constraints of the mundane.

In so doing, I am offering little– if anything–to the academic study of music but have instead highlighted some of the genealogies of the conceptions of music that animate the philosophies of Nancy, Lacoue- Labarthe and Badiou. To do this, it has been necessary to emphasise the (geographically specific) historicity of the concept of singular Art (of which instrumental, absolute music was the pinnacle); its reduction to (functionless) form as content (thus a way of conceiving music in terms of visualised ideation); its (illusory) abstraction from the mundane; and, finally, the philosophical (largely Schopenhauerian and Nietzschean) cross-pollination with a psychoanalytic conception of the subject that figures music's sonorous, rather than ideated, dimension (along with the feminine) in terms of the semiotic, pre-linguistic or pre-symbolic.