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Prologue: Music and language

The Prologue explores the tension between language and music and the place that musicology might occupy as a way of thinking through that tension. Rather than collapsing this difference into the assumption that language deals adequately with music or that, conversely, music remains ineffable to language, the relationship is explored as one of non-identity that is mutually constitutive – in other words, that we understand both music and language better through an exploration of their non-identical proximity. Music is taken here to mount a challenge to philosophy – specifically, that music embodies a kind of thinking through particularity rather than thinking through the abstraction of the concept. It sets out the rationale for a musical focus on Debussy and later French composers, and a parallel exploration of French writers from Mallarmé and Bergson to Derrida and Nancy.