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Beyond Lacoue-Labarthe's Alma mater: Mus(e)ic, Myth, and Modernity
- L'Esprit Créateur
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 57, Number 4, Winter 2017
- pp. 174-188
- 10.1353/esp.2017.0047
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
Addressing the role of music in Lacoue-Labarthe’s thinking, this article identifies a tension between his commitment to a nostalgic narrative that insists on the maternal/uterine origins of music’s emotional essence and his critique of the way that music, in its distinctly modern construction, is figured in relation to a nostalgic attempt to recoup the emotive power attributed to the mythological ancient model it assumes as its (illusory/absent) origin. Though this article highlights a problematic repetition of the mythologizing of music’s maternal origins, by drawing on Lacoue-Labarthe’s own critical understanding of musical modernity it also poses the possibility of moving beyond characterizing music and the maternal-feminine as timeless givens that precede our categories of analysis.