Abstract

Despite frequent valorizations of music in the west, the art has also been perceived as a threat to philosophy and theology, ostensibly on the grounds of its potential for danger to the polis (Plato and Aristotle), temptation to impiety (Augustine and Calvin), coercion (Kant), or lack of objective content (Hegel). Accompanying these doubts is a longstanding anxiety concerning music's relation with inarticulation or silence. Debates over the definition and ontology of music persist today in both analytic and continental traditions, with neither approach succeeding in forging consensus. Musical Platonism (Kivy, Norris) is today's uneasy default position in the academy. However, recent reassessments of speech acts (Miller) and of the Derridean world as phantasm (Naas) can return music to its structural constitution in différance – to an alternation between sound and silence. This redefinition of music and its parallel with language can contextualize Derrida's most extended engagement with the topic, his interview with Ornette Coleman.