“White-heating the Real” – On Music’s Force towards Impossible Nudeness

Abstract

The relationship between psychoanalysis and music has never been a very close one and there might be a reason for that. While psychoanalysis primarily deals with language, it can be argued that psychoanalysis can think music best if music is thought as structured like a language, like a text, as well. In this paper, I follow a different line of thought by reconstructing and analysing an argument Alain Didier Weill brought up in his intervention at Lacan’s Seminar XXIV in 1976, and by then bringing together Didier Weill’s claim that in music “time ceases,” with Deleuze’s reading of Kantian subjectivity. I argue that music in relationship to its other – the listener – is neither language nor non-language, but rather a force that at the same time constitutes and abolishes the border between language and non-language and can therefore be grasped as a force towards an impossible nudeness.