"Vladimir Jankélévitch's Philosophy of Music" Jams.2012.65.1.215

Vladimir Janklvitch's Philosophy of Music Author(s): Michael Gallope, Brian Kane, Steven Rings, James Hepokoski, Judy Lochhead,
Michael J. Puri and James R. Currie Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 215256 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jams.2012.65.1.215 . Accessed: 27/01/2013 21:26
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Colloquy Vladimir Janklvitchs Philosophy of Music

MICHAEL GALLOPE and BRIAN KANE, Convenors
Introduction
BRIAN KANE
Vladimir Janklvitch (19031985) is a rare gure in the history of modern philosophy: much like Theodor W. Adorno, he wrote extensively in the elds of both philosophy and music. But unlike Adorno, who serves as an ongoing interlocutor for musicologists, scholars in our eld have generally neglected Janklvitchs work.1 There are, perhaps, explanations for such neglect; in comparison to the tumultuous disciplinary changes that emerged from the reception of French post-structuralism (bearing no small trace on musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory), Janklvitchs writings are readily overshadowed. He holds little or no place in current histories of French philosophy written in the wake of May 1968none at all in Vincent Descombess Modern French Philosophy, which narrates how the new disciples of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud brought
1. Vladimir Janklvitch, born of Russian Jewish parents, spent most of his academic life in France, writing books about moral philosophy and musical monographs from a perspective that might be generally characterized as Bergsonian. In the German attack on France in 1940, he was wounded in an effort to repel the advance. Although Janklvitch had been teaching at the University of Lille since 1938, during the period of the German occupation he was unable to teach because of his Jewish background. However, he did nd employment as a director of music programs at Radio Toulouse, a job which he found enjoyable, while lecturing and writing on the side. Like Adorno, who was also born in 1903, Janklvitch was profoundly shaped by the experience of World War II and struggled to nd an appropriate response to the Holocaust. The impact of the war on Janklvitchs thought was great; although his dissertation was on Schelling, the work after World War II reveals little overt reference to German philosophy or music. In 1951, he became the chair in Moral Philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he was known as an engaging and sympathetic teacher, much beloved by his students. Despite his prolic body of work, Janklvitchs idiosyncratic thought always remained at a distance from the mainstream of French philosophy. Only in the 1990s, amidst the renewed interest in ethics in the wake of deconstruction, did Janklvitchs work nd an Anglophone revival. For a comprehensive biographical sketch, see Andrew Kelleys introduction to his English translation of Janklvitch, Forgiveness, viixiii.
Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 65, Number 1, pp. 215256 ISSN 0003-0139, electronic ISSN 1547-3848. 2012 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jams.2012.66.1.215.
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Journal of the American Musicological Society
about their own Gtterdmmerung on Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger.2 In the generational shift from the phenomenology and existentialism of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty to the post-humanism of Derrida and Foucault, there has been little place for the grandfatherly bergsonisme (sacrebleu! ) of Janklvitch.3 If Janklvitch is now out of the shadows it is not because he has shifted position, but because positions have shifted around him. His attachment to Bergson appears less idiosyncratic in the wake of Gilles Deleuze. His ethics of alterity have found sympathetic echoes in the work of Emmanuel Lvinas. His interest in the ineffable has become enticing once beauty, presence, and sensation were taken off academic quarantine. His meditations on nitude have a clear counterpart in Heideggerian ontology. And his post-secular spirituality has become la mode since Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry steered French phenomenology in a theological direction.4 For these reasons, it is not surprising that Janklvitch has returned as an emerging gure in English-language philosophy, ethics, religious studies, and social thought. In 1996, philosopher Arnold Davidson introduced a short dossier on Janklvitch in Critical Inquiry, which included translations of two essays, on Bergson and forgiveness respectively.5 Soon after, Janklvitchs moral thought came to the attention of Anglophone readers via the late work of Jacques Derrida; in 2001, two of Derridas essays on Janklvitch, On Forgiveness and To Forgive: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptible appeared in translation. In turn, in 2005, the University of Chicago Press published a translation of Janklvitchs 1967 work, Le Pardon.6 Within music scholarship, Carolyn Abbate brought Janklvitch forcefully to our attention with her 2003 translation of Music and the Ineffable and its widely read companion piece, MusicDrastic or Gnostic?7 Abbate has been a passionate advocate for Janklvitchs thought for over a decade.8 In
2. Trans. Scott-Fox and Harding from Descombess Le mme et lautre. 3. When assessing the landscape of French philosophy before May 1968, the terrain is quite different. Colin Smith, writing in 1964, dedicates a thoughtful and detailed chapter of his Contemporary French Philosophy to Janklvitch, noting him as a signicant gure in moral philosophy, 181201. 4. See Deleuze, Bergsonism; idem, Difference and Repetition; and Deleuze with Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. See also Lvinas, Otherwise Than Being ; Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just ; Gumbrecht, Production of Presence ; Deleuze, Frances Bacon; Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing ; Heidegger, Being and Time; and idem, On the Origin of the Work of Art. On French phenomenology under the theological turn see Marion, Being Given; and Henry, Material Phenomenology. 5. The dossier, entitled Philosophy of Vladimir Janklvitch, included Davidson, Introductory Remarks, 54548; Janklvitch, Do Not Listen to What They Say, Look at What They Do, 54951; and idem, Should We Pardon Them?, 55272. 6. See Derrida, On Forgiveness; and idem, To Forgive. 7. See Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable; and Abbate, MusicDrastic or Gnostic? Before Abbates translation, the only musical writings of Janklvitch available in English were his Ravel and his introduction to Jarocinski, Debussy: Impressionism and Symbolism. 8. Even before the translating La musique et lineffable, Abbate references his work in the nal two essays of her In Search of Opera: Debussys Phantom Sounds and Outside the Tomb, 14584 and 185246.
Colloquy: Vladimir Janklvichs Philosophy of Music
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her deft hands Janklvitch speaks to the questions we confront in our daily labor with musical phenomenaquestions like: how do we speak of music, how do we address musics ephemerality as performance, and how do we negotiate the multifaceted nature of musics affective and cognitive potential? While the continuing debates over Abbates Critical Inquiry article are a tribute to the force of her thinking, such intense xation on the drastic and the gnostic has perhaps winnowed our concern for breadth of Janklvitchs thoughtas if a writer of so many volumes of music and philosophy could be summarized in one dichotomy.9 We have come to know Janklvitch, but do we know him well enough? It may be time to start reading Janklvitchs uvre more widely, and more patiently, rather than shoo it away with the platitude that it is a contradiction for anyone to write books about the ineffable.10 Instead, we might begin to inquire: How is music situated within his metaphysical commitments? What place does morality occupy in his musical and philosophical thought? How might his philosophy link politics and music? How are his views on the ineffable bound to his bergsonisme? Is his distaste for Germanic romanticism supported by his philosophy? How does his privileging of specic genres of French music shape his wider claims about music? Finally, what particular form of the ineffable is asserted, and what are its consequences? We may not know Janklvitch well enoughbut, as this colloquy demonstrates, that situation is changing.11 In editing it, Michael Gallope and I asked the participants to write about any aspect of Janklvitchs work they desired. We did not constrain them to discuss Music and the Ineffable but to use the format as an opportunity to shed light on various aspects of his thought: its orientations, its themes, its contexts, its commitments, its inuences, its historical impact, and its relevance today. The liberality with which we encouraged our participants to approach Janklvitchs work was intentional; while Music and the Ineffable will likely be the text that introduces a new generation of music scholars to Janklvitchs thought, many of his claims become stronger and more nuanced when positioned within the context of his ethical and ontological thought. Readers will note sustained attention here to the way his commitments link up with the privilege he accords to music and his attentive prolongation and inection of its perpetual philosophical problemsthe beautiful and the sublime, the role of reason and intuition, the relationship of
9. See Berger, Musicology According to Don Giovanni; Puri, Review of Programming the Absolute by Hoeckner; and Ayrey, Janklvitch the Obscure(d). 10. Thus spake Roger Scruton: I am currently reading a mercifully short book by Vladimir Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, in which the argument is stated on the rst pagenamely, that since music works through melodies, rhythms and harmonies and not through concepts, it contains no messages that can be translated into words. There follows 50,000 words devoted to the messages of music. . . . See Scruton, Efng the Ineffable. 11. This colloquy rst began as a special session sponsored by the AMS Music and Philosophy Study Group entitled Vladimir Janklvitchs Philosophy of Music, held on 6 November 2010 at the joint AMS/SMT 2010 conference in Indianapolis.
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music and language, affect, imitation, musical meaning and form, technique, representation, and so forth. We did have one requirement, however, that the pieces be written as short, directed interventions to spur debate and exchange. We begin with Steven Rings, who challenges the drastic/gnostic binary by arguing that Janklvitchs attentive style of music criticism is strongly deictic; for him, languages ability to bring musical aspects into earshot paradoxically challenges Janklvitchs denigration of it. James Hepokoski, in turn, critically situates Janklvitch within the tradition of modernist anti-rationalism and postmodern theology. And in a similarly critical vein, Judy Lochhead demonstrates how Janklvitch combines his bergsonisme with a prolongation of the nineteenth century aesthetics of the sublime; a view that forces a gap between language and sensation, while supporting a questionable claim to musical autonomy. By contrast, Michael Gallope urges caution over critique; he situates Janklvitchs philosophy of music within his broader metaphysics to develop a structural aporia that animates his thinking, namely, that absolute reality the deep metaphysical reality of time, life and musical becomingcannot be fully presented as such. Michael J. Puri offers a nuanced analysis of Janklvitchs conicted views on decadence by reading his 1950 essay La dcadence alongside his writings on Debussy and Ravel. Finally, James R. Currie scrutinizes the ethical argument of Music and the Ineffable to expose the commanding, violent, and even dogmatic theology belied by Janklvitchs pious afrmation of modesty and restraint. Although each contributor explores a different aspect of Janklvitchs work, taken as a whole, the individual pieces cohere into a complex portrait of his thought. With as many points of correspondence as points of contention, we hope you nd this portrait engaging, and worth a repeated look.
Talking and Listening with Janklvitch

STEVEN RINGS
No, music was not invented to be talked about.12 The statement does not surprise in a book called Music and the Ineffable. Yet a mere seven pages earlier we read:
There will be things to be said (or sung) about the ineffable until the end of time. Who can possibly say, Now, everything is said? No. No one, ever, will be done with this charm, which interminable words and innumerable musics will not exhaust, where there is so much to do, to contemplate, to sayso much to say, and in short, and again and again, of which there is everything to say. Among the promises made by ineffability is hope of a vast future that has been given to us.13
12. Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Abbate, 79. I would like to thank Brian Kane and Michael Gallope for their helpful and stimulating comments on an earlier draft of this essay. 13. Ibid., 72.
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On its face this seems not merely a contradiction, but a Jekyll-and-Hyde reversal, shuttling us between the two most extreme positions available: no talk about music on the one hand, innite talk on the other. But the paradox is only apparent, for, according to Janklvitch, it is musics very ineffability that underwrites endless talk: all talk about music is innitely equivocal and is thus in principle unlimited.14 If no single discourse can exhaust music, then a vast plurality of discourses can proliferate in musics presence, without threat of closure. In contrast to the unsayable (lindicible), which yields only muteness, Janklvitchs ineffable unleashes a state of verve: as we are pulled asymptotically closer to the ineffable, language is released in ever-greater quantities.15 This fact is amply in evidence in Janklvitchs own writings: the man who said that music is not for talking was seemingly incapable of keeping quiet on the subject. In short, to say that music was not invented to be talked about, is not to say do not talk about music; the mood of the statement is declarative, not imperative. In this account, the musiclanguage relationship is a one-way affair: music elicits talk, but talk gives nothing back to music in return. There are hints, however, that Janklvitch did not always subscribe to this one-way logic. Consider, for example, the following statement from a discussion of Faurs Thme et Variations, Op. 73: The remarkable analysis of Mme DommelDiny makes us feel [nous fait sentir] the absolute calm that reigns in these whispers; the sovereign tonality always reappears through these feints.16 Janklvitch is speaking here about the ninth variation, a quiet movement animated by modulatory swerves that, in typical Fauran fashion, always return to the tonic at the last instant. He cites an extensive (and quite technical) analytical monograph by Amy Dommel-Diny, which devotes some thirty-three pages to the Thme et Variations.17 Note the locution nous fait sentir : Dommel-Dinys analysis does not only report on a musical fact. It also makes us feel the absolute calm in the piece by sensitizing us to the Escherlike kinetics of Faurs harmony (in which we at once traverse considerable harmonic ground and do not move at all). If Dommel-Dinys words can make us feel this effect, they presumably perform some deictic function for the reader, directing, contextualizing, and focusing our aural attention.
14. Ibid. Janklvitch in essence asserts a Bergsonian difference in kind between music and language, in which the former resists any capture by the latter due to their fundamental ontological differences. Yet, as Michael Gallope notes in his contribution to this colloquy, Janklvitchs philosophy seems to suggest that we can maintain a delity to the ineffable in our discursive behavior. 15. Ibid. On being pulled asymptotically closer to the ineffable, see Janklvitchs discussion of the magnetic attraction exerted by the je-ne-sais-quoi in his Le je-ne-sais-quoi et le presquerien, vol. 1, La manire et loccasion, 1112 and 6971; and idem, Lodysse de la conscience dans la dernire philosophie de Schelling, 31415. 16. Janklvitch, Faur et linexprimable, 241; my translation. 17. Dommel-Diny, Gabriel Faur, 1345.
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To be sure, Janklvitch never discusses languages deictic potentialat least not in so many words. But in practice, his language about music has a strongly attention-directing (or pointing) character. Consider, for example, the words he weaves around the many musical examples in his book on Faur. He often begins with specic invitations to attend closely to some sonic effect, typically with the verb coutons:18
1. coutons ici le frlement des altrations qui se fuient: (Let us listen here to rustling of the evanescent alterations:) 2. coutons les harmonies ngligentesseptimes et neuvimesqui terminent, sans ralentis et sans pdale, le mystrieux nocturne: comment resterait-on sourd leurs basses dlies, leur spleen dlicieux, leur ne et prcise lgance? (Let us listen to the negligent harmoniessevenths and ninthswhich end, without slowing and without pedal, the mysterious nocturne: how could one remain deaf to their disjunct basses, to their delicious melancholy, to their ne and precise elegance?) 3. coutons ces cadences hiratiques, avec leur pdale de dominante, leur regard x sur la tonique: ne lit-on pas sur leur visage ce hiroglyphe de lau del quune main anonyme, la n du Jardin clos, avait dj inscrit dans la dune? (Let us listen to these hieratic cadences, with their dominant pedals, their gaze xed on the tonic: doesnt one read on their faces that hieroglyph of the beyond that an anonymous hand, at the end of the Jardin clos, had already written in the dune?)
Janklvitchs words in these and countless other passages stage an encounter with specic musical moments, preparing the readers ears for precise sonic effects, and establishing a particular receptive sensibility through poetic language. The altered pitches rustle; the negligent harmonies project a ne and precise elegance; the hieratic cadences gaze xedly at the tonic. This combination of pointing and highly evocative gural language does not merely impart some bit of propositional knowledge; rather, it constitutes a linguistic performance that, among other things, directs the readers ears toward the music in question and urges that it be experienced in certain ways. Janklvitchs writing can have this effect even when he does not use explicitly deictic language. Consider, for instance, his discussion of the opening of Faurs Thirteenth Nocturne for piano, Op. 119, the score of which is shown in Example 1:
The Nocturne in B Minor (1922) . . . is the austere work of old age. . . . First, a melody, modestly draped over the degrees of the middle register, gropes amid insidious rustling in the arid search for a je-ne-sais-quoi. Is it the fear of sickness
18. Janklvitch, Faur et linexprimable ; all translations mine. Quote (1): p. 107, immediately before a notated example of mm. 3234 from Chanson (Shylock, Op. 57). Quote (2): p. 219, immediately before a notated example of mm. 5052 from Jardin nocturne (Mirages, Op. 113). Quote (3): p. 225, within a discussion of Diane, Sln, the third song from Lhorizon chimrique, Op. 118 (without notated example).
Colloquy: Vladimir Janklvichs Philosophy of Music Example 1 Faur, Nocturne in B Minor, Op. 119, mm. 19
h = 63 # # Andante 3 & 2
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n . n
#
n
? ## 3 2
4
mezzo piano
# n
# & #
j . j . n
. .
? # #
7
# & #
cresc.
w .. w .
#w #
n n
? ##
#w
n n
n
that forces the notes to huddle up against one another like this? Throughout the late works of Faur . . . the proximity of the two handsthe abundance of seconds and thirdscreates nodules and harsh frictions.19
There are many fascinating details in this passage, and I cannot comment on them all.20 What I am most interested in, again, is the language Janklvitch uses to describe the sonic effects in the phrase: the melody is modestly draped over the middle degrees, it gropes amid insidious rustling, the notes huddle together in fear, creating nodules and harsh frictions. This language carries a strong deictic charge. For my own part, it both affects the way I hear the phrase as a listener, and the ways in which I seek to play it. Specically, without Janklvitchs language, I doubt that I would have attended so closely to the many vertical seconds that arise as a result of the compact counterpoint.
19. Ibid., 248; my translation. Le Nocturne en Si mineur (1922) . . . est luvre austre de la vieillesse. . . . Dabord un chant, pudiquement repli sur les quelques degrs du registre mdian, ttonne parmi les frlements insidieux dans la recherche aride dun je-ne-sais-quoi. Est-ce langoisse de la maladie qui force ainsi les notes se blottir lune contre lautre? Tout au long des dernires uvres de Faur . . . la proximit des deux mains, labondance des secondes et des tierces crent des nodosits et de rudes frottements. 20. Most notable are the reference to the je-ne-sais-quoi, that quintessential Janklvitchian term of art, and the thematics of old age, sickness, and death. The latter are pursued throughout the (surprisingly traditional) hermeneutic reading of the piece that follows the excerpt.
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An awareness of those seconds makes me far more careful in my voicing of the passage, as I seek to balance the demands of linear denition in the four voices with an attentiveness to harmonic novelty and colorto the ways in which the voices brushes with one another continually smudge the musics sense of linear integrity.21 These examples suggest the possibility of a two-way commerce between music and language, even in Janklvitchs own writings. To understand the return trip from words to sounds, we can draw on two thinkers more or less distant from Janklvitch. First, we might say that his writing in these and other passages can lead to the dawning of an aspect in Ludwig Wittgensteins sense.22 That is, the various deictic-linguistic gestures in such passages can lead one to experience musical details that had previously escaped notice, thereby disclosing an aspect of the music. Thus, the seconds in the Nocturnea musical aspectbecame perspicuous to me only as a result of Janklvitchs linguistic intervention. Second, we can think of the aesthetic charge that often accompanies such moments of musical aspect perception as akin to Hans Ulrich Gumbrechts notion of presence. When the seconds rst became perspicuous to me, I experienced a moment of epiphanic intensity, in which the physical presence of the seconds suddenly took on a sort of sonic palpability.23 This was accompanied by the physiological effects typical at such momentsamong them, mild goose bumps. These ideas call for much more extensive exploration than I can provide here. But even as sketched they limn a model of two-way circulation between music and language, via the latters deictic return to sonic presence. If we bring this idea back into contact with Janklvitchs philosophyas a sort of rider to Music and the Ineffablewe reach a potentially startling conclusion: Janklvitchs philosophy will insist that we cannot in principle limit the kinds of language that might be adequate to such a project. It is clear that he himself prefers certain kinds of talka gossamer poetics of oblique approach and retreatand abhors others, most notably traditional analysis and hermeneutics.24 But his brief against analysis and hermeneutics is undone by his own
21. There is also an affective change that is more difcult to verbalize. When playing the piece under the inuence of Janklvitchs anthropomorphizing language, I experience a surge in a familiar (if peculiar) form of aesthetic empathy: the music becomes at once the object of, and a vehicle for, affective identication. 22. For the classic discussion of Wittgensteinian aspect perception, see section xi in part 2 of the Philosophical Investigations, 16594. 23. Epiphany is a central concept for Gumbrecht, as is the notion of deixis, introduced above. See his Production of Presence, 91118. 24. As in so many things, Janklvitch is not entirely consistent in this regard. While his arguments against analysis and interpretation are vivid and forceful in Music and the Ineffable, elsewhere he praises certain analyses and even engages in acts of rather traditional hermeneutic interpretation (cf. the reading of the Thirteenth Nocturne). In the Faur book, he lauds not only the analytical work of Dommel-Diny, but also the technical monographs of Franoise Gervais and Max Favre (Faur et linexprimable, 12).
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philosophy. If there is indeed a Bergsonian difference in kind between music and language, and if the latter can never exhaust the former, we are left with a situation in which no single kind of discourse may be ruled out a priori. Any bit of linguistic mediation has the potential to act as a strong deictic gesture for some, while leaving others indifferent. There is a fascinating broader question here regarding what kinds of talk might produce eeting instants of musical presence, and for what kinds of individuals in what kinds of quotidian circumstances. Given human difference and the highly volatile nature of the transaction, it is rash to rule outas Janklvitch wouldwhole genres of talk in advance, as inadequate to any individuals project of generating presence. Temperaments differ, contexts differ, circumstances differ. We should not be surprised if styles of presence-producing talk differ too. Janklvitchs attacks on analysis and interpretation disappoint most, perhaps, in their dissonance with his ethical project. The author of the Treatise on Virtues and Forgiveness wrote with great eloquence on our approach to the other (Lvinas called him an intellectual magician for a reason).25 But when it comes to our myriad situated encounters with music, Janklvitch is uncharacteristically hostile to difference, a point Jamie Currie pursues in his contribution to this colloquy.26 I nd a pointed irony here, as one of the things I value most in Janklvitchs writing is the encounter that it offers with a thinker whose habits of mind differ strikingly from my own. I would not want to be without his insights into music, precisely because they are often unlike mine. In the end, this must surely be one of the greatest virtues of talk about music: the opportunity it provides to experience musical sounds through the lter of anothers sensibility. Thus, if we can save what is best in Janklvitchs musical writings while discarding his proscriptions on diverse talk, we might better reconcile his musical philosophy with his ethical thought as a whole.
Ineffable Immersion: Contextualizing the Call for Silence

JAMES HEPOKOSKI
For readers concerned with the problematics of musics cultural and aesthetic connotations, the most contentious aspect of Vladimir Janklvitchs writing is his call for silence before the epiphanies offered by the kind of music that he favors. Consider these samples from 1959, two years before the publication of Music and the Ineffable:
25. Janklvitch, Trait des vertus ; idem, Forgiveness, trans. Kelley. For Lvinass comment, see his Vladimir Janklvitch, 87. 26. Consider his caricatures in Music and the Ineffable of the silly people whose brows are furrowed with meditation as they pretend to be following theme A and theme B (100) or of the staid music analyst, retreating to the technical out of fear of musics enchanting effects (102). These slips into ad hominem argumentation present a striking contrast with Janklvitchs otherwise generous tone, and raise a suspicion that his briefs against analysis and hermeneutics are rooted as much in personal animus as in philosophical conviction.
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There are things that are not meant to be talked about but meant to be done, and those things in relation to which purely expressive language appears so secondary, so unconvincing, so miserably inefcacious, are the most important and most precious things in life. Are their names not love, poetry, music, liberty? Thats itto be committed, and nothing else. Not to give lectures on commitment, nor to conjugate the verb, nor to commit oneself to commit oneself, as men of letters do, but really to commit oneself by an immediate and primary act, by an effective and drastic act, by a serious act of the whole person; not to adhere halfheartedly but to convert passionately to the truth, that is to say, with ones entire soul, like Platos liberated captives.27
Here and in Music and the Ineffable we nd an embrace of the magic spell of art and the doing or making (poesis) of music, insisted upon as implacably opposed to its cold-eyed, theoretical explication in analytical or hermeneutic discourse. Janklvitchs call for silence about music and the prolixity of his own prose on the subject are not contradictory impulses. They would be so if his writing were analytical or explanatory in the normative, disciplinary sense. Instead, Janklvitchs is the manner of discourse that overows as a result of heartfelt gratitude for the unearned gifts of music. So forgive those who listen to the Andante spianato and do not know how to express their thanks, or to become equal to their experience; forgive them if they celebrate something incommensurable with all celebration in the wrong way: since one does not approach the ineffable except in stammering.28 Thus the words permitted, even encouraged, are those that, like testimonies, are either thankful responses to the musically affective or sympathetic framings for the readers subsequent acts of participatory listening. This is a well-worn position within aesthetics, one typically associated with the nineteenth centurys sacralization of music. In Janklvitchs mid-twentieth-century world we reencounter it ltered through a largely orthodox Bergsonismintuition, duration, becoming, doing, motion, ow, vitalism, objections to the metaphorical spatialization of temporality, and the like. In recent decades this once-faded Bergsonism has been recalled to life via Gilles Deleuze and others and sometimes realigned with such supplementary registers of discourse as antidisciplinary postmodernism or postsecularism. At rst blush, particularly for readers invested in the musicological enterprise, Janklvitchs moralistic declaration is startling. Yet in his writing it recurs in dozens of extravagant formulations. It is a recurrent article of faith throughout Music and the Ineffable that cannot be set aside as only a secondary feature of his rhetoric. No one truly speaks of God, above all, not
27. Janklvitch, Do Not Listen to What They Say, Look at What They Do, 549, 550. The original essay (Ncoutez pas ce quils disent, regardez ce quils font) was published in a 1959 issue of Revue de mtaphysique et de morale devoted to studies of Henri Bergson on the hundredth anniversary of his birth. In this context Janklvitchs article was to be read as an homage to Bergson. 28. Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, 99.
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theologians. . . . Alas, music in itself is an unknowable something, as unable to be grasped as the mystery of artistic creation. Music is made to be heard and not to be read, most reliably by a heart that is chaste and simple, one that keeps alive a great nostalgia for innocence or a longing for a return to the spirit of childhood as an ethical counter to our terrible epoch, with its pathological attachment to trash. Music of the properly groomed, reticent kind is a perfume not an argument, a bearer of untellable and ineffable truth that seizes us with its indecipherably alluring call; it is a continuous miracle, a mystery, an immediately spiritual phenomenon, a kind of fte, a celebration. A musical work exists only in the time of its playing, and that work means nothing and yet means everything. Considering its nave and immediate truth, music does not signify anything other than what it is; it is not an instrumental means to convey concepts. Above all, music was not invented to be talked about; it is not necessary to speak of it; it is better not to try to say the unsayable; and most of the [professionalized] chatter about it is a depressing sign of pretentious, intolerable mediocrity.29 Nobody would deny the musical experiences compelling grip on performers and listeners, its capacity for inducing rapt or trancelike xation often coupled with a strong impression of signicance. This primary effect of music is well worth pondering. It cannot be sidelined in any responsible aesthetics. But that is not what is at stake here. Janklvitch insisted upon adding to this that it is transgressive to go further, to enter into a spuriously interpretive or analytical metaphysics of music that he construed as straying beyond the performative sound proper, musics fundamental reality.30 Instead, we should remain grateful to live in the intoxication of musics charme and bracket out undecidable questions about what might motivate the power of its sway or about its registers of cultural implication or social function. To those who do seek to reect on such matters, Janklvitchs impassioned pleas on behalf of the suppression of hermeneutic inquiry (despite his best intentions) carry a potential for intimidation that is difcult to ignore. What is demanded is a sidelining of critical discourse in order to urge a commitment to an abundant existential experience linked exclusively to the action of doing. One problem with any such procedure is that to ll the vacant space now exempted from external critique one may introduce any foundational doctrine that one chooses. Within the postulated discourse-free zone, where talk and argument are discouraged in the face of lived experience, an absence or darkness lurks at the center, a zone of mystery, waiting to be lit up by external illumination via a wager or leap of faith into a system of grounding authority. At bottom, such arguments are theologicalor transposed from mystical modes of argument, their most natural home.31 The process begins with a
29. Ibid., 2, 11, 18, 70, 73, 76, 7980, 8990, 92, 102, 139. 30. Ibid., 915. 31. Not surprisingly, in Music and the Ineffable references to divinity, truth, grace, and spiritualityas metaphorical (?) analogues of the ineffable, unknowable presence and depth
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credo, a trust in the goodness of what one chooses to esteem. But a perilous second stepand a reactionary one, typically advanced to protect the nowillumined centercan be the subsequent attempt to delegitimize the divergent voices of others: those probing, confrontational voices of rational modernism. Such anti-intellectual positions, interpreted broadly, did not have an entirely savory history in the twentieth century, and liberal thinkers might well greet them with wariness. But in recent years such stances have been resurfacing, with provocative variants, in a number of different areas: in music, literature, lm, art, and theology. It is the reemergence of this broader network of similar arguments that engages me here, not the details of Janklvitchs relentless testimonials. I am interested, for example, in the several reasons put forth by which explanatory or distanced analysistypically associated with modernism and its quest for controlhas been ruled inadequate or dismissed in these various elds. On what grounds could one make such a claim? Here are four of them, all interrelated, overlapping with each other. (There are more.) First is the argument of incommensurability. This contends that, in comparison with the world of disclosure that is before one in the active practice of art or religion, mere talk is idle, academic babble, an inappropriate or arbitrary response. Saying is an atrophied version of Doingmiscarried Doing, a bit degenerate, wrote Janklvitch, recalling Bergsons dismissal of homo loquax (man the talker) in favor of homo faber (man the doer).32 And Carolyn Abbate, in her 2004 amplication of Janklvitchs views, similarly championed the supremacy of real music unfolding in real time and cast a cold eye on current practices of low and soft hermeneutics offering verbal or analytical explications that pay insufcient attention to the more elemental, drastic side of music as performed.33 In recent decades similar claims have appeared elsewhere. One might recall, for instance, George Steiners pronouncements
of musicare legion. In addition to the quotation(s) cited in the text above, see, e.g., pp. 20 (voices in polyphony that, in an iconicity of showing, attest to the presence of God); 72 (the ineffable . . . cannot be explained. . . . Such is the mystery of God); 98 (music as divine inconsistency); 99 (our stammering response to music, similar to the devotions of St. John of the Cross . . . Balbuciendo ); 110 (one cannot read the enigma of death in the last breath of the dying, or the enigma of God in the blinking of the stars; 111 (the potential appeal to the negative propositions of apophatic theology; or types of virginal, C major, and ingenuous and wise music [Prokofiev!] that are present and absent, like God; and familiar yet distant, like Death); 127 (musical inspiration as a point of grace; one of the divine, sublime things that are vouchsafed to human beings in brief glimpses . . . at once dazzling and dubious); 147 (the command for reverent silence linked with the Bergsonian distrust of language . . . [and merged] with the philosophy of the apophatic); 149 (God, according to scripture, does not come with the noise of wrathfulness but as imperceptibly as a breeze); 150 (It is in the Bible every so often that hearing trumps vision, and that God at certain moments reveals himself to man in the form of the spoken Word. Hear, O Israel!). 32. Ibid., 80. 33. Abbate, MusicDrastic or Gnostic?, 50536.
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in Real Presences (1989): No musicology, no music criticism can tell us as much as the action of meaning which is performance. Or: the truths, the necessities of ordered feeling in the musical experience are not irrational; but they are irreducible to reason or pragmatic reckoning. . . . When it speaks of music, language is lame.34 A variant of this strategy might be regarded as the argument from humilitythe advocacy of bowed-head, reverent moments of devotion or Heideggerian Gelassenheit for those occasions when words fail in the face of glowing intensities, as advocated in Hans-Ulrich Gumbrechts Production of Presence (2004): [I have now come] to profess that . . . culture at large, including literature, was not only about meaning, that even in the teaching of literature and culture we should pause, from time to time, and be silent (for presence cannot use too many words).35 Second is the argument of disenchantment. Here the concern is that if one abandons the rapturous Eden of trusting immediacy and unquestioning assentwhere real presence residesone separates oneself from the glow of a primordial or precognitive participation with a deeper, perhaps sacred disclosure. This anxietythis melancholyis a legacy of modernity: die Entzauberung der Welt ; modern scholarship as disenchantment, objectication, distanciation and analysis, ideology critique, the reduction of illusion critical science and hermeneutics everywhere. The aesthetic aversion to all this is an old trope, found often in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, art, and music. One poetic example of hundreds that could be cited can be found in the well-known passage from Keatss Lamia (1819).
. . . . . . Do not all charms y At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angels wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine Unweave a rainbow. . . .
A third strategy is the argument of accusation. This is the anti-rationalists assertion that the ight to exegesis is a modern-world, bureaucratic subterfuge enabling one to turn away from the blinding revelations of spiritual, physical, or artistic experience. This charge surfaces in Janklvitch here and there, as in his imperial sniffs at the music analyst who means to prove by all this that he has not been duped and does not consent to bewitchmen. . . . Everyone knows the type, the cool cerebral people who affect interest in the way the piece is put together after the concert. Technical analysis is a means of refusing to abandon oneself spontaneously to grace, which is the request the
34. Steiner, Real Presences, 8, 19. 35. Gumbrecht, Production of Presence, 134.
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musical Charm is making.36 Or, as we nd the conviction in Steiner: The Byzantine domination of secondary and parasitic discourse over immediacy, of the critical over the creative, is itself a symptom. . . . We crave remission from direct encounter with the real presence or the real absence of that presence. . . . We seek the immunities of indirection. . . . We welcome those who can domesticate, who can secularize the mystery and summons of creation. . . . Commentary is without end.37 A variant of this can be regarded as a fourth strategy: the argument of a modernist exclusion of basic aspects of human experience. This is the familiar indictment of the post-Cartesian ight from the higher truth of the body in the world. Janklvitchs briefs on behalf of the esh-and-blood corporeality of musical performance and listening within the ow of time deployed this strategy, though the usual anti-Cartesian complaint is less in evidence there. Gumbrecht, in a complementary text, was more explicit: This fact [of the importance of bodily touching] had been bracketed (if notprogressively forgotten) by Western theory building ever since the Cartesian cogito made the ontology of human existence depend exclusively on the movements of the human mind.38 In its most radical strains this fourth strategy accelerates into a wholesale indictment of Western modernity, liberalism, and reason as having somewhere (especially around Descartes, if not much earlier) slipped off the track of an incandescent participation in Being in favor of its own constructions of disinterested reason, which logos is then asserted to be no less an arbitrary mythos than those to which that reason had once sought to offer a critique. In the twentieth century (and of course there are many precedents before this), this sort of thing arrives in full throttle at least with Heidegger and those inuenced by himincluding the much-noted theological turn in certain schools of phenomenology along with strains of postmodernism, which, by denition, is forthrightly antimodern.39
36. Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, 102. Cf. pp. 23: Thus, when a human being reaches the age of reason, he struggles against this unseemly and illegal seizure of his person, not wanting to give in to enchantment. . . . A man who has sobered up, a demystied man, does not forgive himself for having once been the dupe of misleading powers. 37. Steiner, Real Presences, 3839. Cf. the similar remarks on p. 49: We inch from the immediate pressures of mystery in poetic, in aesthetic acts of creation as we do from the realization of our diminished humanity, of all that is literally bestial in the murderousness and gadgetry of this age. The secondary is our narcotic. 38. Gumbrecht, Production of Presence, 17. Cf. p. 142: My marginal (but I hope not completely trivial) contribution is, rather, to say that [the] Cartesian dimension does not cover (and should never cover) the full complexity of our existence, although we are led to believe that it does with probably more overwhelming pressure than ever before. 39. Some of the most instructive recent distillations of this polemic may be found in the numerous variants of current postliberal theology and the movement of radical orthodoxy belligerently Christian, antimodernist ideas discussed with interest, for instance, by the otherwise secular Gumbrecht (ibid., 14549, with reference to Catherine Pickstock) and ideas that, in recent musicology, contribute among many others to the Christian-oriented musicological work of
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Of interest in all of this is the recent emergence within the secular academies, in several different disciplines, of a broad network of post-rational advocacies, what Jrgen Habermas has recently diagnosed as arising from a feeling of defeatism concerning modern reason and its capacity to answer some of the fundamental questions of experience and art.40 What we nd are postmodern castings of this on behalf of the recovery of a presence lost to the mythos of modernity: ineffability, performativity, liveness, epiphany, being, God, magic, mystery, the body, the saturated phenomenon of givenness, the disclosure of the invisible in the visible, and so on.41 They are accompanied by familiar connotations: homesickness, the return of the repressed (or the return of the aesthetic), the recovery of that ultimate Other rigorously excluded from the explanatory projects of a demystifying modernity, and the like. All such recuperations are argued along generally the same lines, amidst which the recent retrieval and sprucing-up of Janklvitchs second-hand Bergsonism is only one among many, albeit one that has caught our attention because it addresses specic though limited repertories of music. It may be that appropriating such texts as Janklvitchsusing him charismatically, as it werepermits one to launch a simultaneous critique on two fronts. On the one hand, it remains faithful to the generational indictment of once-traditional musicology and its stock-in-trade research and analysis regimens. On the other hand, it sparks a newer, schismatic attack on the demystifying hermeneutic trends characteristic of much New Musicology of the past two decades. In these past decades, for many within this now-orthodox movement, the primary game in town has been one of smart prosecutorial exposure, disenchantment, historicizing, breaking the spell: the unmasking of the politics or power-agendas of the aesthetic posture, of the doctrine of autonomy, of the Austro-Germanic canon, of Eurocentric biases, and all the rest. At this recent orthodoxys core has often been the traditional hermeneutics of
Daniel Chua, most explicitly in Beethovens Other Humanism; and idem, Listening to the Other. For an overview of radical orthodoxy, whose founding document is Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, see Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy. Related antimodernist issues were promoted, at least within the United Kingdom, in such works as Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many. For a critical overview of the French theological turn (Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, and others) from a more orthodox phenomenological perspective, see Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the Theological Turn. 40. Habermas, Awareness of What Is Missing, 18: My motive for addressing the issue of faith and knowledge is to mobilize modern reason against the defeatism lurking within it. Postmetaphysical thinking cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning modern reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the dialectic of the Enlightenment and in the naturalism founded on a nave faith in science. 41. The saturated phenomenon and givenness, Marion, Being Given; themes that also occur, in different registers, in, e.g., Lvinas and others. Cf. also such writings as Milbank, Beauty and the Soul, 23: To see . . . the beautiful is to see the invisible in the visible; in [the world of secular] modernity . . . [however], there is no mediation of the invisible in the visible, and no aura of invisibility hovering around the visible. In consequence, there is no beauty.
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suspicion, the heritage reaching back at least to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, whose lessons have been to be mistrustful of external appearances, to seek to penetrate the deceptive faade of thingsespecially such alluring and ineffable things as music, art, and religionin order to understand them as contingent cultural practices or, more aggressively, in order to unmask the material forces and political interests that lie underneath and support them. Because such detached, nonparticipatory explication works at cross-purposes with the intuitive factor of music prized by naive listenersand by Janklvitchwe nd the two sides of the debate indulging in mutual crossre. Each denounces the other as perpetuating a deeply misled discourseon the one side, the charge of false consciousness and illusion; on the other side, the charge of the merely gnostic, an insufcient consideration of value of the real, performative experience and temporal effects of music. While not discounting the directness of musics impact as performed which must remain an elemental reality for any considered reectionone might still ask the counter-Janklvitchian question of whether one ever approaches the captivating force of music in an unmediated way, as an isolated and independent subject emancipated from external constraints, free to recognize on ones own terms the ineffability believed to be really there. Whose ineffability are we talking about? The framework for any experience of aesthetic plenitude is signicantly determined by ones immediate culture or at least mightily inected by cultural expectations, training, education, and social modes of production and reception. In the end, it is difcult to contest such observations as those of Carl Dahlhaus in his early work from 1967, Esthetics of Music (here underscoring only one aspect of acculturation), that consciousness of music is determined, to no small extent, by literature about music. Even people who scoff at it can hardly escape the effect of what is written. Musical experience almost always involves memory-traces from reading. And the meaning accumulated by music in its secondary, literary mode of existence does not leave untouched its primary mode, the realm of composition.42 The ineffability experience in one culture may be apprehended in a manner entirely different from that in another time or place. If the parameters of that experience are given their energizing boosts by what is permitted and encouraged within a given culture in a given slice of timeas they surely arethen we are thrown back into an examination of the systems of norms that are acculturating the individual encounter with what seems to be ineffable. We are thrown back, that is, into discourse, into the very talk and secularized examination on which Janklvitch and others are so eager to cast aspersions. In the nal assessment, the disparaging of interpretive conversation about music that wondrous artmust be regarded as a rearguard, regressive posture.
42. Dahlhaus, Esthetics of Music, 62.
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Can We Say What We Hear?Janklvitch and the Bergsonian Ineffable

JUDY LOCHHEAD
For Vladimir Janklvitch, philosophy does not help one understand music; rather, music itself allows one to exemplify a philosophical position. In the following brief exposition, I trace how Janklvitchs aesthetics in Music and the Ineffable builds upon three aspects of Henri Bergsons dualist metaphysics. I then show how Janklvitchs musical concepts of the ineffable and the charme develop certain mystical aspects of Bergsons philosophy while unwittingly recapitulating standard motifs in the nineteenth-century discourse of the sublime. As I argue, I think this potentially leads to a musicological impasse that evacuates the possibility of overt critical engagement with music. 1. Bergsons philosophy hinges on the opposition of absolute vs. relative knowledge, intuition vs. intelligence, and time vs. space. In each pair, the rst is associated with the real (the true nature of life and experience) while the second, associated with representation, distorts it. The rst two oppositions are epistemological and share a common set of properties. Absolute knowledge is prior and given through intuition whereas relative knowledge is analytical and based in language and linguistic concepts. On one hand, human intelligence, which is rational, operates in the realm of relative knowledge: we know one thing in relation to another. On the other hand, absolute knowledge does not submit to analytical understanding but rather is achieved by intuition that allows one to enter into the thing itself.43 Relative knowledge, characterized as quantitative, always reects the interest of the subject, while absolute knowledge, characterized as qualitative, is disinterested and unmediated. For Janklvitch, musical listening and performing engage a form of absolute knowledge through intuition. In the passage below, Janklvitch distinguishes simple listening from intellectual speculation, and points out that the words of the intellect are inadequate for comprehending absolute knowledge of musical experience.
. . . simple listening, or performing per se, is far more effective than the most striking intellectual insights. Listening to music creates a state of grace in the blink of an eye, where long pages of poetic metaphors would not sufce. As irrationalist as this conclusion may seem, we need to accede to it. Listening gives us a glimpse of ineffable. . . . Listening transgresses the limits of intellectual speculation, poetic as the latter might be. Since, when words are no longer worth saying, what can one do, except sing?44
43. Lawlor and Moulard, Henri Bergson, 12. 44. Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, 119. I will take up a fuller discussion of the signicance of Charm in later discussion, but in this context, note that the Charm enacts what Janklvitch refers to as a mystical transaction; 125.
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2. Bergson calls the reality of lived time duration (dure). For Janklvitch as well, the experience of temporality as dure is not a series of instants that can be juxtaposed but rather a continuous modication: Music, like movement or duration, is a continuous miracle that with every step accomplishes the impossible.45 Even repetition in musical form functions as a manifestation of continuous becoming:
In the irreversibility of Becoming, every eventas much as it may be identical to its predecessorstakes over from them. The second time in a Rondo, even if it does not differ from the rst time except by the ordinal number, nevertheless engenders the anterior quality of the rst in the midst of a context that always changes. . . . [T]his continuous conditioning, in the process of Becoming, assumes the form of a continuous alternation.46
In a sense, for Janklvitch, music is dure, the locus of absolute knowledge given in unmediated musical experience. 3. The heterogeneous multiplicity of dure is also central to Bergsons concept of the vital impulse (lan vital ). In Creative Evolution, Bergson claims that the reality of life is creativenot mechanisticand these forces of creativity are actively producing continuous novelty. It is only through creative activity that living beings can realize the absolute knowledge of intuition.47 Unlike interpretive acts of saying, only acts of making music are creative in Bergsons sense:
The Charms artwork . . . is not an act of Saying. Rather, it is an act of Doing. . . . Making is of an entirely different order from Saying. Composing music, playing it, and singing it, or even hearing it in recreating itare these not three modes of doing, three attitudes that are drastic, not gnostic, not of the hermeneutic order of knowledge? 48
In the activity of makingof creatingwe experience the reality of absolute knowledge, a knowledge not given by the hermeneutical activity of relative knowledge. This Bergsonian approach is essential to Janklvitchs concept of the ineffable. As a form of absolute knowledge, musicintuitive, temporal, and creativecannot be explained because there are innite and interminable things to be said of it. . . .49 Saying, which operates in the realm of relative knowledge, does nothing; only musical Doing can produce an understanding of music as absolute knowledge.50 As an experience beyond verbal conceptual45. Ibid., 1819. 46. Ibid., 24. 47. See Bergson, Creative Evolution, esp. chap. 3, On the Meaning of Lifethe Order of Nature and the Form of Intelligence, 20495. 48. Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, 77. 49. Ibid., 72. 50. The paradox of a book about the ineffability of music is a theme through all of the contributions to this colloquy. But in the end, all of us return to the way Janklvitchs words affect
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ization, Janklvitchs ineffable dees understanding in rational terms, often entailing a sense of the mystical and the magical. Such an association emerges in Janklvitchs concept of charme, which is a mystical transaction. (Even the etymology of the term charme links it to the Latin carmena magical song or incantation that carries negative connotations of sorcery.) In fact, the sense that music enacts a kind of magicsomething that dees reason remains largely continuous with dominant themes in nineteenth-century aesthetics of music. Specically, I detect a strong resonance between Janklvitchs ineffable and the tradition of the sublime that has circulated since the eighteenth century. Kants notion of the sublime is emblematic of how the concept was framed as part of a denition of aesthetics that was not then a philosophy of art. The sublime arises in the faculty of Judgment when we experience something either so large or so overpowering that it appears unbounded or formless.51 Such an experience comprises both pain and pleasure. The pain arises from the awareness of our inability to take account of the sensual experience by means of the higher faculty of Reason. The pleasure arises from the awareness that we possess a faculty of Reason that triumphs by transcending our empirical existence and perceptions since we are aware that we have no concept or idea to take account of the overwhelming in sensuous experience. After Kant, the experience of the sublime became central to Romantic writings on aesthetics (now an explicit philosophy of art). In the sublime, the triumph of reason is subordinated to the failure of the imagination to take account of the unboundedness of sensuous experience. Art addresses this failure by giving sensuous expression to the sublime and hence it overcomes the divided faculties of reason and imagination. Aesthetics turned from the eighteenth-century questions of taste, beauty, and the sublime and toward a solution of sorts to the problem of the divided faculties. Necessarily ineffable, art now has a function: sensuous revelation of truth, reality, the transcendent.52 This observation provides insight into Janklvitchs ideas about the ineffabilityeffectively the sublimityof musical experience and hence about his aesthetic position. For Janklvitch, listening to music provides access to a Bergsonian absolute knowledge of reality and hence gives listeners a direct, unmediated encounter with an experiential reality that dees any intellectual engagement with that experience, including any form of linguistic expression.
musical understanding, the way words and other forms of musical engagement (dancing, drawing, etc.) produce musical experience. At an operative level, Janklvitch understands this as well, but his philosophical premises end up as an obstacle. 51. Kants mature discussion of the sublime has its fullest articulation in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790); see esp. Analytic of the Sublime, rst part, rst section, second book. 52. Kirwan, Sublimity, 14142. Readers interested in the history of the concept of the sublime will nd Crowther, Kantian Sublime, and Shaw, The Sublime, useful.
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Words can only allude metaphorically to the absolute reality of music which itself functions as a transcendent truth. While disavowing gnostic approaches to musical study, Janklvitch presents music as occupying that Bergsonian realm of intuition, absolute knowledge, and durationthose ineffable and mystical places whose reality is absolute. Understanding of the absolute knowledge of reality occurs in musical experience only as an indeterminable feeling. Such an experiential understanding operates in the same register as mystical experience, both requiring unquestioning belief. There are no secrets in such experiential understanding, just faith. Thus, Janklvitchs aesthetic remains xated in the nineteenth century. It is easy to see how this aesthetic can lead to a musicological impasse since any intellectual engagement with musical experience remains necessarily suspect or, worse, distorts that experience. If only doing reveals the real, what remains possible for saying is either bloodless facts or allusive metaphors, neither of which can serve as the basis for a critical engagement of musical experience. However, assuming a critical relationship to Janklvitchs work, I think his provocative posture could inspire renewed attention to a few questions that continue to circulate in musicology. I briey suggest two possibilities here. 1. Against Janklvitch, Joan Scott has noted that experience is not unmediated evidence: Experience is at once already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted.53 But when Janklvitch writes that Debussys La mer describes for us . . . inchoate chaos and barbarous disorder, lawless agitation (36) he evokes a powerful metaphor but does not take account of any associated musical features, since that would constitute the relative knowledge of the intellect. James Kirwan has noted that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the whole point of the existence of a discipline of aesthetics was to rescue the aesthetic from being merely aesthetic.54 In other words, the eighteenth-century concerns for pleasure, entertainment, and individual taste are no longer sufcient for a discipline that, up through Janklvitch, sought to nd its justication of art in the transcendental realm of subject, object, knowledge, and experience as such. But why not revive the aesthetic in the eighteenth-century meaning of the term? Then engagement with the particular sounds that produce that sensation and how they relate to individual taste is necessary. 2. Bergson and Janklvitch distrust the ability of reason and linguistic concepts to represent the world accurately. Such distrust was of course, a reaction to the Enlightenment hypostatization of the powers of Reason. As we know, Bergson did not abandon the idea of a preexisting reality that we could discover by discarding the trappings of the intellect. Since then, subsequent post-structuralist and postmodern philosophies, equally critical of the En53. Scott, Evidence of Experience, 797. 54. Kirwan, Sublimity, 142.
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lightenment project, have dismantled this foundational reality and posed instead a constructivist view of reality. Part of this constructivist ontology recognizes that words and concepts do not transparently represent the world; rather, they contribute to the fabric of the world in a dynamic and ongoing process of discourse. Far from being unable to represent a real and hence ineffable musical experience, in the constructivist view, words are a part of the process of knowing the world and hence the production of words about music are a kind of doing. Thus despite his protestations, one could argue that Janklvitchs saying contains a performative contradictionit is actually a productive use of words and concepts that enhance musical experience. As Arnold Davidson remarks: [Janklvitch] makes us re-hear twentieth-century music in its entirety, above all in light of his descriptions of an aesthetics and morality of simplicity. . . .55 If this is true, hasnt Janklvitch, despite protestations to the contrary, ironically succeeded in an intellectual intervention? Davidson has it right: words about music can make us hear something weve never heard before. We can say what we hear and those words play a productive role in our experiential encounters with music. In the twenty-rst century, a turn away from the aesthetic stances of the nineteenth century should allow us to consider not how words can worship music at a distinct remove, or remain utterly heterogeneous to musical life, but how words are implicated in a broader notion of how music affects us as listeners, performers, and creators.
Janklvitchs Fidelity to Inconsistency

MICHAEL GALLOPE
Janklvitch recapitulates an idea familiar to many philosophies of musicif music says what language cannot, philosophy might account for what music does. Or, more elaborately, philosophy does not describe musics being; rather it is musics being that reveals limits and problems within the medium of philosophy itself. Such is an enduring supposition for some of the best-known systems of thought that radiate from the tradition of continental philosophy. I am thinking not only of Janklvitchs work, but the whole musical lineage of speculative philosophy since Kant, stretching from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Bloch, Adorno, Deleuze, and Guattari. All these thinkers attempted to puzzle with the idea that music might actually challenge the very rules of philosophy. What, then, are the dialectical habits and speculative operations that are unique to Janklvitchs philosophy of music? How can we clearly establish what distinguishes the processes of his thinking from other approaches in the continental tradition?
55. Davidson, Charme of Janklvitch, vii.
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Here is an observation that, to my knowledge, has gone unmentioned in scholarly work on Janklvitchhe meditates on what music does in a way that is as attentive to technical musical particulars (structures, topoi, styles, etc.) as it is to what Carolyn Abbate has isolated as drastic musical singularities.56 And these technical particulars are not merely incidental to Janklvitchs prose; they are integral to his philosophical orientation. One might say that he even retains something one customarily associates with German thinkers like Bloch and Adornoa dialectical tacking between musics technical particularity and certain philosophical principles. Steven Rings, for example, has showed in this colloquy how one might study Janklvitchs consistently deictic, often gural, attentiveness to musical particulars. This observation raises crucial questions for an analysis of Janklvitchs philosophy of music: How is someone so oriented towards the drastic singularity of musical time not a simple afrmer of Bergsonian dure, of Roland Barthess grain, or of Deleuzian becomings?57 Why is Janklvitch not a metaphysician of singular performance alone? There are structural answers to these questions. Wider consideration of Janklvitchs philosophical writings shows him to be keenly aware that the drastic singularity of time cannot be presented. In two of his most widely read books, Philosophie prmiere (1953) and Forgiveness (1967), that explore the realms of ontology and moral philosophy respectively, Janklvitch separates creative life from spatial knowledge via a vocabulary that rehearses a key Bergsonian dualism between actual, quidditive, or gnostic forms of knowledge and the contingency of virtual, quodditive, or drastic forces of creation.58 Much of his philosophy is preoccupied with a central paradox at the root of this dualism: that any presentation of quoddity (or the drastic) entails a necessarily quidditive (or gnostic and discursive) means of representation. In Philosophie premire, Janklvitch thinks of creation (a kind of lan vital ) as being fueled by the metaphysical gure of an improvisation-ternelle, an immanent force of dynamism coursing through the life of all beings. Crucially, though, this massive drastic improvisation at the root of all creation is never simply presentable to a particular living thing through means of something like intuition (as it might be for someone like Henri Bergson). The organism created by the improvisation-ternelle is never coextensive with the drastic powers of creativity itselfthere is an essential disjunction between creative life and its particular actualization. Janklvitch writes: There is an eternal improvisation that reduces itself neither to [a] parousian primacy of eternalism [as in a monotheistic creator-God] nor to a historical priority of creationist
56. See Abbate, MusicDrastic or Gnostic?, 50536. Many thanks to Berthold Hoeckner, Suzanne Cusick, Seth Brodsky, Steven Rings, Brian Kane, and Jairo Moreno for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. 57. See Barthes, Grain of the Voice; and Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. 58. In Latin, quid and quod both function to introduce a subordinate clause. Quid means what. By contrast, quod means which or the one that.
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anthropomorphism [creation creates as we humans create]. The creature itself is entirely posited positivity; posited within the continuous, the creature is never contemporary with primordial position. . . .59 In Latin, Janklvitch then makes this division clear when he writes, Creatura t [the creature is made] Creator facit [The creator makes]: Only the drastic creator does the creating; the creature is only made.60 Thus, there is a crucial distinction between an unpredictable singular and genetic quodditive force and its comparatively quidditive or creaturely actualization. Following Bergson, Janklvitch links the genetic, drastic, quodditive forces of creation with vital time or dure: No person is ever witness to the creative instant in its interval; the knowledge is prospective or retrospective, always anticipatory or occurring in delay in that it is of a certain thickness coming before or after the fact, but never right on it, never in sync with it.61 The instant of creativitythe coming of the creators pure eventcannot be witnessed in the ordinary ow of time; put otherwise, the pure creativity of the instant never appears as a product of factual experience, in a simple empirical present. An ontological oscillation between quodditive reality and the quidditive reifying inclination keeps us in an innite game of hide and seek.62 Here we arrive at a Janklvitchian leitmotif : endless things may be said about something that cannot be consistently represented (for example quoddity, dure, or drastic performances), because, far from language being a slippery medium in which communication is impossible, Janklvitch understands language to give us some sense of the unrepresentable. It just cannot present the inconsistent vitality of quoddity as such. So philosophy is in the double business of the Je-ne-sais-quoi (a modesty concerning its ability to present the unnamable) and a Presque-rien (the innitesimal approach to the inconsistent reality of becoming). Bound to these intellectual habits, it is in this sense that Janklvitchs philosophy becomes a kind of ethicsif we
59. Janklvitch, Philosophie premire, 175. Emphasis and translation mine. The original reads: Il y a une improvisation-ternelle qui ne se rduit ni la primaut [. . .] lanthropomorphisme crationniste.La crature elle-mme, qui est tout entire positivit pose, et pose dans la continuation la crature nest jamais contemporaine de la position primordiale. . . . 60. Peter Hallward makes a similar analytical distinction between the virtual creativity and actual creatures in his powerful study of Deleuzes univocal metaphysics, Out of This World. 61. Janklvitch, Philosophie premire, 175. Emphasis and translation mine. The original reads: . . . jamais personne nest tmoin de linstant crateur en cours dintervalle, la connaissance prospective ou rtrospective, prvoyante ou retardataire arrivant toujours, tant elle est paisse, avant ou aprs, mais jamais pendant ni sur le fait. 62. This hide and seek structure of impossible presence at the heart of the creative instant gures prominently in twentieth-century thought from Heideggers obscure and poetic hermeneutics of facticity to Derridas deconstruction of a metaphysics of presence, to Nancys Heideggerian presencing and Gumbrechts oscillation between meaning-effects and presenceeffects that occludes the simple presentation of aesthetic experience. See Heidegger, Basic Writings ; Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon; Nancy, Listening ; and Gumbrecht, Production of Presence.
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cannot speak directly of quoddity then we are enjoined to maintain a form of delity towards its unspeakability by ethically (and dialectically) joining metaphysical principles with empirical particulars. As it is for life itself, so it is for the moral decisions we creatures inevitably confront. In Forgiveness, Janklvitch explains that a true act of forgiveness does not simply acknowledge the transgression one has incurred. In order to truly forgive someone, the forgiver must overcome the gnostic or quidditive specters of self-interest, rationality, justication, calculation, and retribution in order to harness a delity towards the quoddity of the pure event by wagering a gratuitous gift to a real personalized other in excess of all intellectual understanding.63 This faithful act of discontinuity, this sudden decision, this instantaneous event, does not lead to a theophanic presentation of divine grace, but rather forces an aporetic disappearing appearancefor the total generosity intentionally required by the forgiver is strictly unpresentable: Absolute selessness . . . [that metaphysical reservoir for all true acts of forgiveness] is rather an ideal limit and an inaccessible horizon that one approaches asymptotically without ever attaining it in fact.64 Consequently, no propositional or theological dogma can ensure an ethical result: rather, philosophy becomes a loquacious and faithful handmaiden to the act of decision itself. No presentation of forgiveness as such is thinkable; only an apophatic or negative philosophy of forgiveness is truly possible.65 In each caseontology, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of music delity is the key operation of Janklvitchs thought. It allows him to both afrm the unpresentability of quodditive reality, and to subsequently develop a philosophical procedure that ethically links quidditive empirical facts (like musical topoi, intellectual excuses, or gnostic discourses) with the metaphysical inconsistency of quodditive potentiality. Following this, I offer a reading of Janklvitchs philosophy of music based in ve propositions:
1. Absolute reality, quoddity, being, pure forgiveness, the reality of musical becoming, anything that is Being qua Being in Janklvtichs many vocabularies cannot be presented. In the language of German metaphysics perhaps more familiar to discourses surrounding Schopenhauer or Adorno, one might say that the noumenon of music, or music-in-itself cannot be presented without the contamination of approximating and equivocal concepts, reection, phenomena, intellect, the actual, the gnostic, etc.66
63. Janklvitch, Forgiveness, 6. 64. Ibid., 4. 65. Ibid., 5. 66. While I wholeheartedly agree with Judy Lochhead in this colloquy that there are demonstrable analogies between the concept of the sublime in the nineteenth century aesthetic tradition and Janklvitchs concept of the ineffable, I do not understand Janklvitch to be enjoining us to an experience of experiential reality or absolute knowledgerather, I see him as committed to a practice of delity premised on the impossibility of accomplishing such tasks.
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2. Thus, at the core of Janklvitchs philosophy is a necessarily failed effort to represent noumenal absolutes. Inconsistency transxes perception but remains metaphysically intransigent. In the face of this speculative failure and in a way that is not all that different from Adornos unpresentable utopia or Wahrheitsgehaltthe job of philosophy involves developing an ethics of delity towards what is axiomatically impossible: true and adequate knowledge of quoddity as such. 3. For Janklvitch, our delity towards musical quoddity is called Charme, an ethical practice of poetics and philosophical approximation that rejects any universal analytical or hermeneutic vocabulary in order to afrm the heterogeneity of musics being.67 4. Janklvitchs delity towards musics divine inconsistency constitutes a collection of overlapping and willfully conicting miniphilosophies of music that are dialectically attentive to musical particularsregional meditations on inexpressive topoi, speculative links between music and cultural geography, paradoxical discussions of musical time, denunciations of the metamusic celebrated by Schopenhauer and Wagner, analogies between music and the nitude of silence, and so on. These constellations have a kind of gregarious multiplicity about them, reecting the philosophers dual effort to disperse the universality of Hegelian historicism while reorienting his dialectical procedures towards a Bergsonian injunctionthat philosophy has the obligation to restate creatively its philosophical problems again and again.68 5. Under a generous reading, Janklvitchs philosophy might help us envision a philosophy of music that avoids privileging or essentializing any particular medium for musical technique. In one of his more searching speculative remarks, technique becomes an open question. Janklvitch imagines it as a multiplicity founded on a void of musical being, articulated as a skeptical query: But exactly where in the end, is music? Is it in the piano, or on the level of the vibrating string? Does it slumber within the score? Or maybe it sleeps in the grooves of the record? Is it to be found on the tip of the conductors baton?69
It has been said that Janklvitch is the Anti-Adorno.70 While Janklvitchs Gallic aestheticism and his open-ended adherence to the principle of multiplicity over autonomous coherence may tempt us into such polemical brandings, I urge here a soberer analysisone that both takes into account a larger share of a philosophers intellectual perspective, and that keeps transnational comparisons between philosophies honest about commonly held points
67. Here, I afrm an observation shared by Steven Rings and James Currie in this colloquy: that there is no contradiction between the ineffable and the loquacious; in fact, the operation of Janklvitchs philosophical procedure requires loquacity. 68. This injunction to restate the problem is an opening theme in Gilles Deleuzes 1966 monograph, Bergsonism. 69. Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, 91. 70. This is Richard Taruskins phrase, to be found on the dust jacket of Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable.
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of orientation. The ethical operation of delity at work in all branches of Janklvitchs philosophical uvre shows us that he represents not a simple foil to the idealist tradition of German dialectics, but that he is a philosopher who, like Adorno, is consistently dialectical in his habits and equally committed to an ethical vision of modernist music. Recognizing this has potential. By acknowledging that our disciplines leading philosophers of music shared common presuppositions, we make use of an analytical vocabulary capable of describing issues that crop up in many philosophies of musicthe varying status of absolutes (noumenal, unpresentable, inconsistent), the rhythm of ones dialectical prose (how often and how thoroughly musical particulars are referenced), a philosophers ethical vs. ontological claims (prescription vs. description), and even their presuppositions about musics technical being (made of notes, gestures, instruments, recordings, etc.). Drawing honest lines of comparison between different philosophies of music may cool some anxiety that Janklvitchs work represents a symptom of an underlying ethical, moral, or theological turn in the eld. Poetic and philosophical attention to the inexhaustibility of music is not a peculiar property to Janklvitchs universe nor is it unique to twenty-rst century musicology. In fact, I suspect that if we were to approach question of the ineffable with more than Janklvitch as our interlocutor, we would come to think of metaphysical speculation about musics inconsistency to be a curiously enduring problem one confronts when conceptualizing the meaning of music. Far from leading us on the path to simple answers, it may be that musics ineffability ourishes in a multitude of cultural vocabularies, warranting scrutiny and analysis from historians, theorists, and anthropologists of music who have an appetite for breaking down and studying speculative intellectual gestures. Metaphysical principles like noumenalism, inconsistency, and unpresentability name things that are by nature difcult or impossible to know; we should thus not be surprised that they have been continually linked with theology. But we also should not dismiss them too hastily as harbingers of a regressive aesthetic posture incompatible with the politics of twenty-rst century secularism. Why not ask: Is it exactly necessary to consider ineffability as linked with the voice of a God? Can one acknowledge unknowability, multiplicity, or uncertainty as a structuring device for musical experience without collapsing it into the dogma of religious doctrine? Still more provocativelycan one employ uncertainty productively? As Martin Hgglund has shown in his recent study of Derrida, might we develop a secular understanding of the way our desire to survive is predicated on an atheistic acknowledgment of our own limitations?71 In a similar vein, might Janklvitchs bergsonisme show us how our material life entails a measure of delity to inconsistency that is precisely divorced from the historical dogma of religious scripture? If, as James Hepokoskis forceful contribution suggests, an analysis of Janklvitch as a sec71. See Hgglund, Radical Atheism.
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ular materialist is still a ways off, a comparative vocabulary goes a long way in keeping theological elements from forming anti-intellectual barriers to critical scrutiny. Taking the lead from practitioners of comparative analysis in other elds (Martin Jays and Gary Guttings intellectual histories, Peter Hallwards surveys of recent French philosophy, and in a different sense, Karen Armstrongs and Robert Wrights historical syntheses of religious thought) we might develop a better understanding of how the terms of philosophy ineffability, utopia, multiplicity, presence, or the other, for examplehave decidedly secular coordinates as a vocabulary for musics intellectual history.72
Janklvitch and the Dilemma of Decadence

MICHAEL J. PURI
The musical-philosophical thought of Vladimir Janklvitch is still news to us, despite its availability for well over a half century. It is new largely because we Anglophone musicologists have yet to peruse it in breadth and depth: indicators of his limited reception within this community include the translation into English of only two of his many monographs on musicRavel (orig. 1939; trans. 1959) and Music and the Ineffable (orig. 1961; trans. 2003)as well as the publication of only a small number of texts in which musicologists have made substantial use of his work.73 Even for scholars who have already spent some time with it, however, it may continue to feel new because its concepts and methods contrast in varying degrees with those peculiar to our disciplinary habitus. Thus, as we begin a process of rapprochement with Janklvitchs work, I suggest that we acknowledge an initial ambivalence toward it and act accordingly, neither afrming it immediately for its possible redemption of our perceived shortcomings, nor rejecting it wholesale for its unpalatable alterity, but rather critically examining its elements for potential strengths and weaknesses. One of its most distinctive aspects is its dedication to French art music from about 1870 to 1940 and a penumbra of related repertoire: mainly Russian and Spanish music of the same period, as well as the work of a few important precursors (Chopin and Liszt). Janklvitch produces a detailed and insightful physiognomy of this repertoire, especially insofar as it articulates numerous counterideals to what he regarded as the awed Romantic (and largely Austro-Germanic) legacy in music and musical criticism; these counterideals
72. See Jay, Marxism and Totality ; idem, Downcast Eyes; Gutting, Thinking the Impossible; Hallward, The One or the Other; Armstrong, History of God; and Wright, Evolution of God. 73. See Janklvitch, Ravel, trans. Margaret Crosland (1959); and idem, Music and the Ineffable. Current musicological scholarship that places Janklvitchs thought at the center of its inquiry includes texts by Abbate: MusicDrastic or Gnostic? and In Search of Opera; as well as Rings, Mystres limpides ; and Puri, Memory and Melancholy in the Epilogue of Ravels Valses nobles et sentimentales.
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include inexpressivity rather than expressivity, understatement rather than hyperbole, obliquity rather than directness, fragmentation rather than continuity, concision rather than elaboration, irony rather than sincerity, and so forth.74 However, the narrowness of this focus also casts doubt upon any attempt to extend the reach of these categories by applying them to other repertoires. Further, it raises suspicions that the musical philosophy Janklvitch evidently derived from the chosen repertoire unduly elevates the latters idiomatic qualities to general principlesamong which, charm and ineffabilitythat are supposed to express our fundamental experience of and relation to all musics. Even if we were to assent to this leap, would we necessarily have to embrace and even try to replicate Janklvitchs methodology? As compelling as his rhapsodic essays may be in their effort to reap the rewards of what Michael Gallope in this colloquy calls quodditive freedom, they also seem to distance themselves from more mundane matters that are nevertheless essential to some of our own, present-day research methods: incorporation of historical fact, musics situation within a thick cultural context, and the ideological critique of attendant discourses, including ones own.75 As untroubled as the surface of his prose seems to be, nevertheless I suspect that he was anything but oblivious to the consequences of these choices. A case in point is the dilemma that the topic of decadence posed for hima topic equally promising and threatening to his ongoing musical-philosophical project. On the one hand, decadence lay at the crux of his concerns in its dual identity as both a general and a specic cultural phenomenon. When spelled in both English and French with a capital D, it was a literary and artistic movement in France that ourished from about 1880 to 1900 (with an extended dnouement) and proved formative for musicians like Debussy and Ravel.76 The Decadence upheld the countercultural impulse inherent in the more general notion of decadence by embracing hedonism, aestheticism, and ironic
74. For an account of Janklvitchs musical preferences, see Revah, Sur la partialit en musique. 75. While Janklvitchs musical writings are undoubtedly sui generis the result of an imaginative encounter among music, philosophy, and literature that can never be reproducedI would nevertheless propose that their methodology bears at least an afnity to that of Gaston Bachelard (18841962), fellow philosophy professor at the Sorbonne and author of books such as Leau et les rves ; Lair et les songes ; and La potique de lespace. Although Janklvitch does not espouse Bachelards phenomenology, he nevertheless shares his interest in identifying the archetypal images (or gestures, or elements) that govern the texts under consideration (for Bachelard, usually literature) and using these archetypes to generate a seemingly boundless array of intertextual associations and philosophical claims. Accordingly, they are vulnerable to the same criticisms of ahistoricism and subjectivism. For a useful review and critique of Bachelards method, see Hans, Gaston Bachelard and the Phenomenology of the Reading Consciousness. 76. Three indispensable sources on French Decadence and cultural decadence in general are Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects ; Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 151221; and Pierrot, Decadent Imagination, 18801900. For an extensive treatment of decadence from a current musicological perspective, see Puri, Ravel the Decadent.
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self-awareness, among other attitudes, all of which interested Janklvitch.77 On the other hand, if he tried to situate potentially Decadent musicians too rmly within this context, he would risk bogging down his narrative in the quidditive details of history and aesthetics; as he made clear in the preface to Stefan Jarocin skis book on Debussy, he preferred to maintain a certain distance from periodizations or classications (in this case, Symbolism, Impressionism, and Realism), apparently to support the claim of this musicor really any musicto a transcendence of historical particularity.78 Moreover, delving any further into the history of French Decadence would require acknowledging the strong inuence on this movement of Richard Wagner, whose presence was anathema to Janklvitch and his musical-philosophical project.79 But, most of all, I suspect that he did not want to associate his beloved music too strongly with decadence in general, since its connotations (whose negativity only increased as the n de sicle and its exaltation of the nonutilitarian faded away) were simply too widespread and enduring for him single-handedly to override. Thus, with respect to decadence and similar themes the alternative to lineffable was not lindicible but linterditthat which he forbid himself from saying. Janklvitch did, in fact, directly confront decadence in an essay he dedicated solely to this topic in 1950, which he may have undertaken in a personal attempt to come to terms with it (rather than merely performing an exercise in cultural criticism). Here, he describes decadence in broad terms as extreme civilization and characterizes it by a decline in instinct, creative vitality, virility, and innocence, as well as an increase in self-consciousness and irony, articiality of life, complexity of needs, and renement of taste.80 Moreover, a decadent civilization is one devoted to ruminating over itself (se recueillir) and is bound to the past through an obsessive, archivist memory rather than
77. Books by Janklvitch in which he addresses these themes at length include Lironie; Laventure, lennui, le srieux ; La mort ; and Lirrversible et la nostalgie. 78. This [scholarly vacillation among Symbolism, Impressionism, and Realism] only goes to prove . . . the relativity of the various categories and headings under which we were hoping to classify Debussy. He himself had a horror of concepts, and would no doubt have been the rst to express astonishment at being thus bandied about between various conicting isms. . . . Symbolism, in the profound sense in which Jarocin ski understands it, is still linked with Impressionism through the paradox of certain elusive external similarities. It is not easy to explain how this contradiction between sensorial discontinuity and the continuity of dreamsbetween scattered and disparate qualities and the uidity of a dreamcan ever be resolved. Yet, in fact, it is resolved, in the way that music sings, in the mystery of the inexpressible and the je ne sais quoi ; Janklvitch, Preface, in Jarocin ski, Debussy, xiii and xiv. 79. A standard account of Wagners association with the Decadence is Koppen, Dekadenter Wagnerismus. 80. Janklvitch, La dcadence, 362. All translations into English are mine, unless otherwise noted. A revised version of this article appears in idem, Laustrit et la vie morale. Although the revisions are not extensive, nevertheless they are potentially interesting to us for their references to music.
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envisioning the future through ardent hope.81 In art, decadence manifests itself in preciosity, ornamentation, virtuosity, the fetishization of means as ends in themselves, and the exploration of various dichotomies at their extremes majuscule vs. miniscule, expressivism vs. formalism, frenzy vs. immobility. One of the few redeeming effects it can claim is an uncommon lucidity, the consequence of a hypertrophied self-consciousness. Music did not play a central role in his essay on decadence, but his musical writings on the chosen repertoire, which stretch across the length of his career, nevertheless indicate a strong awareness of the implication of this music in decadence, as well as a conicted conscience about how he ought to deal with this. Evidence of this mindset is notable in La vie et la mort dans la musique de Debussy (1968). Soon after declaring in the Introduction that everything is agony and decadence in the n-de-sicle French artistic world in which Debussy was embedded, he pulls back slightly to assert that there is more in Debussy than a literary neurasthenia.82 In like fashionbut in reverse orderhe follows up the claim that the appeal of the decline and not-Being has nothing specically Debussyan about it with the statement that what Debussys music suggests to us, above all, is the disintegration and dissolution of matter.83 As the rst chapter draws to a close, he reafrms the decadent interpretation of Debussys music on behalf of its predilection for noons and afternoons: The decline begins at noon . . . noon sounds the slow onset of night; and, more generally, the maximum in all things announces the onset of the decadent ebb.84 But this interpretation is unsettled again once we remark that, in a revision of this chapter for Debussy et le mystre de linstant (1976), he changed its title from The Decline (Le dclin) to The Descent Underground (La descente dans les souterrains), thereby replacing a direct reference to decadence with one that somewhat conceals itself beneath eruditionhere, an allusion to the underground vaults in act 3, scene 2 of Debussys Pellas et Mlisande.85 The presence of decadence was even stronger in his 1939 monograph on Ravel. As in the Debussy volumes, in this book he explicitly associated decadence with languor, lassitude, and twilit effects in the composers early works, especially those written during the Decadence. Implicitly, however, there is a large overlap between his description of Ravels music in this book and the account of decadence he would later provide in the 1950 essay.86 One instance
81. Janklvitch, La dcadence, 365. 82. Janklvitch, La vie et la mort dans la musique de Debussy, 9 and 13, resp. 83. Ibid., 9 and 23, resp. The discussion of materiality in Debussys music is one place where Janklvitch explicitly acknowledges a debt to Bachelard. 84. Ibid., 67. 85. Janklvitch, Debussy et le mystre de linstant. 86. When Janklvitch republished his Ravel book in 1956 (the version that Crosland translated into English), he made numerous changes to every page, ranging from the alteration of a single word to the insertion of large blocks of text. Even though he published his Dcadence essay in between the two Ravel publications, his revisions only further suppress the composers decadent prole. See Janklvitch, Ravel (1956).
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of extreme civilization is the composers gluttony for novelty ( gourmandise de nouveaut ), which resulted in a harmonic language completely dominated by an insatiable curiosity that compels him toward the rarest combinations and increasingly quintessential aggregationsa classic decadent scenario in which hedonism produces overrenement.87 Another manifestation is its articiality, which Janklvitch deems the most distinctive trait of Ravels craft.88 In addition, a retrospectivist attitude is supposed to lie behind the multiple examples of pastiche in this repertoire, while, according to Janklvitch, nothing is more characteristic of Ravel than the fact that he was incomparably lucid and clearly aware of his own intentions.89 Instead of Romantic introspection and confession, Ravel demonstrates in both his life and his art an extreme modesty or shamefulness (pudeur) that exhibits itself in repressed desire, reticent friendship, strength that does not show all its power at onceall fundamental aspects of that embodiment of decadence, the Baudelairean dandy, which we know Ravel to have emulated throughout his life.90 Further, when interrupted in his sublimity, the dandy produces a music that oscillates between frenzy and impassivity.91 In these and other respects Janklvitch nds Ravels music to draw inspiration from the rococo eighteenth century, the era of the most exquisite renements of politesse, luxury, and pleasure, thereby becoming an oasis . . . a series of intermittent escapes beyond life and reality.92 While Janklvitch had not yet published his 1950 essay on decadence by the time he wrote his book on Ravel, he nevertheless managed to trace the outlines of this concept in the composers music. Even in 1939 he appears to have realized what he had done, noting midway through the book that Ravels instrumental perfection, manual dexterity, and absolute domination of material are ordinarily symptoms of decadence.93 But, even more strongly than in Debussys case, he strove to shield Ravel from this charge, drawing attention instead to a dimension of unmediated expressivity in his music (a precious movement of his heart) while also identifying what he would later call the three alibis of Ravels pudeur : naturalism [which] helps him to conceal himself, exoticism to conceal this naturalism, and pastiche to conceal this exoticism.94
87. Janklvitch, Maurice Ravel (1939), 47 and 82, resp. 88. Ibid., 62. 89. Ibid., 6. 90. Ibid., 91 and 122, resp. For a detailed account of dandyism in Ravel, see Puri, Dandy, Interrupted. 91. Janklvitch, Maurice Ravel (1939), 58. Cf. the passage from La dcadence in which he asserts that frenzy and collapse [lenlisement] . . . are the two fundamental types of decadence (356). 92. Ibid., 58 and 63, resp. 93. Ibid., 94. 94. Ibid., 94 and 103, resp. Janklvitchs substitution in 1956 of les trois exposants successifs de sa ruse, les trois alibis de sa pudeur (120) for the 1939 les trois exposants successifs de sa fraude (103) is one of many revisions apparently motivated by his self-interdiction against criticism of such a paragon in French art and culture.
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These three attempts to be elsewhere (the literal meaning of the Latin alibi ) do little to mitigate Ravels decadence: The seamless simulation of the real (naturalism) can qualify as a goal of technical perfectionism; exoticism is a basic strategy of decadent escapism; and the layering of concealments is standard protocol for the dissembling dandy. A different strategy adopted elsewhere by Janklvitch to distance Ravel from decadence is equally unsuccessful. When discussing the Trois pomes de Stphane Mallarm (1913) he uses the set of mlodies to draw a line in the sand, declaring it to break decisively with the decadent languor of the composers earlier pieces by means of its clearer textures and more incisive harmonies.95 Although the Trois pomes is certainly a mature work, it is nevertheless just as decadent as any other piece in Ravels uvre. How, indeed, could the eponymous sigh of Soupir be any more languorous, whose initial ascent toward the Ideal only heightens the melancholy effect of its subsequent collapse back upon the Real?96 Further, Ravels settings of Placet futile and Surgi de la croupe et du bond are as exquisitely precious are they are erotic. Simply put, if one is searching for a shining example of decadence in Ravels music, there is no better candidate than the Trois pomes. Decadence, like ineffability, is only one of many possible entry points into the thought of Vladimir Janklvitch, but it is a quite productive one: Its direct relevance to n-de-sicle French music gives us the opportunity to apply the knowledge and skills specic to our discipline to a critique of his musical writings; since he also addresses it in his nonmusical writings, it allows us to broaden the scope of our critique to include his work as a whole, a methodology betting such wide-ranging thought;97 as a highly ambivalent concept, it helps to expose tensions and opacities within an uvre that might otherwise seem perfectly transparent in its motivations. But adopting these critical positions should not prevent us from enjoying the insights he offers us on every page; further, the blind spots we nd could also be mirrors in which to recognize ourselves, as James Currie suggests in this colloquy. In the long process of rapprochement with Janklvitchs thought, removing it from a pedestal may ultimately bring it closer to us.
95. Ibid., 28. 96. I am simply paraphrasing the decadent interpretation of fountains that Janklvitch offers in La vie et la mort dans la musique de Debussy : The fountain itselfand this already appears in the third Pome de Baudelaireis more a collapse (croulement) than a bursting-forth ( jaillissement); 26. 97. In addition to decadence, there are other concepts in Janklvitchs philosophy that we could explore to gain further insight into his understanding of Ravel, among which conscience, irony, and the lie.
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Where Janklvitch Cannot Speak

JAMES R. CURRIE
We might wonder whether the recent vibrant growth of Janklvitch within the musicological landscape can be understood not only as the well-earned fruit of some exquisite gardening on the part of Carolyn Abbate, but also as a symptom of broader disciplinary changes afoot. Indeed, it is tempting to see the success with which Janklvitch has entered into recent circulation as an expression of increasing dissatisfaction with the oft-unquestioned preponderance of culturally oriented hermeneutics and its causal assumptions about the symptomatic relationship between music and human social life. His work offers a welcome respite from the prevalent practices of musicology, in which pieces of music are frequently propelled across the gap that divides them from the determinants that purportedly have brought them into being so that anxieties regarding meaning and the potential absence of grounds for understanding can be allayed. What Janklvitch can sometimes help us to appreciate is that engagement in such acts can dilute music down into being the mere effect of that which brings it forth, as if, to draw out ethical implications, children were to be but solely the reproduction of parents (and thus completely screwed). As he rightly points out, No cause is entirely the cause, and no effect is exclusively an effect.98 There is always a life-enhancing excess, something that is epitomized for Janklvitch by music, and denoted by the term ineffable.99 And thus no simile is absolute, nor any metaphor capable of taking all lines of ight into account. A sonata is like a prcis of the human adventure that is bordered by birth and deathbut is not itself this adventurea statement which, contrary to a strategic fanfare by Richard Taruskin (that Janklvitch is the anti-Adorno), is at the very least proximate to Adornos abiding concern, particularly in Negative Dialectics, regarding a nonidentity in excess of the conceptual violence performed by identity relations.100 But if Janklvitchs work, broadly like Lvinas, Derrida, Deleuze, and other twentieth-century French philosophers, is deeply concerned with unmasking the abusive restrictions engendered by glib identity relations, I would
98. Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, 27. 99. So, for example, the mystery transmitted to us by music is not deaths sterilizing inexplicability but the fertile inexplicability of life, freedom, or love. In brief, the musical mystery is not what cannot be spoken of, the untellable, but the ineffable, in ibid., 7172. In contrast to the untellable void opened up by death, where speech cannot go because there is absolutely nothing to say, the ineffable cannot be explained because there are innite and interminable things to be said of it; ibid., 72. And thus the ineffable unleashes a state of vervea formulation that can open up some productive lines of resonance between the ineffable in Janklvitch and the concept of life in Deleuzes work. Indeed, this connection is perhaps not surprising considering the import of Bergsons work for both philosophers. 100. Ibid., 14. Adorno might better be thought of in a kind of productively dissonant proximity to Janklvitch, a point that Michael Gallope considers more systematically in this colloquy than some of my eeting suggestions are able to here.
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argue that it is also fueled by their nondialectical reinscription, creating the effect of a kind of unconscious return of the repressed. The most obvious example of this symptom is to be found in his nonnegotiable refusal of all things German, which, contrary to Abbates too easily dismissive claim that Janklvitchs silence with regard to, for example, the German philosophical tradition is to be congratulated since it put him at odds with the fashionable compromises of post-war academic convention, can in fact seriously compromise the integrity of his arguments.101 Of course, from a therapeutic perspective, it is completely acceptable if the negatively sublime reality of the fact that Nazi atrocities actually happened made it simply too traumatic for Janklvitch to allow the potential proximity of German philosophy to sound into acknowledgement within his thought. This would be similar, for example, to some of the reasons that have surrounded decisions not to have Wagner played in Israel. But for that to equate into a philosophical assertion of an absolute and inviolable differencein effect, that Germany is not here, a common insistence on a number of levels in Janklvitchs workis not defensible. As the contributions from Michael Gallope, Judy Lochhead, and James Hepokoski can illustrate, there are simply too many shared preoccupations for the asserted distinction to have credibility. More broadly, I would argue that the symptomatic distortions that derail the ethical coherence of Music and the Ineffable arise from Janklvitchs attempt to defend the identity relation between, on the one hand, a certain conception of reserved modesty in human utterance and, on the other, the laudable or ethical responsibility and sensitivity that it supposedly embodies.102 For one quickly notices that the structure of this identity relation between modesty and ethics is contradicted by the refusal of such relations elsewhere in the text. And the text provides no advice or theoretical justication as to why this is the case; we just have to accept the texts whims, something that for this reader, at any rate, seriously discredits the integrity of it as philosophical work, even if, at times, it makes it seductive as a kind of cryptic-driven literature, or strangely analogous with music itself, a point to which I will return. If, to reinvoke an earlier example, a sonata can be like something but not actually that thing itself, why in this instance is something that could easily amount to being just a seperable stylistic component, and so something that is strategically available to a vast array of productive reinscriptions and slippages, therefore an inextricable embodiment or enactment of a particular form of ethical responsibility?
101. Abbate, Janklvitchs Singularity, in ibid., xvii. 102. Since modestyor the slightly more tricky French pudeur, with its young girl connotations of shamefulnessis a key term in Janklvitchs writings on decadence, there is a connection here between my critique and Michael J. Puris contribution. However, my own feeling is that the contradictions created within Janklvitchs texts by the invocation of modesty and similar values are neither as self-knowing nor philosophically productive on Janklvitchs part, as Puri seeks to assert.
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Indeed, in certain instances the very rejection of an identity relation acts as the justication of another one, and yet again, this is accompanied by an almost total lack of acknowledgment of the potentially dialectical volatility of concepts that this would seem to illustrate. For example, in the midst of some frankly quite self-righteous axioms concerning the crimes of rhetorical excess, Janklvitch writes that there is no simple proportional relationship between a given beings true importance and the volume of sound it emits, between its ontological weight and its phenomenological acoustic volume.103 Now, I would be the rst to agree that there are no positive values to be guaranteed from an appearance; in fact, I am tempted to assert it as a fundamental ethical ground. However, if that is the case for loud volumes, it is equally true for soft ones, and so the following conclusion, but half a page later, is, in itself, insupportable: Truly important things make less noise than loud, insolent existences, with all their fanfares.104 At the very least, we should note that after Frances defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 187071, such language was repeatedly employed in French musical discourse as a means of fuelling nationalist pride. Indeed, the aesthetic clich of French clart, simplicit, and mesure is centuries old, and Janklvitchs employment of it potentially suspect: in other words, it easily functions as a means, rst, of creating a background that many of his readers could uncritically digest as a simple conrmations of the superiority of French taste, and then of using the particularity of that backgrounds attractions as a means of giving weight to a supposedly universal claim. More disturbing, however, would be the fact that convincing arguments have been made for seeing in the cool restraint of neoclassicism, which often falls easily within Janklvitchs idiosyncratic musical canon, complicities with the very fascist politics that Janklvitchs own musicalized value system is self-evidently meant to prohibit.105 And so perhaps it is the very political and ethical vulnerability of stylistic restraint to dialectical volatilities that necessitates the quickly following rhetorical gesture, which strikes me as manipulative: God, according to scripture, does not come with the noise of wrathfulness but as imperceptible as a breeze.106 Sometimes, but not always. For example, to arrive at a quiet dinner for two dressed as a burning bush hardly exemplies a couture decision on Gods part that has been motivated by restraint.107 If Janklvitch propounds otherwise, then I am tempted to conclude that his position has to appear in the name of God in order to mask the fact that it
103. Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, 149. 104. Ibid. 105. The seminal formulation regarding the problematic ideological content of neoclassicism is to be found in the second essay (Stravinsky and the Restoration) of Adornos Philosophy of New Music. In more recent academic discourse (1993), the topic was brought into circulation by a particularly virtuosic piece by Taruskin, Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology, reprinted in idem, The Dangers of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays. 106. Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, 149. 107. I refer, of course, to God appearing to Moses as a burning bush in Exodus 3.
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is primarily the willful assertion of something he wants to be true but which any argument that remained consistent with his own position would invalidate if it were allowed to be voiced. God, as ever, lls in the gap created by the deadlock of an antagonism. And although I think that there is much of great use in the theological turn of modern philosophy, particularly in the Pauline political swerve it takes in the work of Alain Badiou and Slavoj iek, Hepokoski is right to remind us here that darkness and censorship can be effectively sustained through the rhetorical force of silence.108 I certainly dont deny that sometimes this kind of quiet restraint is indicative of ethical integrity; and it would be unfair if I did not acknowledge the few small moments in Music and the Ineffable when Janklvitch acknowledges ways in which the appearance of restraint can provide harbor to potential violence.109 But if the ineffable is the ever-present excess within existence, then stylistic restraint can retain the kind of inviolable ethical value that Janklvitch precisely claims for it only if ineffability is kept in a kind of quarantine when stylistic restraint sets the boundaries. If ineffability were not somehow quarantined, there would be an innite and interminable number of things to be said about stylistic restraint itself. And if it were quarantined, the identity relation between the ineffable and the ethical values that Janklvitch ascribes to it would no longer be sustainable, since they would now be barred. But since Janklvitch does not inform us why his philosophy need not sustain what Gallope understands as his delity to inconsistency by pressurizing stylistic restraint with a characteristic threat of innite discoursethe singular ethical equation he wants to sustain (see p. 247, note 98)I have to conclude that we are dealing with a suspicious act of intellectual exclusion, which reveals a certain negatively ideological moment. Nor is this problem resolved by acknowledging the fact that exposure to ineffability is, for Janklvitch, the theological experience that necessitates restraint as the only suitable form of ethical mode of behavior. Why, for example, might such a form of silence not be indicative of smugness? Or why, faced with the impossibility of the ineffable, should one not become possessed by a kind of interminable discourse oneself, as in glossolalia? All this talk about things being quiet is potentially just a lot of noise aimed at hiding the silence created by the absence of the coherent philosophical talk that would be necessary for Janklvitch to prove to us that he is right. So why does Janklvitch not speak here? Or to pose things through a theological provocation: why does he need the name of God to make his musical philosophy work?
108. See Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, with an afterword by iek. 109. In a discussion of Nietzsche, for example, Janklvitch notes that just as immorality is often simply excessive rigor on the rebound, an alibi produced to disguise a secret and passionate moral temperament, so melomania explains in certain cases the furious energy of melophobia; Music and the Ineffable, 7. And later, that an eagerness to resist temptation is no less suspect than temptation itself ; ibid., 10.
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I offer the following hypothesis: that this silent silence is the inadvertent product of the attempt to respond appropriately to the seeming profundity of a reaction to certain musics. For when, particularly in Music and the Ineffable, Janklvitchs writing devolves into what basically amount to strings of undeveloped ethical declaratives, his philosophical discourse becomes remarkably reproductive of the very qualities that he values in his musical predilectionsa tendency that one might compare fruitfully to the resonances that exist between Adornos philosophical style and the gnarled dialectical movements of Schoenbergs atonal works. Thus, talking of the stationary aspects of the music of Mussorgsky or Debussy, he states, with characteristic exaggeration, that The intrinsic inaptitude for development can explain at least two essential traits of all musical discourse: its absence of any systematic unity, and its insensitivity to repetition.110 It is as if we are being told that the import of this music is of such a degree that its features must be allowed periodically to usurp such philosophical principles as coherence, noncontradiction, explication, and justicatory development. However, by allowing this to happen, Janklvitch threatens once more to contradict his own position by relying upon a neutralizing set of identity relations between music and philosophy that are detrimental to botha conceptual abuse that, to his credit, Adorno was always keen to resist. Personally, what I nd sadder still, though, is that when this is the case, it results in a missed opportunity, both for Janklvitch and the musicology beholden unto him, to investigate the possibility that what is remarkable about music is precisely that it can allow us a respite from ethics that does not nevertheless have to have ethically worrying repercussions. And so I leave you with the following provocation: that perhaps with music we can at last avoid the endless narcissistic threats created by the obsession with which we seek to see ourselves in an ethically attering light by proving that those things that feel good to us are therefore of the Good. Any noncritical validation of Janklvitchs work is, thus, no sign of something new afoot in musicology, but perhaps just another means of making our work shiny enough to reect back the oldest fantasy of all: that we are on the side of the angels.
Janklvitch: Selected Writings on Music and Aesthetics

Laustrit et la vie morale. Paris: Flammarion, 1956. Laventure, lennui, le srieux. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1963. De la musique au silence. Vol. 1. See his Faur et linexprimable. De la musique au silence. Vol. 2. See his Debussy et le mystre de linstant. De la musique au silence. Vol. 3. See his Liszt et la rhapsodie: Essai sur la virtuosit. Debussy et le mystre de linstant. Vol. 2 of his De la musique au silence. Paris: Plon, 1976.
110. Ibid., 18.
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Journal of the American Musicological Society

Colloquy: Vladimir Janklvichs Philosophy of Music

Janklvitchs Fidelity to Inconsistency

55. Davidson, Charme of Janklvitch, vii.

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Colloquy: Vladimir Janklvichs Philosophy of Music

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Colloquy: Vladimir Janklvichs Philosophy of Music

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Colloquy: Vladimir Janklvichs Philosophy of Music

Janklvitch and the Dilemma of Decadence

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Colloquy: Vladimir Janklvichs Philosophy of Music

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Colloquy: Vladimir Janklvichs Philosophy of Music

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Colloquy: Vladimir Janklvichs Philosophy of Music

Where Janklvitch Cannot Speak

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Colloquy: Vladimir Janklvichs Philosophy of Music

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Colloquy: Vladimir Janklvichs Philosophy of Music

Janklvitch: Selected Writings on Music and Aesthetics

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Colloquy: Vladimir Janklvichs Philosophy of Music

Other Works Cited

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Colloquy: Vladimir Janklvichs Philosophy of Music

Journal of the American Musicological Society

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