Waltham-Smith, A Music Worthy of The Name

A Music Worthy of the Name
Or, Agamben’s Museicology
Naomi Waltham-Smith
University of Warwick, Coventry, England
A REVOLUTION IN MUSIC
La musique, la philosophie. La, la. Not la, le. Not feminine, masculine. Not la
bête, le souverain. But la, la. La vie, la mort. No—la vie la mort, life-death. La
musique la philosophie, music-philosophy. A heady love affair of desire and
repression, attraction and disavowal, fantasy and envy. This coupling of music
and philosophy that traverses Western thought from Plato to deconstruction
is what Agamben invokes when, in the appendix to the recent What Is Philos-
ophy? he claims: “Philosophy is today only possible as a reformation of music”
(2017, 97). Philosophy depends for its survival, he appears to argue, upon a
transformation of music beyond its current state, an end even of what is called
music today. Philosophy depends on what I want to call, after Derrida’s
phrase, a music worthy of the name—une musique digne de ce nom. It depends
for its survival upon a music whose dignity keeps it alive, makes it an excess
CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 18, No. 2, 2018, pp. 179–202. ISSN 1532-687X.
© 2018 Michigan State University. All rights reserved.
179
This work originally appeared in CR: The New Centennial Review 18.2, fall 2018, published by Michigan State University Press.
180 A Music Worthy of the Name
over life, makes it a sur-vival precisely on the condition that it is exposed to the
other, to indignity, and is therefore always life-death, always God and death.
If philosophy survives only by virtue of the fact that it overflows its bounds,
it is music’s dignity—that is, its excess over itself, its overspilling of “its” limits,
the fact that music is always already music-philosophy—that makes pos-
sible the future of philosophy. This perhaps is how we should understand
the Platonic claim that gives the title to Agamben’s appendix. If philosophy
is “the supreme music,” this is not to say that philosophy supersedes music
to replace it, as Plato appears to suggest. Or, insofar as philosophy does
substitute for music, it is only because music’s excess of life always already
leads it into technicity and prostheticity. Philosophy is the end of music
because, to the extent that music aspires to this supreme condition, it exposes
itself to the other, which is to say to death and self-destruction. There is
philosophy only because music has what Derrida would call an “autoimmune”
character. Or, more strongly, the fantasy of philosophy as such is the retroac-
tive effect of music’s autoimmunity.
MUSIC AND LANGUAGE
But this is to get far ahead of ourselves. If philosophy depends upon a revolu-
tion in music, what would, in Agamben’s analysis, be a music worthy of the
name even if he does not use this idiom? We can glean an answer to this by
tracking his reading of Plato’s famous banishing of the poets from the city. In
keeping with a certain reading of aesthetic autonomy that we find, for in-
stance, in Theodor W. Adorno and Jacques Attali’s (1977) writings on music,
“the state of music” (by which Agamben means a larger sphere typically
referred to as art) “defines the political condition of a given society better than
and prior to any other index” (2017, 102). Accordingly, “the bad music that
today pervades our cities at every moment and in every place is inseparable
from the bad politics that governs them.” More specifically, this bad music
consists in a music that “seems frenetically to pervade every place” and that is
“no longer museically tuned” (106). Agamben then attributes “the general
feeling of depression and apathy” that characterizes modern society to a
music that has lost the “experience of the museic limits” of language. What is
Naomi Waltham-Smith 181
disguised as pathology is actually the eclipse of the political that results from
music’s break with “its necessary relation with the word” (101).
If the disappearance of the political and the malaise of contemporary
society is the symptom of a change in the state of music, then it is necessary to
understand what is meant by an originary museic attunement. What exactly
is the nature of the relation between language and music that Agamben calls
“museic”? He derives this neologism from the Greek Muses with whom, ac-
cording to an idiosyncratic reading of Hesiod’s Theogeny, “we begin and are
initiated” (2017, 98). That is to say, that the Muse is what comes before and
opens up the possibility for the poet’s enunciation. The museic origin of the
word, then, is the mere fact that something comes before our speech—which
is to say that our speech is never our own, that language is characterized by an
originary expropriation—what Agamben also calls “infancy” (1993b).
This idea goes back to some of Agamben’s earliest reflections on language
in Language and Death. There he argues: “Muse is the name the Greeks gave to
this experience of the ungraspability of the originary place of the poetic word”
(1991, 78). Or, as he puts it nearly 40 years later, “The Muse . . . symbolizes the
speaking being’s impossibility of integrally appropriating the language that is
not his voice.”
There is music; man does not limit himself to speaking, and rather feels the
need to sing because language is not his voice. . . . Singing, man celebrates and
commemorates the voice he no longer has, which, as taught by the myth of the
cicadas in the Phaedrus, he could find again only if he ceased to be human and
became animal. (2017, 99)
And the task of poet is to “give musical shape to the difficulty of his taking the
floor . . . how he succeeds in appropriating a word that does not belong to him”
(99). Music is thus intimately related to what here as elsewhere Agamben
describes as the “event of language.” By this he means the very fact that there
is language—that on account of which language happens.
It would be easy to construct an account of the relation between the two
such that music were philosophy’s condition of possibility—music as tran-
scendental. Music is what philosophy is not, what philosophy defines itself
against. That is why the musical organization of the Athenian polis must be
replaced by its philosophical critique. Music or philosophy. Either one or the
other. And the implication is that only the supreme music that is philosophy is
a music worthy of the name.
The relationship, though, is more complex. Music is no straightforward
adversary that precedes philosophy and that philosophy will subsequently
cast out. It is perhaps more accurate to say that philosophy conjures up music
only so that it may triumph over it. Music’s priority, we might say, is the
“phantasm” of philosophy, a fiction created so as to posit the originary purity
of the logos and indeed of music.1 Philosophy secures its sovereignty by puri-
fying itself of a contaminating music, vigorously denying its own dependence
on music, disavowing the museic nexus by which the experience of the limits
of language and philosophy are “musically conditioned” (Agamben 2017, 106).
As Laura Odello remarks in her Derridean reading of music’s banishment, the
Sirens’ song seems to be banished; music is liquidated, repressed. In fact, the
Platonic gesture is not so simple: music does not disappear; it remains present
by becoming silent. This is the great imprisonment of sound carried out by
philosophy. Music remains present so that it can be banished, exhausted,
dismissed, tamed; in this Platonic operation of subjugation, it is put in the
service of philosophy itself (2013, 41).
That is why philosophy does not simply consist in the absolute exclusion
of music but is, on the contrary, the supreme music—what dignifies music.
But music is also the object of philosophy’s envy. It seems to have some-
thing that philosophy wants. It is what philosophy secretly aspires—but can-
not permit itself—to be. Music is philosophy’s split-off part. It is the internal
object that philosophy disavows within itself and for that reason desires and
covets in the other. This ambivalence explains philosophy’s fictional charac-
ter and the role that music plays in the fable. Unable to comes to terms with its
own museic contamination and in a bid to uphold the phantasm of its pure
sovereignty, the logos projects its musicality outside itself onto the other. But
it does so only that it might then (re)appropriate it to itself—reintroject it—so
as to make the threat of instability it represents more digestible. Philosophy,
as Odello puts it in Derridean terms, “immunizes” itself. It incorporates a
prophylactic dose of music, now safely blended with and under the control of
logos, to protect its integrity against the larger threat of music’s destabilizing
force (2013, 45). That is why Odello can say that music is pharmacological: cure
and poison—cure, we might add, in anticipation of poison, a guard against the
threat to come.
Agamben’s argument rests upon this deconstructive point even as he tries
to distinguish himself from Derrida, so it is worth pursuing further. Discussing
the supposed opposition between theory and practice in his 1976–77 seminar
on Althusser, Théorie et pratique, Derrida observes that
the overflowing of philosophy by a ‘thinking’ that is no longer simply philo-

sophical [which is to say] philosophy’s overflowing itself, comprising itself and
the rest, has always belonged to the philosophical. As a result the utterance
proposing that the definition or situation of philosophy is not in itself philo-
sophical is always difficult, unstable. Nothing is more philosophical that the
act of defining or situating the philosophical within the general field of what is,
of being as this or that, here production or practice. (2017b, 9–10).2
We might in a similar vein say that there is nothing more philosophical than
situating the philosophical within the general field of the musical, than phi-
losophy’s overflowing itself in the direction of music. Nothing is more philo-
sophical than its musicality.
Later in this fifth session, Derrida argues that “it is within that technical
determination—which coincides with metaphysics itself—that the opposi-
tion between the៮ oria and praxis is produced” (2017b, 15). The positing of an
external viewpoint from which to theorize practice is the retroactive effect of
a theory that is always already praxis—that is, a philosophy that overflows its
bounds. If thought is praxis, a theoreticist theory is an aftereffect of philoso-
phy’s aporetic self-referentiality, of a practice of philosophy that strives in vein
to grasp itself as such. The notion of a purely musical condition that precedes
philosophy or of a pure logos uncontaminated by musicality is similarly a
retroactive effect of a philosophy that is always already musical. This is the
Derridean point: this mutual contamination of music and language is not a
lack of purity, a privation. Even in its ideal purity, philosophy is always already
musical and music always already philosophical. A purely philosophical phi-
losophy is not impossible because it is always belatedly contaminated by

music’s illogical desires. Rather, philosophy is necessarily contaminated
by music for it to be philosophical. Philosophy is not philosophy without being
music.
If music could be said to be the experience of the limits of philosophy, this
is not simply because music is outside philosophy, the other to which philos-
ophy opens itself. Neither an inner nor outer edge, music, I am arguing, is
instead what “takes aim at the edge, aims to problematize the security that a
border provides, the trait that forms an edge” (9). Music—or at least that is I
how I am suggesting we read this edge that joins and separates Agamben and
Derrida—music is the name for the overflowing that is philosophy’s “essential
trait,” its condition of (im)possibility.
This is how we should understand Agamben’s thesis on the museic rela-
tion between word and song. When he states that “in [music] something
comes to expression that cannot be said in language” (2017, 97), he is not
simply referring to an outside of language. If there is any ineffability here, it is
of a different order. In an earlier essay in the same book, he is at pains to
distinguish between the sayable and the unsayable. “The unsayable,” he main-
tains, “is nothing else than a presupposition of language” (35). Language
presupposes the thing it names—the referent—as the nonlinguistic with
which it is in relation. This presupposing power, though, “is so strong that we
imagine the non-linguistic as something unsayable and unrelated, which we
somehow try to grasp as such, without realizing that in this way we are simply
trying to grasp the shadow of language.”
Ever since his early works, Agamben has insisted upon the negative onto-
logical foundation of metaphysics. Careful reading shows that this negativity
consists less (or only secondarily) in the exclusion of the unsayable than in the
exclusion of language’s condition of possibility—which Agamben will also call
the event of language, the pure taking place of language, or the sayable. In
Language and Death, he says that this taking place of language, which he
names “Voice” with an initial capital, consists in the removal of the animal
voice or phone៮ in the gramma (1991, 37). He argues there, in a scathing critique
of grammatology, that Derrida, insofar as he seeks to overturn the primacy of
the voice over writing, winds up ignoring Voice—displacing not sonorous
presence but its withdrawal (39). The negativity that constitutes metaphysics
is not the first—the exclusion of the phone៮ , of language’s musicality, to make
way for logos—but the second—the forgetting of that very negativity. And that
is why Derrida (or so Agamben alleges) is able to bring the fundamental
problem of metaphysics to light without surpassing it.
Derrida, though, makes precisely this same point when, glossing
Heidegger, he speaks of metaphysics as a retrait—as a redoubling of that word
trait (translated each time in English as “trait”), which appears twice in the
passage quoted above from the seminar on Althusser. In that passage, trait
first refers to the drawing of a line as a boundary or edge, the security of which
is threatened by philosophy’s overflowing itself. Derrida then goes on, how-
ever, to define this overflowing as the “essential trait” of every discourse that
addresses the theory/practice relation and of which he also maintains that
“nothing is more philosophical” (10). We might say even that this overflow-
ing—this excess and sur-vival of philosophy beyond itself that I am calling
music—is what gives philosophy its dignity. It is the essential trait of a philos-
ophy worthy of the name.
A few years later in “The Retrait of Metaphor” (2007), Derrida explicitly
thinks the trait in terms of withdrawal. Like the stroke of a brush or pen, the
trait is what draws [trait] the line to create a division but in so doing with-
draws [retrait] from the page. The trait, Derrida argues, is always a retrait in
the double sense that it retreats but also retraces. Or, to be more precise, the
trait cannot retreat without at the same time retreating, treating again, draw-
ing another line. The trait does not withdraw itself without presupposing
another trait. This is why the Platonic trait that divides music from philosophy
at the same time leads to a division within the category of music itself: music
becomes something to be policed and split into that kind of music that serves
the polis by cultivating order in the souls of its citizens and that which threat-
ens disorder by stirring up the wrong sorts of emotions. Odello suggests,
though, in a vivid metaphor that music’s pathologization is the product of “an
illness contracted during an enforced hospitalization,” “the unfortunate re-
sult of intense philosophical therapy” (2013, 44). The paradox here is that
“music starts to get sick insofar as the word tries to cure it; in other words, the
logos tries to neutralize the musical pathology that the logos itself caused to
eliminate it by reestablishing itself, phantasmatically, as being originally un-

harmed” (44). Likewise, the demotion of the animal cry relative to human
speech and the subordination of music to the word is a side effect of the
disavowal of language’s irreducibly museic character. In a clear case of blam-
ing the patient, the division of music into bad and good is a cover that allows
metaphysics to disavow its own disavowal.
The supplementarity of the retrait means that a split opens between the
trait and “itself,” tracing a margin between the withdrawal and its withdrawal,
between the denial and the denial of denial, the retrait of the retrait. So,
translating this back into Agamben’s terms, Voice is the (re)trait that opens up
a division between the linguistic and the nonlinguistic, the merely sonorous
and articulate speech. Voice is the retrait of the originarily museic character of
language that opens up a split between music and language. Agamben tells us
that music expresses “the impossibility of accessing the primordial place of
the word” (2017, 97). Music, then, consists in the withdrawal of the museic.
With this withdrawal, a split opens up not only between music and language
but moreover between this music as the withdrawn event of language and that
music that is opposed to language—between music as language’s condition of
possibility and music as the nonlinguistic. The distinction between music and
itself is what Agamben articulates when he distinguishes the sayable from the
unsayable. If the unsayable is a linguistic category—that which appears to be
outside language but which is produced by and in language—the sayable, he
contends, is nonlinguistic (it is not an effect of language’s presuppositional
power) and for this reason “can never be given before or after language: it
arises together with it and, however, remains irreducible to it” (2017, 35).
Agamben hereby reproduces the Greek pathologizing split by positing a mu-
sic that exhibits the sayable as a remedy for the endless music and chatter that
pervades our cities today. Only a reformed music would be worthy of the
name.
THE IDEA OF MUSIC
The earlier essay in What Is Philosophy? aims to connect the sayable with the
Platonic idea. This chapter is an extended elaboration of one of Agamben’s
meditations many years earlier in the Idea of Prose. In a chapter on “The Idea
of the Name,” he distinguishes between the sayable and unsayable on the basis
of their (un)nameability. That book also contains a reflection on “The Idea of
Music,” which begins by taking up the Heideggerian themes of Stimmung and
Stimme that Agamben had treated more extensively in Language and Death.
To explicate what this idea of music might be, I want to trace the various
threads and how they come together in Agamben’s writings from his earliest
to his most recent thinking. Noting the reference back to Stimme (voice),
Language and Death defines Dasein’s Stimmung as something more originary
than Stimme, namely, “the experience that language is not the Stimme of man”
(1991, 56). The chapter on “The Idea of Music” begins seemingly off-topic by
lamenting the inability of contemporary art and literature to capture the
Stimmungen of the epoch. The aural dimension and the echo of Stimme appear
only halfway down the second page, where Agamben bemoans that “the
registering of Stimmungen, the listening to and transcription of this silent
music of the soul, came to an end once and for all in Europe around 1930”
(1995, 90).
Regardless how plausible this historical claim and the blame he goes on to
accord to mass media, this short essay helps to fill in some of the gaps and to
make sense of the claims he is making about music in these various texts. In
the Idea of Prose, Agamben advances the claim he will repeat in the more
recent text and that makes the connection yet to be elucidated in Language
and Death between Stimme, Stimmung, and the Muse: “we are the first men not
to be in tune with a Stimmung, the first men who are, as it were, absolutely
non-musical: without Stimmung, without, that is, a calling” (1995, 91). Without
using the word Stimme this time, Agamben here defines music as “the scoring
in the soul of the inaccessibility of the origin.” This short text thus paves the
way for the following remarks in What Is Philosophy? that tie these various
threads together into the closest thing we have to an Agambenian theory of
music:
It is peculiar that still in the masterful piece of twentieth-century philosophy,

Being and Time, the original opening of man to the world does not take place
through rational knowledge and language, but through a Stimmung, an emo-
tional mood that this very term refers back to the acoustic sphere (Stimme
means voice). The Muse—music—marks the splitting between man and his
language, between the voice and the logos. The primary opening of man to the
world is not logical but musical. (2017, 99–100)
This announces what—to reflect the co-originarity of music and word—I am

tempted to call Agamben’s museicology. But this theory remains incomplete
without an account of the idea of music—one that is only hinted at
tantalizingly in the Idea of Prose. An essay on “The Idea of Language,”
roughly contemporaneous with that book and later published in translation
as part of Potentialities, prefigures the appendix to What Is Philosophy? and
establishes the connection with the issue of the sayable:
We now look without veils upon language, which, having breathed out all
divinity and all unsayability, is now wholly revealed, absolutely in the begin-
ning. Like a poet who finally sees the face of his Muse, philosophy now stands
face to face with language (this is why—because “Muse” names the most
originary experience of language—Plato can say that philosophy is the “su-
preme music.” (1999, 46)
These various passages evidence a remarkable consistency across Agamben’s

work in thinking a nexus of mus(e)ic, Stimme/Stimmung, sayability, and idea.
“The Sayable and the Idea” in What Is Philosophy? thus resumes at greater
length a theme that has undergirded a lifetime of analyzing the presupposi-
tional character of language. In “The Thing Itself” (which, like “The Idea of
Language,” was also first published in 1984 and then translated in Potentiali-
ties), Agamben defines the Platonic idea as the sayability itself that remains
unsaid in what is said (1999, 33).
As he puts it 30 years later, assimilating the Platonic idea to the Stoics’s
conception of sayability, the idea should be carefully distinguished from word,
concept, and thing—from signifier, signified, and referent—and instead
names the thing only in its “sayability,” in its “being knowable” (2017, 44). The
idea is what gets lost on account of the aporetic character of self-reference. As
Agamben explains here and more extensively in the essay “Pardes” on the
structure of the Derridean trace (1999, 212), a term cannot refer to itself and at
the same time refer to its referring: “We can name the name ‘rose’ as an object
(nomen nominatum), but not the name itself in its actual designating a rose
(nomen nominans)” (2017, 56; cf. 1999, 71). What is unnameable—the anonym-
ity of language—is the power of naming. There is no name for the name—no
metalanguage by which one can name naming itself—which is why Plato can
resort only to this anaphoric construction of the thing itself so as to mark the
impossibility of the name naming itself.
Regardless of whether one remains unconvinced by Agamben’s philolog-
ical evidence or his claim to be the first to recover the origins of a thinking that
has veered off course, the significance of his reading consists in distinguishing
the Platonic idea from the abstract concept or universal. If there is a kind of
abstraction that inheres in the idea, the relation it creates between the intel-
ligible and the sensible is not that of universal to particular but one of homon-
ymy. What links the idea of the circle, for instance, to the word “circle,” to the
conception of a circle in the mind, or to a specific existent circle is that they are
all called by the same name. The idea, echoing Agamben’s theory of the
para-digm, is what lies beside each of them. The idea, on Agamben’s reading,
is neither universal nor particular but a singularity defined exclusively by its
being-called.
I therefore want to say that the idea of music, insofar as it characterized
only by its being able to be called by the same name, would have to be a music
that is worthy of being called by that name—a music worthy of the name. This
in turn leads me to situate Agamben’s Platonic idea against another idea: the
Kantian one whose dignity becomes the occasion for Derrida to think through
the idiom digne de ce nom (worthy of the name). What, then, distinguishes not
only différance but also Agamben’s idea of exemplary sayability from the
Kantian regulative idea? And what separates, if anything, Agamben and Der-
rida?
It is rather tempting to dismiss différance as a mere extension of the
Kantian idea that now thinks an “infinite deferment” of presence and a telos
that, though we may never reach it, remains our guide. Notwithstanding the
more sympathetic reading of the trace in “Pardes,” this is precisely the charge
that Agamben levels at Derrida in The Time That Remains when he notoriously
pillories deconstruction as a “thwarted messianism” (2005, 103). It is an accu-

sation Derrideans vociferously deny (Jean-Luc Nancy described it as a “refusal
to read the texts” [2007b, 435] on Agamben’s part, and Geoffrey Bennington
has described similar readings as “a mistaken understanding of Derrida”
[2016, 246]). But Derrida has also confessed to this temptation in Rogues. The
regulative idea may be “a last resort” but he “cannot swear never to give into it”
(2005b, 83; using Bennington’s modified translation [2016, 248]). And, then,
referring to this passage in the second year of The Beast and the Sovereign
seminar, he admits: “Let’s say, as I did in Rogues, that I’m tempted to act ‘as if’
I had no objections to Kant’s ‘as if’s’” (2011b, 271). Derrida, though, then
proceeds to offer three reasons for his reservations about the Kantian idea, the
first of which is most relevant to the argument at hand. Rather than an
infinitely deferred promise, he argues that the im-possible remains foreign to
the order of possibility albeit “in a nonnegative fashion” (2005b, 85). More
precisely, the im-possible is not “privative.” Privation, as distinct from nega-
tion, which simply denies a property to the predicate, deprives the thing of an
attribute that it might have had and in this way presupposes that attribute.
The im-possible refers instead to that which can never become possible.
This is because Derrida discerns in the Kantian idea a self-destructive or, as
Derrida would say, an autoimmune character. The idea would destroy itself in
reaching its telos. This point has not been lost on careful readers of Derrida,
and helpful analyses have been offered by students of Derrida, including
Bennington and Alexander García Düttmann, but Peter Szendy offers perhaps
the most readily graspable example. He asks us to consider the laudable goal
of ending debt. He points out, however, that debt necessarily “defers itself as
itself and for itself” (2017) for both an absolute debt that could never be repaid
and a complete absolution from debt that would result in the destruction of
the system and the end of debt. More abstractly, Düttmann, in a recent
keynote (2018) observed that while the power of différance tends toward
expansion, it necessarily limits itself lest it succumb to itself. While différance
triggers a desire for a pure presence and a pure absence “without ellipsis,” as
Düttmann has it—a desire for infinite différance as God or death—if it were to
reach its goal, it would by definition destroy itself. Otherwise put, it is because
the Kantian idea has an autoimmune character that the path to the telos is
always interrupted or because, as Derrida wryly puts it, “infinite différance is

finite” (2011a, 87).
If it became infinite—which its essence excludes a priori—life itself would be

returned to an impassive, intangible, and eternal presence: infinite différance,
God or death. (1974, 131; using Bennington’s modified translation [2016, 245])
The finite, though, is not something that intervenes belatedly to limit the
infinity of différance. Rather, the idea is therefore necessarily interrupted from
the very start lest the point of interruption turn into another telos. This means
that the idea does not fall short of a transcendental that it still presupposes. It
is, rather, a quasi transcendental that “scatters” (Bennington’s word) the
transcendental from the outset. Otherwise put, philosophy is always already
musical. Düttmann, on the one hand, risks falling into a dialectical reading of
différance by thinking the différance of différance as a split between the finitely
infinite and the infinitely infinite (2018; see also Düttmann 2001). Bennington,
on the other hand, recognizes that it is neither infinite nor finite and refuses to
resolve the self-differentiation of différance—what he calls its “scatter”—into
specific differences that can assume a contradictory relation with one an-
other.
What remains to be thought is how the Derridean deconstruction of the
Kantian idea relates to the Agambenian reading of the Platonic one. What
separates the im-possible from impotentiality? What Agamben and Der-
rida share is an effort to think a form of relation between the infinite and
the finite, between the possible and the impossible, that would not be one
of contradiction—something other than Hegelian determinate negation.
Derrida claims to think a relation that is neither negative nor privative.
Agamben, for his part, insists that impotentiality is not “simple privation”
but “the presence of an absence,” “the existence of this privation” (1999,
179). Impotentiality can be neither negation nor a “simple” privation that,
according to Aristotle’s definition in the Metaphysics, implies an underlying
attribute of which the privation is predicated.
At this juncture, it is worth considering whether the relation engendered
in the idea might fall into a category that Daniel Heller-Roazen (2017) has
recently excavated under the heading of the infinite name or, in Kantian
terms, infinite judgment. Instead of negation (“No A is B”) or privation (“A is
not B”), the indefinite name takes the form “A is not-B” or “A is non-B.”
Agamben frequently, albeit not consistently, uses the formulations “can not-
be” for impotentiality or “cannot not-be” for the actuality that results from
impotentiality folding back upon itself, the impotentiality of impotentiality. It
is worth pondering whether the différance of différance—the Derridean idea,
as it were—might be thought as an infinite name. The infinite name or judg-
ment works by excluding an element from an infinite set and then establishing
a second field of infinity on the basis of that exclusion. It thus rests upon a
constitutive exclusion. Does not Agamben follow a similar logic when he
conceives of the idea as a being-alongside, as a para-digm or example? Ac-
cording to Agamben,
the proper place of the example is always beside itself, in the empty space in
which its undefinable and unforgettable life unfolds. This is purely linguistic
life . . . Exemplary being is purely linguistic being. Exemplary is what is not
defined by any property, except being-called. (1993a, 10)
Paradigmaticity—which is to say the pure being-called exhibited in the idea—

consists in the exclusion of a singular element from the set it constitutes. The
field thereby produced is infinite. There is no limit to the number of examples
that can be added: there is always another example of the set of examples
already constituted at any given point. This leads Lorenzo Chiesa and Frank
Ruda to analyze Agamben’s paradigmaticity as an initial moment of negation
(the initial constitutive exclusion) followed by one of privation that is neces-
sary to ensure that there is no substantialization of the chain of examples, no
final example to end all examples. They argue persuasively that Agamben
loses what he seeks to gain through the coupling of negation and privation by
specifying the event of language as such—that is, music or the idea of music—
as a transcendental that cannot emerge insofar as it remains unnameable.
“But still the retroaction must end at one point,” they contend, “because it
cannot retroact on the structure of language, that is, pure belonging as such
or, as Agamben has it, whatever being as ‘being-called’” (2011, 167). Music thus
becomes the negative ontological substantialization of philosophy, and

Agamben is unable to escape the negativity of metaphysics.
One wonders whether the same might not be said of deconstruction, for
there has to be a point at which différance is undeconstructible—at which it
limits itself—lest it destroy itself. Which is why Bennington will translate
“infinite différance is finite” into the formula “scatter is always somewhat
gathered,” provided that this gathering is understood “in a nonteleological
sense” (2016, 249). (We should note parenthetically that Agamben follows
Heidegger in pointing out that legein does not only mean “to say” but also “to
gather” [2017, 44–45]. The idea, then, is not simply the fact of being said in
many senses but, moreover, of being gathered into presence in many ways.
And if there is an infinite naming—an infinite being-said—then there are
infinite ways of gathering and scattering.) Much hinges on how we under-
stand this “non-”—if this is not a negation or privation, are we dealing with an
infinite name and, if so, how are we to construe this non-name?
A MUSIC WORTHY OF THE NAME
One way to approach this question is to consider, Is the non-name still a

name? Is it, in other words, a name worthy of the name? Similarly, does the
nonteleological gathering of the idea not lose “the dignity of a telos” (Derrida
2011a)? The Derridean rejoinder here is that the only dignity worthy of the
name is the one that is always already a bit undignified. In an exchange late in
his life with Eduoard Glissant quoted by Bennington, Derrida comes strikingly
close to Agamben’s concerns about sayability when he addresses his habitual
uses of the phrase digne de ce nom:
When I say “a trembling worthy of the name,” this to suggest, across all the
inextricable plays of the literary or figurative uses of the word “trembling,” that
we don’t know what it means. There are uses of the word “trembling,” but the
trembling worthy of the name does not exist. But there is nonetheless an effect
of meaning; when we speak to each other, we presuppose that we understand
what “trembling” means in a language: even if it then gets infinitely compli-
cated, there is a presupposition of what is worthy of the name, of the fact that
a thing is or is not worthy of the name. If we translate that into Saussurean

language (signifier, signified, referent), we will say: the referent is worthy of
being called this i.e., worthy of its signified that is worthy of its signifier. We
presuppose an adequation. That’s the presupposition of language. I’m not
saying that it takes place: if it really existed, there would never be any misun-
derstanding, there would never be any poetry. (quoted in Bennington 2016, 268
n. 39)
The presupposition of language is not, then, merely being-called, but, surrep-

titiously, the worthiness of being-called. But Derrida’s point here is that there
is no poetry—by which we should understand no music, no musical lan-
guage—without there being a certain unworthiness.
Agamben’s idea names what we might call the indignity of language—in
short, its musicality. Or, rather, what is musical is the impossibility of an
unconditional dignity. Translating Michael Naas’s gloss on unconditional
hospitality in late Derrida (2008, 24), we might say that dignity is worthy of the
name not because it coincides with what the name names but because it is
done in the name of that with which, on account of its indignity, it never quite
coincides. Otherwise put, there would be no dignity worthy of the name that is
not enacted in some specific and hence limited and conditional dignity, and
the only dignity worthy of the name is the conditional one carried out in the
name of that unconditional dignity that inspires it. Odello asks “Could it be
that music, when cured by logos, would be equal to logos in philosophical
dignity?” (2013, 47; emphasis mine). But it is not a question of adequation—for
then there would be no music whatsoever. Rather, the only music worthy of
the name—the only “supreme music”—is that which is sounded in the name
of a music that it never quite is.
Conversely, following Bennington’s train of thought (2016, 275), if the
music of metaphysics is never quite worthy of the name, it is not for want of
dignity but because it has too much dignity. It lives up to its name too much, it
is too much itself, too sovereign, too pure—and hence undignified in its rush
to deny its ignoble origins. Another way to think about the indignity of the
metaphysical concept is as a dignity in scare quotes. In the Idea of Prose, a
reflection on “The Idea of Thought,” which (not uncoincidentally) is dedicated to
Derrida, asks what it means to put a word in quotation marks. Marking a word off
in this way creates a certain distance, suggesting that we do not fully subscribe to
it or perhaps that it is an old term to which we no longer subscribe (cf. Bennington
2010, 101). The term is somehow suspended, cited without being used. In a
vivid image, Agamben (1995, 103–104) imagines the word, enclosed by the
quotation marks that tighten around it and awaiting its moment of revenge
for its imprisonment within the walls of language. This characterization
makes sense if we consider that, in Agamben’s analysis, the word, once cited as
a term (the name “rose”), is referred to as an object and not insofar as it refers
to something else. To put a name in quotation marks is to think the name as an
object without its capacity to name—that is, without its constitutive musical-
ity and the indignity of its overflowing itself. This is the music of which we say
pejoratively (with obligatory use of scare quotes) that today goes by the name
of “music,” what some people call “music,” your so-called “music.”
The dignity of music lies in the promise that this “music” will one day live
up to that unconditional idea of music in whose name it is made. But if the
dignity of the name lies in such a promise, it too is subject to the same logic of
autoimmunity and indignity. It is a promise worthy of the name only if it also
harbors the threat of nonfulfillment. This is Agamben’s point when he insists
that “all potentiality is impotentiality” (1999, 181), by which he means all
potentiality that is not just a possibility in waiting—a potentiality worthy of the
name, we might say.
This, I suggest, is what it means to think the idea of music as a call and a
being-called. Twice in the introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, Der-
rida asserts that the idea can only be heard (1978b, 141, 142 n. 170). Bennington
elaborates this as “heard, as a call” even as he is careful to distinguish this from
the Heideggerian call of conscience (2016, 267). Later, he specifies the charac-
ter of this call, connecting it with both the idea of dignity and the experience of
language in its sayability. What Bennington here calls the “name” should be
understood in the Benjaminian sense of that term that Agamben claims is a
reading of the idea (2017, 57).
Perhaps this suspension of the referent in the name, the “desertification” of

language [quoting Derrida 1995, 55–56], is what leaves me calling to that
referent in the effort to name it and leaves me in the essential indignity of the
supplicant in the desert. (Bennington 2016, 278; emphasis mine)
Bennington is here glossing some elliptical notes that Derrida sent him by way of
response to an inquiry about his use of the idiom digne de ce nom. The notes
proceed through a series of enigmatic first-person statements. “I am unworthy”
transmutes into the form of an address to the other: “I am unworthy of you,” which
in turn leads to the declaration “I cannot speak about X, only to him. The name =
2nd and not 3rd person. I can only call.” This sense of unworthiness in relation to
the other comes across in the following explanation Derrida offered when asked
why he was not tempted to write about music:
I wonder if philosophy, which is also the birth of prose, has not meant the repres-
sion of music or song. Philosophy cannot, as such, let the song resonate in some
way. . . . For me, the first way to turn speech over, in a situation that is first of all
mine, consists of recognizing by giving passage to a woman’s voice or to women’s
voices that are already there in a certain way at the origin of speech or of my
speech. There are women’s voices. I do not write about these voices—you ask me if
I am tempted to write about the multiplicity of voices in music—I never write
about them. In a certain way, I try to let them take over—and keep—speech
through me, without me, beyond the control that I could have over them. I let
them, I try to let them speak. And this music, consequently, if there is any, I cannot
say that I sign it. I do not write on it and when it arises, I would say of it as I wrote,
I think, elsewhere about the poem: a poem: I never sign it. The music of voices, if
there is any, I do not sign it. I cannot precisely have it at my disposal or in my
control. Music, if there is any [s’il y en a] and if it happens in the text, mine or that of
others, if there is any music, first of all I listen to it. It is the experience itself of
impossible appropriation. The most joyous and the most tragic. . . . Let’s listen.
(Derrida 1995, 394–95; emphasis mine on “if there is any”)
What is striking here is not simply the hesitation about appropriating music—
something we also find in his characterization of the philosopher’s ear in “Tym-
pan” (Derrida 1990, xii), for example—but another kind of humility in the face of
music, a sense that no words of his would be worthy of music. But I want to stress
that this indignity of prose should not be understood as inadequacy, because

there is a tiny idiom here that, as it were, deflates music at the same time, not by
imprisoning it in quotation marks by but freeing it from a regulative ideal: “if there
is any [s’il y en a].” In his book on Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida discusses the signifi-
cance of this idiom and its relation to negation:
I perceive that the syntagma that has imposed itself on me these past few years
(or decades), even as I insisted on the multiplicity of deconstructions, hasn’t
been “there is no ‘the’ . . . ” but “if there is any” [s’il y en a] (the pure and
unconditional in so many forms . . . ). Each time, it was necessary to point to
the possible (the condition of possibility) as to the impossible itself. And “if
there is any” doesn’t say “there is none,” but rather there isn’t anything that
could make room for . . . any determining judgment. It is another way of in-
flecting the “there is no ‘the.’” It isn’t the same, precisely, for here are two
irreducibly different “deconstructive” gestures . . . It is necessary to account
for this analogy or affinity, to say deconstruction in the singular again, in order
to say it in the plural, in the “singular plural”—and explain at least why in the
two syntagmas, the “there is” turns to a conditional (“if there is any”) in one
instance and to a negative modality (“there is no ‘the’ . . .”) in the other. (2005a,
287–88)
“If there is any” is another way of saying “infinite différance is finite.” “There is
no ‘the’” by contrast, succumbs to the temptation of the infinitely finite, of
death, and hence chooses infinity over finitude. “If there is any” instead holds
open the undecidability between the infinitely infinite and the infinitely finite,
between God and death, music and philosophy. What is significant is that it
does so without recourse to the negative. To say of a name “there is any” is,
rather, an affirmation that reopens the unconditionality of what is called by
that name. If Agamben’s interpretation of the infinite judgment is to think
something between negation and affirmation—in the guise of the middle voice
in The Use of Bodies (2015), for example—Derrida’s deconstruction of the
infinite name lies, I suggest, in the double affirmation.
In a reading of the Derridean double affirmation as a destruction of Kan-
tian infinite judgment, Roland Végső (2010) nonetheless argues that Derrida
ultimately retains différance as a transcendental upon which autoimmunity

cannot retroact—which shows that Derrida comes up against the same diffi-
culty as Agamben. Insofar as there is a limit to the expansive power of dif-
férance because it is necessarily self-limiting, différance is, in Végső’s view,
another name for the undeconstructible. To adapt Derrida’s statement on
justice as the undeconstructible (2002, 104–5), the idea is what gives decon-
struction its movement, what justifies it—what dignifies it with the name
“deconstruction.” Végső discerns in the undeconstructible a certain axiom-
atic character of deconstruction. And there is certainly textual support for
this. When Derrida speaks of the undeconstructible as justice, he also con-
cedes that there is an “axiom of deconstruction . . . on the basis of which it has
always set itself in motion and which links it, as with the future itself, to
otherness, to the priceless dignity of otherness” (2002). In Specters of Marx, he
states that the spectrality of deconstruction (its autoimmunity in the lan-
guage of the later writings) resembles an axiom, more precisely an axiom
concerning axiomatics itself, concerning some supposedly undemonstrable
obvious fact with regard to whatever has worth, value, quality (axia). And even
and especially dignity . . . that unconditional dignity (Würdigkeit) that Kant
placed higher, precisely, than any economy, any compared or comparable
value, any market price (Marktpreis) (Derrida 1994, xi–xx).
If the dignity of the idea lies in its promise of an X other than the specific,
conditional version of X we find in the world today, this dignity is certainly
recognizable as a fundamental driving force of deconstruction. But it is un-
clear whether deconstruction is in fact axiomatic (or only “resembles” it, as
Derrida has it in Specters), and, even if it were, what is the content of this
axiom. It certainly does not state, “Nothing is undeconstructible,” but equally
cannot say (because différance is self-limiting), “Everything is decon-
structible.” It could, though, say that “Some things (but not all) are decon-
structible” and at the same time that “Something is undeconstructible.” With
such subcontraries, both may be true but both cannot be false.
And yet this is precisely what Derrida calls into question when he does not
say simply that “the undeconstructible is justice” but that “the undecon-
structible, if there is such a thing, is justice” (2002, 104). This is “the axiom of
deconstruction” on the basis of which it is drawn to be worthy of the name:
“Something is undeconstructible, if there is any such thing.” And that is why

deconstruction can only resemble an axiom because that axiomaticity is itself
subject to conditionality, indignity, autoimmunity, and so forth. We can
therefore understand why Derrida says that this axiom that différance resem-
bles is “more precisely an axiom concerning axiomatics itself.” The axiom of
deconstruction should be understood as both objective and objective geni-
tive: (1) the concept of “axiom” that deconstruction elaborates and names—
which turns out to be something like an axiomaticity without axiom, the
axiom as im-possible, the axiom, if there is any—and that is also (2) the axiom
in whose name and on the basis of which specific, conditioned axioms (the
undeconstructibility of justice, dignity, music, and so forth) are upheld—and
which therefore renders them undecidable.
This is why Derrida suggests, in what resembles an axiom, that the only
response to music is to listen: a philosophy worthy of the name is one that
listens to music and its musicality—to the cry of literature, as Hélène Cixous
would have it, or to Derrida’s “animality of the letter” (1978a, 72–73).3 Music
and philosophy thus do not contradict one another or negate one another.
One does not have what the other lacks. Rather, they affirm one another and in
so doing return each other to the undignified superfluity of their musicality.
We might, then, add another to the list of expressions of double affirmation
elaborated by Derrida and his followers (the ones, that is, who, in the Derrid-
ean sense of double affirmation, open his “yes” onto that of the other, interrupt
it, [in]dignify with a response): oui oui, amen amen, hear hear, come come,
now now, ha ha.4 La musique, oui. La philosophie, oui. La musique la philoso-
phie. Oui oui. La la. And why stop there? La la la la la!
NOTES
1. Derrida’s later writings since Glas (1986) make frequent reference to phantasm, fictions,
and fables; see in particular the second year (2011b) of The Beast and the Sovereign seminar
in which the phantasm is a recurring figure and also the beginning of the first year of that
seminar (2009), where he discusses fables. See also chapter 10 of Naas (2008) and Naas
(2015) for a reading of the phantasm in Derrida.
2. The seminar is published in French as Derrida 2017a. An English translation by David Wills
is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press, of which the first part of the fifth
session under question here has been published as 2017b. The quotations that follow are
drawn from this published translation.
3. Cixous begins her book (2013) with the homonymous repetition of the exclamatory ayaï aïe
ai aì. It is perhaps also possible to characterize Jean-Luc Nancy’s (2007a) conception of
listening as resonant referral as a kind of multiple affirmation.
4. The first two are Derrida’s own (1985, 14; 1992), the next addition is John Llewelyn’s (1986,
123), and the remaining three Bennington’s (1988, 113).
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A Music Worthy of the Name

Or, Agamben’s Museicology

MUSIC AND LANGUAGE

the overflowing of philosophy by a ‘thinking’ that is no longer simply philo-

losophy is not impossible because it is always belatedly contaminated by

eliminate it by reestablishing itself, phantasmatically, as being originally un-

THE IDEA OF MUSIC

It is peculiar that still in the masterful piece of twentieth-century philosophy,

This announces what—to reflect the co-originarity of music and word—I am

These various passages evidence a remarkable consistency across Agamben’s

pillories deconstruction as a “thwarted messianism” (2005, 103). It is an accu-

always interrupted or because, as Derrida wryly puts it, “infinite différance is

If it became infinite—which its essence excludes a priori—life itself would be

Paradigmaticity—which is to say the pure being-called exhibited in the idea—

becomes the negative ontological substantialization of philosophy, and

A MUSIC WORTHY OF THE NAME

One way to approach this question is to consider, Is the non-name still a

a thing is or is not worthy of the name. If we translate that into Saussurean

The presupposition of language is not, then, merely being-called, but, surrep-

Perhaps this suspension of the referent in the name, the “desertification” of

that this indignity of prose should not be understood as inadequacy, because

ultimately retains différance as a transcendental upon which autoimmunity

“Something is undeconstructible, if there is any such thing.” And that is why

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