Music and language in the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben

Abstract

The general objective of this article is to present the reflections of Giorgio Agamben (1942), Italian philosophy, about music and its intrinsic relationship with language. The analysis focuses on the works in which the philosopher addresses the theme, specifically selecting the passages in which the music-language nexus appears with greater relevance. Because it is a theme on which Agamben focuses, unsystematically, over the course of four decades, the specific objective of the article is organized as scattered references in the philosopher's work as a whole and to comment on them. From them, it clarifies the definitions of music as “original opening” of language and of philosophy as “supreme music” presented by Agamben in the aforementioned works. In this sense, the specific purpose of the article is to present a systematic study on the music-language nexus, whose function is to allow the understanding of a smaller part of an even bigger and more central problem for the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben: the nature of language itself.

Key words: Agamben; language; music; philosophy.