Description: This is a pioneering attempt to rearticulate the relationship between music and the problem of mimesis, of presentation and re-presentation. Four "scenes" compose this book, all four of them responses to Wagner: two by French poets (Baudelaire and Mallarmé), two by German philosophers (Heidegger and Adorno).
Review Quotes: "This is a remarkable book. Not since Theodor Adorno has a theoretical work approached music in as broad, incisive and provocative a way as does Lacoue-Labarthe's Musica Ficta. The book opens up an entirely new perspective for reinterpreting the relations between music, theater, literature, and the philosophical-aesthetical tradition that has largely governed our understanding of those media. For the first time, to my knowledge, recent analyses of representation are brought to bear on the function of music, revealing its particular affinities to theatricality. Musica Ficta breaks new ground."--Samuel Weber, University of California, Los Angeles