Beyond Lacoue-Labarthe’s Alma Mater : mus(e)ic, myth and modernity.

Addressing the role of music in Lacoue-Labarthe’s thinking, this article identifies a tension between his commitment to a nostalgic narrative that insists on the maternal/uterine origins of music’s emotional essence and his critique of the way that music, in its distinctly modern construction, is figured in relation to a nostalgic attempt to recoup the emotive power attributed to the mythological ancient model it assumes as its (illusory/absent) origin. Though this article highlights a problematic repetition of the mythologizing of music’s maternal origins, by drawing on Lacoue-Labarthe’s own critical understanding of musical modernity it also poses the possibility of moving beyond characterizing music and the maternal-feminine as timeless givens that precede our categories of analysis