ABSTRACT

My title speaks to a duality in language hinted at in the early work of Nietzsche, a duality that challenges the traditional relation between language and music. Of course, rhetoric and music have often been conjoined. By this, I mean more than that forms of music and language come together, as in poetry, chant, and song. I mean that music and rhetoric inform each other not simply in the generation of such hybrid arts, but in the recursive development of discourses about music and rhetoric, whereby music provides a framework for understanding and practicing rhetoric, and vice versa. This is not to say that they are the same, but it is to suggest that rhetoric has not attended to how intimate they in fact are-and this is crucial-on music’s terms, as opposed to rhetoric’s or philosophy’s terms. It is an understatement to say that the relations between the two are not equal. Overwhelmingly, the intellectual tradition has considered music suspicious if not dangerous. There have been two interrelated reasons for this: first, music’s indeterminacy forestalls the kinds of control we seemingly achieve over language; second, while both music and language induce feelings, sensations, and emotions, music has been considered the more effective in doing so. One sees the problem: music is not only more affectively powerful, but indeterminately so, which opens the door, it is argued, for all manner of impropriety, decadence, and ill-virtue. To the extent that the language of rationality is elevated as the highest universal good and the key to ethical life, music and affect have been held in suspicion and tightly controlled.