ABSTRACT
Rptition is repetition in the presence of a given global telos, a goal with respect to the thing repeated. The telos, however admirable, does not change or grow, and the thing repeated changes inessentially and perhaps only in small increments from presentation to presentation, yet the process of successive approximation imparts a certain wan glow of pseudo-life to the series and thus to its components, les revenants. The musical instrument is a paradigm of such quantified, repeatable doses: Des Esseintess mouth organ, and his syntax of smells. Music, like empirical science, is grounded on the repeatable experience. A thing endures for us, temporally, by virtue of abstraction from changes-of-context; things boundaries, which hold it in existence for us as a cupped hand holds water, are constructed for it by us by means of an act of abstraction, drawing the thing out from its context. Such ontology encounters problems both practical and theoretical.
