ABSTRACT
Jacques Derrida has written almost nothing specifically about music'. Derrida never wrote at length on a specific work of music, but scattered throughout his own work are references to music that play a crucial role in a certain articulation of his thought. Derrida maintains the old association between the poetic and the musical, the tradition according to which the poetic is defined by an obscure but inescapable relation to music. Translation, an impossible translation out of an incomprehensible language, is a common enough metaphor for such negotiations between love, music, poetry, and language, and by no means a novel one. The music is somewhere between studium and punctum; somewhere in the 'rapport' between them; somewhere in the composition between them; and Derrida adds to the musical sense of the word 'composition' the sense of ongoing negotiation and compromise.
