ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author examines Jacques Lacan’s famous schema of desire that is, appropriately, broken up like a sonata in three or four movements. Desire is an effect of speech, but the author want to demonstrate topographically, following Lacan, how desire also operates in an audio unconscious where speech is absent or misperceived and music is the privileged form. Lacan’s subject of the unconscious is defined against both Hegel’s philosophical subject of self-consciousness and the subject of science that the latter assumes is ejected from the objectivity of its discourse. Desire emerges, in relation to music, through the delusion that it speaks, that it can convey things—feeling, emotion, truth—more than words can say. For Lacan, “the drive is what becomes of demand when the subject vanishes from it”: that is to say, the subject of language, speech.
