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These words, "No music, not now!" appear in Phrase, Lacoue-Labarthe's book of poems and prose, published in 2000. They come toward the end of "Phrase XVII," which is called "Scène." "Pas de musique!" may well be the words that most attached me to this book when I first read through it; they are the words I've remembered it by ever since. This is probably because when I had the good fortune to know Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, at least a little, I shared an interest in music with him. He knew a great deal of music very well, of course. Once he mentioned to me, in what by some stretch of the imagination one might have taken for a mild, joking boast, that in the past he'd briefly played sax in a jazz band, and that he would have liked most to be a drummer.
So I think he loved music. But maybe not the music in it.
I am thinking, when I say this, of a rather comical anecdote recounted by Emmanuel Hocquard, the writer whose works I happened to be reading and puzzling over when Nidesh Lawtoo and Paola Marrati kindly invited me to participate in this workshop. Hocquard recounts that he had once been so taken by Paul Badura Skoda's way of playing the piano, he had seriously considered becoming a pianist himself; but there had been a problem—he did not like music. "I never could see," Hocquard writes, "how to play the piano without the music that went along with it" ("Histoire" 469).
So he gave up on the piano and went for poetry instead.
Since this anecdote was, as it happens, one of the first things that caught my attention in Hocquard's work and got me poring over his writing, I associate it with Lacoue-Labarthe's "No music." It seems to suggest the same odd taste that I sense in Lacoue-Labarthe—a taste—but can you really call it taste?—for music but without the music in it.1
I can think of a few other writers from Lacoue-Labarthe's and Hocquard's generation, and the preceding one, who were or are musicians, and take a very dim view of music. Pascal Quignard, for example, claims to hate it (The Hatred of Music)....