The Philosopher’s Touch
Sartre, Nietzsche, and Barthes at the Piano
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- $41.99
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- $41.99
Publisher Description
Renowned philosopher and prominent French critic François Noudelmann engages the musicality of Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Roland Barthes, all of whom were amateur piano players and acute lovers of the medium. Though piano playing was a crucial art for these thinkers, their musings on the subject are largely scant, implicit, or discordant with each philosopher's oeuvre. Noudelmann both recovers and integrates these perspectives, showing that the manner in which these philosophers played, the composers they adored, and the music they chose reveals uncommon insight into their thinking styles and patterns.
Noudelmann positions the physical and theoretical practice of music as a dimension underpinning and resonating with Sartre's, Nietzsche's, and Barthes's unique philosophical outlook. By reading their thought against their music, he introduces new critical formulations and reorients their trajectories, adding invaluable richness to these philosophers' lived and embodied experiences. The result heightens the multiple registers of being and the relationship between philosophy and the senses that informed so much of their work. A careful reader of music, Noudelmann maintains an elegant command of the texts under his gaze and appreciates the discursive points of musical and philosophical scholarship they involve, especially with regard to recent research and cutting-edge critique.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this revealing look at an unexamined commonality in three major philosophers' lives, Noudelmann, French philosopher and critic, examines amateur piano players Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Roland Barthes in light of their brief writings on the subject, which are curiously and frequently at odds with their interests and putative tastes. Sartre, for example, a fierce proponent of most cutting-edge art forms and revolutionary social movements, preferred to play Chopin's sentimental, conventional pieces in private. (And in spite of his many political engagements, he made time each day to play the piano.) Nietzsche, stentorian Wagner enthusiast, also had a surprisingly soft spot for Chopin, finding in the Polish composer's subtlety a different dimension of romanticism than what Wagner represented. Barthes, another daily piano player and renowned musicologist, disliked academic discussions on music, preferring instead to speak about the subject "from his own emotions and his own playing." Instead of working toward technical mastery, Barthes pursued "privileged wandering, fragmentation, and sensible caprice," enjoying exploring his vast collection of scores rather than perfecting one particular piece. An elegant ode to the emotional and intellectual importance of music and solitude.
