Music, madness, and the unworking of language2008

"In this study, John T. Hamilton investigates how literary, philosophical, and psychological treatments of music and madness challenge the limits of representation and thereby create a crisis of language. He builds his theses around the decidedly autobiographical impulse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Here, musical experience and mental disturbance disrupt the expression of referential thought, illuminating irreducible aspects of the self before language can work them back into a discursive system." "Hamilton begins in the 1750s with Diderot's Neveu de Rameau, situating the text in relation to Rousseau's reflections on the voice and the burgeoning discipline of musical aesthetics. Tracing the link between music and madness in the work of Herder, Hegel, Wackenroder,...