Abstract

ABSTRACTTranslated into English in 2004, Vladimir Jankelevitch’s book Music and the Ineffable has made a significant impact in anglophone musicology. I argue that the figure of the feminine is central to his understanding of music and musical ineffability, and use feminist philosophers’ interpretations and critiques of the figure of the feminine in his close friend and colleague Emmanuel Levinas’s work to unpack the gender politics of Jankelevitch’s book and the secondary literature on it. I focus on the figure of the feminine in Time and the Other and Totality and Infinity, which are works we have evidence Jankelevitch read. There, Levinas describes the feminine as a “form of being” that is “inexhaustible, infinite” and thus “refuses thematization positively”. This is nearly identical to Jankelevitch’s definition of musical ineffability as “fertile inexplicability”. Not only is Jankelevitch’s concept of musical ineffability identical to Levinas’s concept of the feminine, it is also couched in gendered terms throughout Music and the Ineffable. “Musical ineffability” in Jankelevitch’s sense is thus a parallel to Levinas’s concept of the feminine. I then read Jankelevitch and his interpreters in musicology through feminist scholarship on Levinas to show how the former two succumb to the same ultimately patriarchal flaws as the latter. For example, just as Levinas prioritizes paternity and the reproduction of patriarchy, muiscologist Carolyn Abbate uses Jankelevitch as the white masculine other in which musicology recognizes itself as both different and the same.