This is a pioneering attempt to rearticulate the relationship between music and the problem of mimesis, of presentation and re-presentation. Four "scenes" compose this book, all four of them responses to Wagner: two by French poets (Baudelaire and Mallarme), two by German philosophers (Heidegger and Adorno).

"Lacoue-Labarthe's work is a thought-provoking book: the reader embarks on an intellectual journey that draws connections between music, theater, aesthetics, philosophy, and history from ancient Greece to the present. . . . Lacoue-Labarthe offers a point of departure for a new aesthetic of art, one appropriate to the philosophical problems of the 20th Century." -- Wagner Notes"This is a remarkable book. Not since Theodor Adorno has a theoretical work approached music in as broad, incisive and provocative a way as does Lacoue-Labarthe's Musica Ficta. The book opens up an entirely new perspective for reinterpreting the relations between music, theater, literature, and the philosophical-aesthetical tradition that has largely governed our understanding of those media. For the first time, to my knowledge, recent analyses of representation are brought to bear on the function of music, revealing its particular affinities to theatricality. Musica Ficta breaks new ground." -- Samuel Weber * University of California, Los Angeles *"A remarkable book. Not since Theodor Adorno has a theoretical work approached music in as broad, incisive, and provocative a way. The book opens up an entirely new perspective for reinterpreting the relations between music, theater, literature, and the philosophical-aesthet ic tradition that has largely governed our understanding of those media." -- Samuel Weber * University of California, Los Angeles *