Deadline: 18.03.2020

The relationship between music and language has been complicated since the advent of post-Enlightenment musical aesthetics. On one hand, as Eduard Hanslick insists in Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854), music’s content consists solely of sound forms in motion; on the other hand, music does seem to have some sort of para-discursive semantic quality: “it is a language we speak and understand, but which we are unable to translate”.

Suspended between the project of a musical semantics and the myth of music’s ineffability, the philosophy of music has never broken its problematic link with the philosophy of language. Recently, analytic philosophy and neuroscience have addressed the question of the emotional content conveyed by music, taking advantage of new conceptual tools and empirical data previously unavailable; in this way, however, they have had to deal again with questions about the sense and meaning of musical experience.

There has been a long talk, with ups and downs, about the languages of politics – which, for its part, in the post-media chattering, is today more aphasic than ever. A little less it has been discussed the political nature of language, and even more sporadically the surreptitiously political forms that the philosophy of language may assume, in its various epistemological patterns and theoretical features. The two paths, among other things, can easily and happily meet.

As regards the first line of research, semiotics, above all, has proven to provide several interesting contributions: starting from the pioneering works of Eco on political language as a form of communication constituted by a double recipient, and of Fabbri on political discourse as an arena of strategic moves and tactical countermoves, passing through the reflections of Landowski on the abstract configurations of the political theatre and of the role that passions play in it, up to the most recent research of many authors around the new forms of politics, often linked to online communication, social media and (perhaps) the consequent global spread of populism. But there are other working hypotheses, be they markedly cognitivist (which find their cues especially in some studies of Lakoff) or in terms of philosophy and sociology of science (which instead refer to the research of Latour and his school).