Jankelevitch/Levinas
When Jankelevitch says: “music refers[s] to an infinity of possible texts,” and thus that its infinite, ambigous meaning is “a secret far more mysterious than that of time yet-to-come and its potential novelty” (62), he’s clearly referring to Levinas’s late-work idea of dia-chrony, a-venir (future/to come), etc. It SEEMS like (I have to think this through more carefully; so far it’s just a decently-founded hunch) Jankelevitch is using “music” and “musical ineffability” in a way parallel to the way Levinas uses “the feminine” (in the early work, e.g., Totality & Infinity) and “time” (in the later work, e.g., Otherwise than Being). Interestingly, in Jankelevitch, musical ineffability is both feminized and temporal. So it may be that we can read him as bridging early & late Levinas. It would be interesting also to think about the role of sonic metaphors in Levinas—they’re there (I wrote a lot about this in grad seminars a decade ago)…
