ABSTRACT
'Jacques Derrida [...] has written almost nothing specifically about music.' Whether one can agree with Richard Kurth's affirmation 1 depends on how one interprets the words 'specifically about'. Derrida never wrote at length on a specific work of music, but scattered throughout his own work are references to music that play a crucial role in a certain articulation of his thought. Those references, though numerous, always remain curiously undeveloped, for which there is a very good reason. Music, in Derrida's writing, is at the centre of a series of paradoxes on which his art depends, paradoxes that must be repeatedly lived out, but never argued through.
