Music, Body, and Language: Other jouissance in musical performance

Abstract

Drawing on the contributions of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Alain Didier-Weill, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Bernard Sève in the fields of anthropology, psychoanalysis, phenomenology of perception, and philosophy of music, this study investigates transformations in the musician’s experience of self and body during performance. It hypothesizes that such experiences may be associated with a state of musical ecstasy, while also analyzing the modes through which this experience is established and dissolved, as well as the role played by the relationship and negotiation with the instrument in this process. To this end, we adopted a qualitative approach grounded in case study methodology, with data collection based on unstructured interviews. We present testimonies from two musicians – a bassist and a guitarist – whose accounts contribute to the analysis of the proposed questions. The reports indicate that, during performance, musicians may experience transformations in their relationship with both their body and themselves, produced by the incidence of music. When silence is reinscribed into the scene, the musician returns to the state preceding the transformation. Thus, the musical experience reveals the body as a privileged site for the inscription of music’s effects. In psychoanalytic terms, such effects may be related to the Lacanian formulation of the Other jouissance.