Let us try first of all to describe systematically the musical act – this description will be nuanced and rectified as we proceed – according to the new paradigm, 'abstract' or 'scientific' in spirit, that we have evoked below and which we shall go on to define more precisely.

We cannot be certain that music is a position or the taking up of a position before the World, a decision of position towards the object or the motif. Before the ear, the hand, the torso are implicated in it, perhaps it is from the most obscure and the most irreflexive depth of the body that the musical act departs. Not from the organ-body or body as organ-support, from the substance-body, but from a body absolutely without organs, from a stance rather than a position. The musician does not throw itself into the World, it replaces itself firstly in its body as in a stance, and renounces all corporeal or psychic intentionality. 'Stance' – this word means: to be rooted in oneself, to be held within one's own immanence, to be at one's station rather than in a position relative to the 'motif'. If there is a musical thinking, it is first and foremost of the order of a test of one's naïve self rather than that of the decision, of auto-impression rather than that of expression, of the self-inherence of the body rather than that of being-in-the-World. A thinking that is rooted in rather than upon a corporeal base. What is the body as musical base, stripped of intentionality? It is that which concentrates in itself an undivided and precisely non-intentional hearing-force. What body fro music? Precisely not the phenomenological body as part of the World or as thrown-into-the-World, but an originary and transcendental arche-body that is from the outset 'hearing' through and through; but an as-yet un-objectivating hearing. Musical thought, rather than being primarily relational, differential, positional, is first of all real, in that sort of undivided experience, lived as non-positional self-hearing-force, which has no need to posit itself simultaneously on the object, to divide with itself, to identify itself with the World and to reflect itself in itself. The ultimate musical lived experience – that of the immediate self- and hearing-applicataion, the very passion or affect of hearing – is too naïve to be anything other than an indivisible flux of hearing, of which it is not even certain whether it will be divided by the instrument. This hearing-force resists the World through its very passivity and its impotence to separate from itself and to objectivate itself. The existence of the musician does not precede its essence; it is its body as force, indivisible into organs, that precedes the World.

There is therefore – and this is exactly the same thing – a veritable musical transcendental reduction of the World, in the sense that the logic which makes for the coherence of the latter, which assures it and permanently renews its transcendence and the inexhaustibility of its horizons, that this logic, which also governs everyday life in the World, is as if globally inhibited, invalidated in a stroke by the musical stance. This stance consists less in situating oneself in relation to the World, in retreating, coming back to it and surveying, overflying it, than in definitively abstracting oneself from it, in recognizing oneself from the start as distant, as the precessor, even; and hence, not in returning to the World, but in taking it as a simple support, or as an occasion to focus on something else – what, we do not yet know. However, if there is a type of intentionality proper to music, if it no longer directs itself upon it, it does so, no doubt so as to frame a universal note which belongs rather to objective fiction. This reduction is that of a stance, and is assured by the lived-body in the most subjective or immanent of manners. Not by a rational or bloodless subject, or indeed one reduced, for example to an ear; but by a body as absolute, uncircumventable requisite of the musical act. The latter is at least (but not only) this stance, that which permits delivery, in a stroke, from all the onto-musicological interpretations that are merely circular but which divide themselves into the idealist, the materialist, the technologist, the empiricist, etc. Music is not a return to the things, but a return to the body as undivided hearing-force. Further, this is not a return, but a departure upon that basis constituted by the greatest naïvety, a naïvety which, inversely, makes possible an almost absolute disenchantment, like a disinterest for the World at the moment when the musician tunes. The musician does not think the World according to the World, but according to their most subjective body which, precisely for this reason, is what is most 'objective', most real in any case, in the musical act. There is thus what we shall call a musical finitude. It is more immediately apparent than in other arts. It is a refusal to survey or accompany the World or History in extenso; a subjection to the body and, consequently, to the singularity and the finitude of the motif. Here, finitude does not mean the reception of an external given, but an impotency in regard to oneself, a powerlessness to leave oneself so as to go amongst things – the intrinsic finitude of a hearing condemned to hear according to itself and to remain in itself – but precisely without being, for all that, a rational subject 'listening down on' the World. The musician spontaneously prohibits itself from exceeding or surpassing its stance, its hearing, its instrument, its motif. Such intrinsic finitude means that the 'musical' body is not a site or a place, but a utopian body whose very reality, whose type of reality qua 'force', leaves it with no place in the World. Music is a utopian activity: not because of its objects, but because of the way it grasps them, or even more, because of the origin, located in itself alone, of this way of listening.

…