Philosopher’s Touch

Francois Noudelmann is professor of philosophy at l'Universite Paris VIII. He has taught at The State University of New York, Stony Brook, and Johns Hopkins University, and he has served as president of the College International de Philosophie and host of France-Culture's radio program Philosophy Fridays. His publications include Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Image et absence. Essai sur le regard. Brian J. Reilly is visiting assistant professor of French literature at Johns Hopkins University.

• Intuition The Off-Beat Piano Why I Am a Great Pianist The Piano Touches Me Resonances

Who before Francois Noudelmann has shone a spotlight on great thinkers enamored with the piano? In the lives of Sartre, Nietzsche, and Barthes, exercising at the keyboard for pleasure was crucial. Yet their writing about music is relatively scant, implicit, or even, sometimes, discordant with their work. Breaking boldly with the academism all too common on the French scene of writing, Noudelmann's The Philosopher's Touch reveals an entirely new dimension of these figures' writing styles and thinking patterns. His piano is a harmonics of three disparate philosophers. -- Robert Harvey, professor of French and comparative literatures, State University of New York, Stony Brook Amateur pianist and philosopher Francois Noudelmann was jolted into action when he saw a video of Sartre at the piano. Like a recurring traumatic flashback, the Sartrean performance touches off a series of reflections on the covert practices of three highly attuned thinkers. The relation to music, private and protected, offers another register by which to read the unsayable in the imposing works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Roland Barthes. Ever vying with language for sovereignty, music disrupts the implacable habits of linguistic positing and delivers these exemplary writers to the scene of their greatest vulnerability. -- Avital Ronell, New York University and the European Graduate School, author of The Test Drive and Finitude's Score: Essays for the End of the Millenium An elegant ode to the emotional and intellectual importance of music and solitude.Publishers WeeklyPublishers Weekly Publishers Weekly a remarkable and revealing book. Library Journal Noudelmann's book is musically sophisticated and informed by deep knowledge of thepiano...This little book is a unique chapter in the aesthetics of thepiano, and serves as a wonderful opening beat for a suite of others to follow. -- Daniel Herwitz Notre Dame Philosophical Review ...essays that pique the reader's interest, rather than bludgeoning it. -- Scott McLemee Inside Higher Ed The book probes the meanings of these elective affinities, and speculates on both the yawning gaps and hidden passageways between intellectual and corporeal pleasures, the travails of the mind and the secret life of the fingers. -- Jeremy Eichler Boston Globe A musical reverie, a meditation, best if savoured slowly. -- Cynthia Peck The Vienna Review of Books In today's philosophical culture, where thinkers seem to have succumbed to a fashion of soulless scholasticism, the significance of an invigorating book like Noudelmann's is difficult to overestimate. -- Costica Bradatan The European Legacy Whether in a text that is scholarly or meditative, and whether, as Barthes put it in S/Z, a text is 'readerly' or 'writerly', music and letters never did comfortably embrace each other, for all that we need them to. Kudos to Noudelmann for offering something expertly imaginative, trying to meet that need. Music and Letters