Marco Parmeggiani

Nietzsche understood nihilism as a characteristic form of contemporary life. But it was Heidegger who located in technology its specific mode of existence in the modern world, and, in his final period, discovered in the cybernetic the most recent form of the technological. The arts, and music in particular, are a privileged place to clarify this problem, because it is here that digital and computer technology becomes most evident and problematic. All this implies a transformation of the musical experience into a cybernetic experience, both in listening and distribution, as well as in music making, composition and performance. The present paper aims to study what this means and what its modalities are, using Heideggerian concepts and examining some developments in electroacoustic and computer music in recent decades.

In his later years, Nietzsche restores the privileged position he gave to tragic art in The Birth of Tragedy. A careful reading shows that, despite the strong opposition between them, the tragic spirit and Romantic pessimism have more than one thing in common, especially when one focuses less on the theoretical issues and more on the impact of each theme on the human psyche. This paper aims to answer two questions: (1) what is the element that can be a distinguishing feature in relation to the effects of each, and (2) how does this element operate differently in the tragic spirit and in romantic pessimism. To answer these questions, it is not enough to invoke Nietzsche’s distinction between abundance and exhaustion. What is needed is a careful analysis of the complex role of action and contemplation in the particular kind of aesthetic experience on which ancient Greek tragedy is based.

In Nietzsche’s mature work reflections, marked by the elaboration of a semiotic conception of music, pain plays a central role in music. In order to extract its full potential, it is very fruitful to confront it with Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophy of music and his reading of Nietzschean texts. All that will be aimed at the main task of this study: to extract the guidelines of a ‘philosophical semiotics of music’, as a proposal for the present. And as a conclusion, its application to Alban Berg’s work.

The philosophical model of constellation has been applied to contemporary musical form, but it reveals too many limitations when confronted with late Adorno’s model of informal music. Once the component of heteronomy, in hierarchical and centered structures of traditional music, has been overcome, it reemerges in the opposite type, the decentered, non-hierarchical or free structures, between the opposites of serialism and aleatoric music. Therefore, the model of informal music, as an "image of freedom", pursues the realization of a musical-aesthetic nominalism that is subtracted from all forms of heteronomy, ancient or modern. To do this, it has to achieve the 'actually constructed totality' of the work, integrating in it the opposite of free subjectivity.

The concept of vagueness is essential to understand some Nietzsche’s main ideas about the relationship between language and reality. In this way, is it precisely vagueness, and not ambiguity or polysemy, which characterizes verbal-conceptual language for Nietzsche? In order to answer this question, firstly I will summarize the functions of the cognitive process, underlying all types of languages. Secondly, I will identify the Nietzsche’s closer concept in relation with the modern concept of ‘vagueness’ and interpret it following the rst section. Thirdly, I will brie y examine what type of symbolic language is mu- sic. Finally, I will develop a comparison between verbal-conceptual language and musical language concerning the property of vagueness. The paper approach will be more theoretical than historio-graphical, because it focuses on the potential of Nietzsche’s thought regarding both the philosophy of language and the philosophy of music.

It is difficult to place Deleuze’s philosophy within the hermeneutic paradigm that characterizes the philosophy of the second half of the XXth century, since he contrasted always the experimentation principle to the concepts of understanding and interpretation. Deleuze intended to forge his philosophy as experimental thought, as an alternative to the intents to establish everywhere ‘interpretation machines’. This paper thus seeks to sketch, the singularities of Deleuze’s experimentalism, from his practice as a historian of phi- losophy, to his project of a philosophical constructivism.