Musica, Linguaggio, Escrizione

Jean-Luc Nancy in his essay “Prayer Demythified” explains the possibility of a “language” able to say the “Name”, i.e. the name of God, without saying it: the ultimate possibility of saying stays in the failure of its task, of the intentionality that belongs to its saying (for which Nancy creates the neologism excrire). In the same essay Nancy makes one of his few references to Adorno’s philosophy of music: to what extent does music represent another way of “saying” and “praying”, compared to language? Considering Nancy’s and Adorno’s reflections on language and music the aim of this paper is to understand the common bond of all these forms of “saying” and “communicating”, and whether if at their depths lies a more dangerous and theurgic desire to tempt (Versuchen) the name of God as a necessary condition of any theopatic, passive praying.