Conclusion

The concluding chapter provides summary observations of the book’s themes that highlight the complex, multifaceted dimension of conversion throughout twenty centuries of Christian history. These include the convert’s cognizance of divine presence; the crucial importance of historical context (political, religious, institutional, and socioeconomic factors); continuity and discontinuity (how much of the new displaces the old in conversion?); nominal, incomplete, and “true” conversions; personal testimonies and narratives (the autobiographical impulse attests to the converted life); the role of gender; identity and the self; agency (are converts actors or are they being acted upon?); the mechanisms behind and the motivations for conversion; the body as a site of conversion; the role of music; conversion as event and process; coercive practices; and forms of communication in the converting process.

‘Catacoustic’ Subjects and the Injustice of Being Born: Lacoue-Labarthe’s Musical Maternal Muse

This chapter approaches two texts in detail, both of which explicitly focus on the relationship between music and philosophy: ‘L’Echo du sujet’ – a well-known essay from the early collection Typographies I (1979) which theorises a ‘catacoustic’ subject (rooted in a proto- or pre- subjective musico-rhythmic element) – and Le Chant des Muses (2005), transcribed from a talk aimed at teenagers given towards the end of his life. As well as critiquing the alignment of the maternal-feminine with the musical, the chapter probes at Lacoue-Labarthe’s construction of this essentially rhythmical/emotional – and constitutively nostalgic – subject and locates in this gesture his own autobiographical impulse. The chapter also develops from the thinking on tonality outlined with Nancy, to develop a critique of the assumed notion of the musical work: a static, total, bound and autonomous object which obscures its means of production and the labour required for its (re)production (regardless of whether it is actually performed, as such). Finally, in the way that Lacoue-Labarthe expressly puts this into relation to education, socialisation and environment, the chapter argues that there is an important political and ethical value to Lacoue-Labarthe’s conception of a ‘catacoustic’ subject.

LeWitt, in the Shadow of the Object

Rye Dag Holmboe examines previously undocumented wall drawings produced by Sol LeWitt in the Torre Bonomo in Spoleto in 1976. Using a psychoanalytic framework derived in part from the writings of Adrian Stokes, Holmboe argues for the existence of an “architectural unconscious” in LeWitt's practice and for the crucial importance of architecture to our understanding of Conceptual art more broadly. The essay further explores the choreographic dimensions of LeWitt's work and its autobiographical impulse.