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Self-evidently, everyone's ear can be opened to something unfamiliar, especially given the unique filters we all have waiting to attenuate the strangeness of the unfamiliar as necessary. The philosopher is no more impervious in this sense than the psychoanalyst who reads his work. How could he be? But Georges Leroux is more than a philosopher. Long before becoming one, his life had already been touched by music, specifically Bach, when he heard one of his brothers in the basement of the family house “tirelessly rehearsing the Italian Concerto … while I was pegging away at Homer's verses” (p. 14). Unlike our Freud who refused to listen to music, Georges asked for more and never looked back.
In December 2007, Leroux published a work entitled Partita pour Glenn Gould, subtitled Musique et forme de vie.2 Georges Leroux is an admirer of Gould and by his own admission one of those who “love him insanely” (p. 13).
Fulsomely attesting this love for our greater benefit, this book is an unexpected offering to the person he admires, but also to whom he admirably listens: the artist Glenn Gould, his words and music. From this listening, he has made (for us) a ‘partita’ that sets out both the ethic of Gould's life and the aesthetics of his art. For some, the pianist's way of life, his exaltation of solitude and his premature retreat from the concert halls quickly relegated him to the pathological realm - as phobic, paranoid or autistic … Without disregarding this, however, Georges Leroux takes a different approach; instead, he seeks to discover and bring out what in this choice of an exceptionally demanding way of life might be a condition for another form of communication. Cultivating solitude to join the commonest mortal in its neglected counterpoint, the community of solitary individuals.
According to a certain romantic model of the artist, the creative act and creative expression are spontaneous and immediate. Thought plays only a retroacti