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SPECTRAL PHILOSOPHY: DERRIDA AND DELEUZE ON TONE // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2020. Issue 2 (24). P. 39-55

Continental philosophy was often being characterized (most significantly by Badiou) as having a particular relationship with language manifesting in an acute sense of and purposeful usage of style. Yet the matter of tone has rarely been addressed as something significant. One of the rare examples is Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy by Jacques Derrida. Having long dismissed with the separation of “rhetorical decorations” and “conceptual content” Derrida proposes a certain tone as a defining characteristic of philosophy, capable of saving it from a crisis or killing it altogether. Another we encounter in the works of Gilles Deleuze who characterises style and even a concept itself as a “hue” or “colour” of a text (in L’abécédaire) and in relation to the notion of Stimmung (in Logic of Sense) in opposition to the language’s function of designation. The same notion – Stimmung, meaning “attunement’ or “mood’, linked to Verstimmung - “delirium” or “mis-tuning” - appears in Of an Apocalyptic Tone. Is philosophy itself a particular kind of tone or hue of a text? The answers to these questions, as I suggest, differ depending on which of the two approaches - Derrida’s “harmonic” one or Deleuzian “colouristic” one - takes to philosophical conceptual creativity. By analysing and comparing these two approaches this paper suggests a particular relation between tone (both in the sense of sound and of colour) and concept. It also suggests that a certain integration of these two approaches can be achieved through analysis of time (as rhythm and detour), as presented in Quentin Meillassoux’ Subtraction and Contraction.

Keywords: tone, colour, Derrida, Deleuze, Meillassoux, envelope, sound studies, spectralism