George Steiner on Music

All I know is that music is a sine qua non in my existence. It reinsures what I sense to be, or rather search for in the transcendental…Neither psychoanalysis nor deconstruction nor post-modernism  have had anything revelatory to say about music. This is crucial. These language games of subversive decipherment, of suspicion in the wake of Nietzsche and Freud, are virtually impotent before music. They remain arrogantly trapped within the language-sphere  which they claim to relativise or unravel. Why should we take them seriously on the philosophic, on the human level?

Errata An Unexamined Life