Meaning and Music: Lacan's Non-All.

Abstract

This article examines musical meaning through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis. While music and language are often treated as fundamentally different forms of communication, both are shaped by structures of meaning that resist complete articulation. Drawing on Lacan's theory of the signifier, the Real, and the non-all, as well as Alenka Zupančič's account of the missing signifier, I argue that music cannot be understood as organized around a missing signifier in the same way as language. Rather, music is non-all: it generates meaning without being reducible to a universal or totalizing system of signification. Musical meaning is therefore neither inherent nor ineffable but emerges through culturally learned structures, subjective interpretation, and contradiction.