Simon Clarke

Dr Simon Clarke is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Music and Deputy Head of Graduate School at the Royal Northern College of Music. Beginning with his 2010 article ‘Line and Colour: Instrumental (Ir-)Rationality in Adorno’s Musicology’, his focus has been the aesthetic foundations of traditional ontology, very much in the Derridean line, though this has more recently developed into a self-styled 3D philosophy (Deconstruction, Dialectics and Dialetheism). In this vein, ‘Debussy’s Speculative Idea: Orchestration and the Substance of Jeux‘, reading Debussy through Hegel’s Science of Logic, was published by the Journal of the Royal Musical Association in 2018. More recently, both ‘Aporetology or Aporetography in Derrida and Badiou’ and (2020) and ‘Nothing Else Matters: Dialetheism and the Event of Sovereignty’ (2022) have appeared in the French journal MaLiCE.

David Horne and I are in the final editing stages of our monograph Music in Contradiction: A Study of Logic and Musical Meaning – here, the idea is to interpret music in accordance primarily with Graham Priest’s Logic of Paradox (LP), along with the work of his fellow ‘paraconsistent frontierspeople’ Hegel, Heidegger, Adorno, Althusser, Derrida and Butler (update 2026: now contracted with Routledge, the full manuscript submission being due on 01.05.26).