Chapter 2 THE DECEPTIVE T ENTACLES OF THE AUTHENTICATING MIND: ON AUTHENTICITY AND SOME OTHER NOTIONS THAT ARE GOOD FOR ABSOLUTELY NOTHING Rajko Muršič If there are any human activities that incorporate authenticity in the very moment of their appearance (and disappearance), they are music and dance. Whenever we speak (or write) about music, we lose ourselves in the opacity of the simplest words. Playing and listening to music, and the experience of dance and rapture, sound and silence, bring words to their limits: and beyond. No other magic than music can conjure its experience (see Muršič 2003). Whatever kind of music we experience, if it has any meaning to us, we may eas- ily become seduced to conceive it as ours. If it is music presumably inherited from our ancestors, or if it is music that relects the soothing quality of our landscape, or the spiritual essence of our people, it is, in one word, authentic. he idea that music authenticates social experience is rather trivial. But if we generalise the idea that there are practices that authenticate experience, we have to consider the opposite situation: the falsiication of social experience through inauthentic practices. In the following discussion I shall try to show that the notions of authenticity and inauthenticity are deeply problematic and fallacious. here are various notions we take for granted without questioning. hese notions are typically used in both daily life and academic jargon. When we are dealing with notions which are not only pregnant with meaning but at the same time charged with value, things can become problematic. In these times when everything solid is ineluctably melting into the air, the notion of authenticity is widely used to deine that which is resisting. However, this resistance is not necessarily liberating. he use of charged notions without establishing any critical distance from their daily use can become problematic as soon as the notion is used on a daily basis as an excuse for suppression, repression, prevention and cleansing. In diferent contexts,