Stanley Cavell, Classical Hollywood and the Constitution of the Ordinary (With Notes on Billy Wilder)

Abstract

When in his Tanner lectures Stanley Cavell sets out to define Ordinary Language Philosophy or – rather – to explain how it demarcates philosophy as such, he takes up psychoanalytic literary criticism in order to articulate the terms of this task. Yet the constitution of the ordinary, in Cavell, is never quite accessed from within psychoanalysis-cum-literature alone; instead, it takes another relation, that of psychoanalysis and literature to classical Hollywood, for Cavell to address the ordinary in terms of its constitution. I propose to discuss this complex using two films by Billy Wilder as a passageway to Cavell’s analytic procedure.