Stanley Cavell’s Philosophical Literary Criticism

Abstract

An American philosopher Stanley Cavell (1926–2018) is one of those philosophers who, consciously starting from the assumption of the mutual complementarity of philosophy and literature, develop their theoretical reflection at the meeting point of both these fields and treating their reflection as a form of writing. In Cavell’s opinion, literature is in no way inferior to philosophy in terms of its cognitive values. He goes so far as to question the validity of the rigid, insurmountable division into these two areas, and describes his own writing as epistemic criticism which is a kind of philosophical literary criticism. Although he comes from the analytical school, Cavell remains extremely critical of this tradition of philosophizing, accusing it, as he puts it, of “forgetting the human voice”, losing touch with reality and being alienated from life and in the result calling analytical philosophy “the discipline most opposed to writing, and to life”. At the same time, he turns to the continental tradition and tries to combine these two different intellectual traditions on the basis of his considerations. In this way, Cavell places himself at the intersection of various intellectual currents. His area of interest is also extremely wide and varied, including philosophy, literature, film, theater and music.
 In my article I intend to focus on a few chosen aspects of Cavell’s work that is still not recognized enough in academic studies, namely on the Cavell’s use of philosophical concepts and chosen methods used by Cavell to analyze literary texts – the paraphrase method, the problem of the open work, the literalization of language method (in the context of Cavell’s analysis of Beckett’s Endgame), the problem of the ordinary connected with Cavell’s version of the ordinary language philosophy (in the context of the chosen features of Wittgenstein’s philosophy). In concluding part I also make some provisional remarks on Cavell’s hermeneutics and also suggest that it could be fruitfully read in the context of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and his philosophy of the Other.