Stanley Cavell Research Articles

Editorial Comment

The tenth issue of Conversations takes as its starting point the mutually expressed importance of the intellectual relationship and friendship between Stanley Cavell and the historian of science Thomas Kuhn. Their dialogue is all the more striking given that both thinkers were as concerned with difficulties of communication as with its achievement. Yet there is no hint of a struggle with incommensurability in Kuhn’s claim that Cavell was “the only person with whom I have been able to explore my ideas in incomplete sentences.” Cavell likewise explained, in The Claim of Reason, that the work owed much to having been “at times almost in possession of the something you might call an intellectual community” while working with Kuhn at Berkeley. This issue springs from these conversations between Cavell and Kuhn, exploring and extending their encounters through readings which cross Cavell with Kuhn and Kuhn with Cavell, and in so doing extending our understanding of each, while also illustrating the ways in which their work can still provide inspiration for grappling with science, art, and philosophy.

The Sceptic, The Outsider, and Other Minds

The usual way with scepticism is to formulate a problem in connection with the external world and then apply this to other minds. Drawing on work by Stanley Cavell and Richard Moran, I argue that the sceptic misses an important difference in our concepts of mind and of body, and that this is reflected in the sceptic’s formulation of a problem regarding other minds. I suggest that an understanding of this important conceptual difference is also missing from the work of those who attempt to reply to (dismiss, or ignore) the sceptic. In this connection I discuss both inferential and perceptual accounts of our knowledge of other minds. I identify an error in these accounts that may be thought to arise from a lack of understanding of the important conceptual difference here, and then develop an understanding of this error that draws on the work of Edith Stein and Stanley Cavell.

Doing philosophy as opening parentheses: quantifying the use of parentheses in Stanley Cavell's style

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to say something significant about Stanley Cavell's style. To accomplish this task, we adopt a distant reading approach, quantifying what seems to be an idiosyncratic use of parentheses. After outlining our methodological approach and the choices of texts from Cavell's corpus, we will present the results of our quantitative analysis. Two kinds of results will be presented and interpreted: the result of a comparison between Cavell and other authors (i.e. why Cavell's use of parentheses is exceptional) and the result of a quantitative analysis of Cavell's texts (i.e. how Cavell uses parentheses throughout his books). For both results, we will provide our own interpretation. In the conclusion, we will draw the moral of this parenthetical story, hoping to open future parentheses.

Wittgenstein and Feminism: Alice Crary in Conversation with Mickaëlle Provost

Alice Crary is a moral and social philosopher who has written widely on issues in metaethics, moral psychology and normative ethics, philosophy and feminism, critical animal studies, critical disability studies, critical philosophy of race, philosophy and literature, and Critical Theory. She has written on philosophers such as John L. Austin, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Iris Murdoch and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This is the first of two parts of the interview with Crary conducted in a single exchange in the first weeks of January 2022, where she discusses ordinary language philosophy and feminism, Wittgenstein’s conception of mind and its relation to feminist ethics, the link between Wittgenstein and Critical Theory, and her own views about efforts to bring about social and political transformations. The second part on “Wittgenstein and Critical Theory” is published in the regular volume 11 of NWR.

Bridging Gender Divides: Toward a Transcendentalist Feminism

AbstractHow can we build a path from the binary of gender to the unity of common humanity? What kind of difference can the “different voice” of feminism make as a human voice? In this article, Naoko Saito argues that the way we talk about the difference of a “different voice” needs to be radically transformed. To envision a route to such a transformation, she explores an alternative possibility of feminism in the American transcendentalism of Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson. First, Saito critically examines the politics of recognition and suggests a susceptibility to binary thinking in its approach. Second, as a way of transcending the binary mode of thinking, Saito introduces the humanist feminism of the nineteenth‐century American transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. Third, as a way of elucidating the radicality of Fuller's transcendentalist feminism, Saito introduces the feminine voice of two male philosophers — Ralph Waldo Emerson and Stanley Cavell — as her conversational partners. By radically converting the way we talk about difference of voice, the transcendentalist feminism of Fuller, Emerson, and Cavell provides a third way that lies beyond the politics of recognition and care ethics. In conclusion, Saito proposes that the cultivation of the feminine subject requires an alternative political education that resists assimilation into political realism. This would realize our common humanity and, in its crossing of divides between men and women, would create democracy from within.

Emerson's ‘Self-Reliance’ and political self-education

Abstract This paper studies how Emerson's ‘Self-Reliance’ offers a meaningful account of political and moral self-education in Western democracies. Emerson's moral perfectionism involves an ethical, political and democratic individualism that needs to be reconsidered. This paper explores a perfectionist interpretation of the modern forms of self-education as political and ordinary practices, first with the case of conspiracy theories, which express an individual desire for self-education but appear as the result of a lack of self-reliance and a failure of political self-education, and then through the explicit claim to self-education made by activists in ecological, anti-racial or feminist organisations, which embodies the democratic need for self-reliance. These two examples reveal a new kind of efficient and ordinary political power at the edge of civic commitment. This leads us to define an alternative conception of pedagogy, in which equality in self-reliance matters. This also underlines our moral and ordinary political responsibility and challenges the traditional philosophical opposition between personal and public, subjective and universal. This paper underlines the accuracy of Stanley Cavell's interpretation of Emerson's ‘Self-Reliance’ in order to provide a perfectionist interpretation of activism. It also opens a new crossed perspective between the French and American approaches.

Dogtoothand Wittgenstein's builders: A future in language?

AbstractThis article grows out of the conviction that (some) films can philosophise. It looks to juxtapose the filmDogtoothand Wittgenstein's builders' example, such that they are seen as philosophising in similar ways over similar issues. Both strike me as probing the possibility—or denial—of a future with language. Using Stanley Cavell and Rush Rhees' responses to Wittgenstein's builders, I register the significance and meaning of themes from the film and Wittgenstein's work in a mutually enlightening way: language, games and breaking free. This results in two different pictures of our hope of a future in and with language.

Ecology/Echography

This essay deploys the theoretical frames of inheritance and echography to recover and redefine the meaning, for environmental philosophy, of Martin Heidegger’s storied hut in the Black Forest in Germany, where large portions of Being and Time and other major texts were written. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Stanley Cavell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others, the essay insists that a deconstructive reading is crucial to recovering and sustaining the significance for environmental philosophy of Heidegger’s work, a reading quite different from those found in Deep Ecology. In that context, the essay transforms the hut into a kind of spectral presence that is put into dialogue with other, later “echoes”: the poetry of Paul Celan, the work of experimental film-maker and artist James Benning, and the author’s own current art project, focused on a clearcut site in the mountains of Colorado.

How to Measure a World? A Philosophy of Judaism by Martin Shuster

Reviewed by: How to Measure a World? A Philosophy of Judaism by Martin Shuster Kenneth Seeskin Martin Shuster. How to Measure a World? A Philosophy of Judaism. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2021. 241 pp. Anyone who sets out to write a philosophy of Judaism faces two problems. The first is that essentialist theories which try to identify a small set of commitments with which to characterize all of Jewish existence have fallen into disfavor. The second is that one must balance reliance on classical Jewish sources with appeal to arguments designed to reach a nonsectarian audience. Put too much emphasis on the first, and you will be criticized for being parochial. Put too much on the second, and you will be criticized for not having enough Jewish content. Martin Shuster tries to avoid these pitfalls by beginning with Emmanuel Levinas's observation that Judaism is best understood as a kind of anachronism. By anachronism, Shuster takes Levinas to mean that there is a fundamental dissonance, friction, or conflict between the self and the world. As Levinas says in Difficult Freedom, the distinguishing feature of Jewish existence is its ability to stand apart from history and be its judge. Or, as Shuster says, it is a moral imperative not to feel at home in a world where violence, oppression, or genocide rule the day. Yet, as Shuster hastens to add, the self cannot be completely divorced from the world since the whole question of what counts as a world must be investigated. It is not just a huge collection of things but rather a consideration of how things emerge for us in the first place. To explicate this sense of emergence, Shuster turns to phenomenology as practiced by Husserl and Heidegger. [End Page 456] It will be objected that Levinas's understanding of anachronism is not just a way of characterizing Jewish existence but a critical feature of the human condition in general. As Shuster points out, such a view of the self's relation to the world is a legitimate way of understanding what it means for a person to be free. What, then, is specifically Jewish about this inquiry? Shuster answers by referring to Levinas's quip that we are all "a little bit Jewish." On the issue of essentialism, Shuster admits that what he is offering is a "sort of" essentialism in that it stresses the form rather than the specific content of Judaism. This means that rather than going into Jewish history or liturgy in detail, Shuster rests his case on the alienation we feel toward the world. The best way to understand Shuster's project is to look at the first two chapters. In chapter 1, he takes up Maimonides's understanding of how we are situated in the world and concludes that for him, our primary orientation is that of awe and wonder. Recall that while Moses was not allowed to see the face of God in Exodus 33, he was permitted to see God's back, which Maimonides takes to be everything God created and which the Torah describes as "very good" (tov me'od). This is followed in chapter 2 by a discussion of Theodor Adorno, whose primary orientation is moral outrage. Although the world that God created may invite wonder, the horrors that people inflict on each other invite disgust. Taken together, these approaches tell us how to distance oneself from the world in order to take a reflective stance on it. The next two chapters take us into important themes in Continental philosophy. Chapter 3 deals with the philosophy of history as seen in a comparison between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Chapter 4 takes up the philosophy of language, with a comparison between Levinas and Stanley Cavell. The virtues of this book are not hard to spot. Levinas's insight about the distance from the world runs through a great deal of Jewish history. Abraham was not at home in his father's house, nor was Moses at home in Egypt. Although Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah were in their native land, they were profoundly dissatisfied with what they saw. With the destruction of the Second Temple and two millennia...

Enter the Child: A Scene from Stanley Cavell's The Claim of Reason

Taking its cue from a resonant passage in Stanley Cavell's The Claim of Reason, this essay reflects on the necessity of the figure of the child for Cavell's philosophy and for his understanding of the differences between Austinian and Wittgensteinian criteria. It develops the difference between instruction and initiation by meditating on how we learn the words for love. Finally, I examine briefly the figure of the boy Mamillius, son of the skeptic Leontes, in William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, whom Cavell first noticed as central to the play's energies.

On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives, by Andrew H. Miller

Reviewed by: On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives by Andrew H. Miller David LaRocca (bio) On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives, by Andrew H. Miller; pp. xvii + 207. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020, $31.00, £24.95. "Lit by sly wonders," On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives is Andrew H. Miller's marvelous, melancholic, middle-aged meditation on the meaning of lives unled (183). One attribute of the human condition that we appear to know, at least from a scientific perspective, is that an individual has but one life—often measured by the mere fact of a body's duration in time and space. Yet we also have a sense—an inkling—that, within such singularity, one could have made other choices, not taken the path one did (what we call personal history). This fact of limitation and this impression of freedom are the consolidated motivating force behind Miller's book: I could have done otherwise than I did; indeed, there were many choices to make. At this point, your personal ontology will determine the extent to which Miller's book will grip you. In scenes of reading defined by a paratactic style, Miller largely sidesteps the aid of philosophers and wisdom literature that reflects on freedom and fate (though Stanley Cavell appears as a patron saint of the endeavor, and has the book's final word)—turning instead, earnestly and wistfully, to a series of vignettes on the arts, principally movies, short stories, novels, poems, and paintings. With these resources at hand, including Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" (1916), Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Henry James's "The Jolly Corner" (1908), Carl Dennis's "The God Who Loves You" (2001), Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001), and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Miller shows us how alternate paths, unled lives, and counterfactuals are human preoccupations, especially for artists called to reflect on our vexing condition. Yet to what extent is the premise of an "unled life" viable as more than a compelling structure for artistic invention? The works of art upon which Miller dwells give words, [End Page 466] pictures, and sounds for addressing the drama of an inner life spent (more for some than others) engulfed mindlessly in anxiety and doubt, tormented by negative emotions, toggling between "regret and relief": wishing things had been otherwise or being grateful that they were not (or were not worse) (96). Does the mere belief in "unled lives"—with its focus on what did not happen—cultivate ugly feelings? Regret and relief are both predicated on the conviction that one could have done or chosen differently. In short, both mental gestures—and the varied emotions that track them—take for granted that humans are, to some extent or other, free. Some ethicists pick up this supposition in their formulations of culpability, responsibility, and moral choice, while others probe the countermanding notion of moral luck. Who wants to say that a person chooses to be a refugee, a climate migrant, an orphan, diseased, or homeless? If we are fated, there is no reason to regret (or to feel relieved) because things could not have been otherwise than they are. As art is ever an accomplice to philosophical insight, it is no wonder that Miller's careful study should provide counsel for existential and phenomenological matters, as well as moral ones. Why are such thoughts especially poignant at middle age, as Miller suggests? Because one has made enough decisions, done enough to regret, to wonder after "untaken" paths. Yet, caught up in that middlescence mindset, one wonders: could other paths really have been taken? There is no way to disprove or dispute the course of one's history as one's own; counterfactuals persist as speculative fictions (for example, if T. S. Eliot did not catch a cold and had instead visited Woolf, would she still have committed suicide?). Alas, regret and relief are epiphenomena of a private faith in freedom. Though Miller presumes free agency, his observations are plaintive, often somber. Meanwhile, mechanistic, deterministic, and fatalistic valences are left aside, as are the practitioners...

Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson

Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson

Immortality, the Good Life and Romantic Love in Groundhog Day and Only Lovers Left Alive

Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) and Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013) are fantasy films that use the device of practical immortality in order to raise important philosophical questions about what constitutes a good life and to explore the nature of romantic love. Groundhog Day provides fairly conventional answers about how to live a good life by focusing on issues of spiritual redemption, selflessness, and developing one’s human potential. In contrast, Lovers provides a dark portrayal of a civilization on the brink of extinction but offers a glimmer of hope for the future. The lifestyle and values of married vampires Adam and Eve represent an alternative vision of the core values needed to sustain a better world: greater reliance on human imagination, maintaining a sense of wonder and curiosity about the world, creating and appreciating works of art and living in harmony with the natural world. Both films also offer a perspective on the importance of romantic love in living a good life. Although these perspectives often diverge from one another, they do overlap in some interesting ways. The style of film criticism used in this paper is inspired by the film philosophy of Stanley Cavell.

Algeria and the crisis of theimage-mouvement: checkingcinéma colonial’s imperial gaze inMuriel ou le Temps d’un retour(Resnais, 1963)

One of the most cryptic characters in Alain Resnais’s Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (1963) is a returning veteran who edits his own amateur video footage of North Africa while contending with his traumatizing memories of torturing a young woman in Algeria. This article’s fundamental argument is twofold: first, Bernard’s experience of editing and watching his footage is co-extensive with his private interrogation of the reductive, propagandist images of Algeria that he viewed in classic colonial cinema prior to serving in the war; second, Resnais’s portrayal of this process provokes spectators to reassess their own consumption of retrograde colonial culture and its impact on their perception of the colony. Key to this analysis is the imperial gaze that E. Ann Kaplan associates with colonial cinema’s reductive construction of the female colonial “other,” Stanley Cavell’s understanding of how film spectator’s “check” their engagement with cinematic narratives, and Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of politics in the image-temps. This article ultimately aims to deepen present understandings of questions regarding preservation, research, and interpretation that Muriel continues to raise sixty years after the signing of the Évian Accords.

UNTHEORIZING DISCOURSE

ABSTRACTA New Philosophy of Discourse: Language Unbound, by Joshua Kates, examines a range of philosophical, literary, and literary‐theoretical approaches in attempting to formulate a view of language sheerly as individual events. Kates considers works from philosophers including Martin Heidegger and Hans‐Georg Gadamer in the Continental tradition; Donald Davidson and W. V. O. Quine in the analytic tradition of philosophy of language; and such “crossovers” (an arguable categorization) as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, and Martha Nussbaum. The book also investigates the work of literary scholars including Mary Poovey, Charles Altieri, Paul de Man, Walter Benn Michaels, and Steven Knapp, among others. In each instance, the thinkers under scrutiny offer some support for the new philosophy of discourse that Kates proposes but fall short of the radicality of his anti‐foundational, anti‐structural approach. Kates coins the term “talk!” as a way to refer to language in an anti‐foundational vein. The new philosophy of “talk!” proposed here emphasizes the shortcomings of the wide range of authors with respect to thinking of language as only its instances, begging the question of what avenues of thought the new philosophy opens.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

SPEP Plenary Address

ABSTRACT In Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Stanley Cavell says, the film camera, a “somatogram,” reads fits and fidgets as a post-Cartesian cogito of embodied thinking. Giorgio Agamben sees the cameras of motion studies at Salpêtrière in the 1880s as dehumanizing normalizers of gesture, but Georges Didi-Huberman claims that what they recorded as hysteria was solicited by them and sometimes refused. Which is it? Does the camera humanize, normalize, or solicit gesture? I consider the question with Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits (2015). Like Mr. Deeds, The Fits foregrounds non-sovereign body movements, but its protagonist, Toni, agonistically engages the camera’s gaze, extracting from it the respect she deserves. I argue that Toni may be seen as responding to Salpêtrière, and also to Thomas Eakins, in whose attic, in the 1880s, a young Black girl was photographed naked, on a couch. Is her stare a refusal of the white gaze or a coerced pose? Toni’s own stare suggests she avenges such historic wrongs in acts of cinematic agonism. In The Fits, the camera that might have been Toni’s reader/partner (Cavell), betrayer (Agamben), or groomer (Didi-Huberman) becomes a mystical mechanism of remediation and Toni, the ghost in its machine.

Art or Shit: Value, Sincerity, and the Avant-garde in David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace’s fiction often depicts the reception of unsettling avant-garde artworks; it also makes use of similar strategies to those that it depicts. The short story “Octet” can be seen to pose a question about its own value, or status as art, in a similar way to avant-garde provocations such as Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit. Stanley Cavell analyzes the experience of uncertainty that modernist art causes for its audience; in the absence of agreed criteria, there is no obvious way to know what “counts” as art. The absence of criteria also causes a crisis for sincerity—we have no way of knowing if an artist means their artwork. For Wallace, questions about the sincerity of his work are woven into questions about whether it “counts,” since he seems to have taken seriously Tolstoy’s claim that only sincere works of art should count as art.

Environmental Law and Youth Protests: Future Generations Between Speech Acts and Political Representation

This article aims to provide a semiotic analysis of environmental law and youth protests. More precisely, drawing on speech act theory this article regards both as types of communication and teases out the inherent voice and message, specifically with regard to the interests of future generations. The argument unfolds in three steps. First, the article looks into speaker and speech of environmental law and argues that it speaks, as legislation does, in the first-person plural voice of a ‘we’. Second, the article examines a speech of Greta Thunberg through the lens of Stanley Cavell’s theory of passionate utterances. This interpretation will unlock the political stakes of Thunberg’s speech as she claims standing with those responsible for enacting environmental law. Finally, the consequences of this reading will be analysed by relating message and voice of environmental law. As youth protests question ordinary forms of political representation, new ways of safeguarding the interests of future generations are called upon.

The University as Troublemaker

This paper begins by considering the claims that in many ways, the university sector is in trouble, and that there are a variety of potential reasons for this state of affairs. Drawing on the etymological insights of the word ‘trouble’, the paper suggests that we can situate the university very differently: we can see it not as an institution in trouble, but rather as a place that troubles and that agitates the mind. It is a troublemaker. It argues that the university is – ipso facto – a place for the agitation and troubling of minds in three distinct ways. First, drawing on the American philosopher, Stanley Cavell’s, idea of passionate utterance, it considers the place of the lecture, and explores how in the encounter of this pedagogical form, the university is a troublemaker. Second, in drawing on Cavell’s ideas of invitation to dialogue, the paper offers a thick account of the civic university, and by doing this, shows how the university is a political troublemaker. Third, it draws on John Williams’ evocative (1965) novel, Stoner, to demonstrate how – through the relationships between lecturer and student – the university can be seen as personal troublemaker. The paper concludes by outlining two influential accounts of the way that academics and students can survive and flourish in the university given the pressures that are increasingly evident in the sector. It shows how these are both problematic, and that hope for the university – and for re-imagining its purpose as troublemaker – can be found in the very ordinariness of the ways in which we talk together.