Stanley Cavell Research Articles

The Disrobing of Aphrodite: Brigitte Bardot inLe Mépris

This article examines a number of philosophical concepts that are at stake in the visual culture of the nude. It particularly focuses on Aphrodite’s appearance, or rather, what I call her exposed concealment, in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 Le Mépris. A film, I argue, which is not only concerned with Aphrodite and the figure of the female nude via Brigitte Bardot, but which also explores the very idea of the sex goddess in cinema. In the first section I introduce arguments from T.J. Clark about the changing status of the nude in nineteenth-century France. In the second section, having introduced Kenneth Clark’s work on Aphrodite, I outline Michael Williams’ work on the archaeology of divine stardom and discuss my disagreement with the way Ginette Vincendeau and Colin Gardner interpret Bardot in the film. In the longest section, the third, I examine several shots in Le Mépris in conversation with Stanley Cavell and argue that the nude scenes both invoke and rework the pictorial language of nudity found in the history of painting and sculpture, as well as Bardot’s film back catalogue, and I conclude by suggesting the film provides an indirect critique of what Hegel says about female nudity.

Emerson and Other Minds: Idealism and the Moral Self, Volume One; Emerson and Other Minds: Idealism and the Lonely Subject, Volume Two

Emerson and Other Minds: Idealism and the Moral Self, Volume One; Emerson and Other Minds: Idealism and the Lonely Subject, Volume Two

Cavell vs. Wittgenstein on the Body-Mind Problem

With the ideas of skepticism and acknowledgment that he broached in Must We Mean What We Say? and The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell put a lasting imprint on the literary reception of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. In the wake of these books, it became standard practice to take Cavell’s reading as a reliable guide to this difficult text, or even to claim that in confronting Cavell, one confronts Wittgenstein. But the conflation of Wittgenstein’s thought with Cavell’s requires us to underplay or completely ignore what Garry L. Hagberg has called a Cartesian “ conceptual undertow” in Cavell—an undertow present in Wittgenstein only as a philosophy-induced malady of thought.

Knowledge of language as self-knowledge

ABSTRACT In ‘Must We Mean What We Say?’, Stanley Cavell defends the method of ordinary language philosophy while arguing that the special status of philosophical claims about language arises from the fact that these statements are expressions of self-knowledge. Recently, Nat Hansen (2017) has explored Cavell’s position in relation to empirical research on linguistic usage. This paper challenges Hansen’s reading of Cavell, and presents an alternative interpretation that withstands some of Hansen’s objections. For Cavell, claims about ‘what we say’ are claims about observable matters of fact, but nevertheless they are not, and cannot ever be, observation-based claims. The point of observing ordinary usage is to remind the philosopher of what is contained within the practical mastery that she already possesses.

The Genius of Feminism: Cavellian Moral Perfectionism and Feminist Political Theory

Work on Stanley Cavell in contemporary political theory tends to foreground Cavell’s reading of Emersonian moral perfectionism, but this aspect of Cavell’s thought is often left out of feminist readings of his work. In this paper, I give an overview of Cavell’s importance to political theory, and I also trace two Cavellian-inspired feminisms: Sandra Laugier’s ordinary language inflected ethics of care and Toril Moi’s understanding of feminist theory as the close and careful reading of examples. I argue that Cavellian-Emersonian moral perfectionism enhances these feminist readings of Cavell because it helps us explain certain practices in feminist activism, such as resisting conformity, acknowledging the limits of our understanding and being receptive to other members of our feminist community.

Thoreau’s Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism. By Alda Balthrop-Lewis

In this gorgeously written and theoretically robust book, Alda Balthrop-Lewis has given Thoreau scholarship and the broader field of environmental ethics one of the most important works about America’s so-called “patron saint of environmentalism” to appear in many years. Thoreau’s Religion joins a renaissance of scholarship that has followed in the wake of Thoreau’s bicentennial in 2017. Since the late Stanley Cavell’s various philosophical meditations on Thoreau, I can think of few others who have done so much to restore the vital importance of Christian thought and Biblical scripture behind Thoreau’s most well-known work, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, originally published in 1854. Some of Balthrop-Lewis’s insightful excavations of the biblical intertextual echoes that punctuate Walden make Thoreau’s Religion alone worthy of our attention; that it has so much more to offer is a testament to Balthrop-Lewis’s knack for having written something that is much more than just another historically situated study of Thoreau that embeds him in various streams of influence, Christian or otherwise. This is a book that cogently demonstrates why and how Thoreau (still) matters for the Anthropocene—that he remains a useful interlocutor in our present, someone who can speak to the twinned crises of climate calamity and our ongoing dysfunctional politics.

The Passionate Fallacy

The Passionate Fallacy

‘Politically devastating passions’: Romance and reality in the aesthetics of democracy

Abstract To speak of democracy is often to speak less of a fact than of a hope. In his introduction to Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville admitted that ‘… in America I saw more than America; I sought the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or to hope from its progress’. De Tocqueville recognised that democracy's success would rely on its constant promotion, the affirmation and revaluation of its terms and conditions, such that it sustains the investedness of its (voluntary) participants. This paper considers the work of Stanley Cavell as inheriting the tone of de Tocqueville's romantic will to democracy, particularly in the discovery of its analogous image in ‘remarriage comedy’. I look first at the ways in which popular pictures of (in this case, American) democracy on film sustain an expression of hope for a better set of relations amongst equal and consenting participants, an expression that is identified as romantic in nature. By contrast, I will also discuss how representations of democracy's reality on screen—pictures that sit outside comfortable generic expectations, and reveal those moments in which interest in democratic participation or values has ebbed or is dormant—have as much to tell us about democracy's character as more idealist expressions of what it might be or become.

Digging at the Roots: A Reply to Naoko Saito's American Philosophy in Translation

Digging at the Roots: A Reply to Naoko Saito's <i>American Philosophy in Translation</i>

Introduction

Introduction

Transcendentalism, Pragmatism, and Skepticism: A Response to Saito

Transcendentalism, Pragmatism, and Skepticism: A Response to Saito

Hollywood’s white privacy: Stanley Cavell and James Baldwin

I have a fantasy of discovering archival television footage in which Stanley Cavell and James Baldwin talk about their respective philosophies of film, their modes of autobiographical writing, and maybe also their shared fixation on Bette Davis. While I have no evidence that Cavell and Baldwin read, much less responded to, each other’s work, this essay puts them in conversation around the nettlesome question of privacy and its gendered and racialized dimensions on film. In his books The World Viewed and Contesting Tears, Cavell poses a series of questions about character and privacy that Baldwin both answers and complicates in his philosophical memoir The Devil Finds Work, a reflection on Hollywood written in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement.1 At the same time, Cavell’s elaboration of privacy, especially as it relates to the character of the ‘unknown woman’, suggests something of his own politics of world...

Stanley Cavell and the queer thought of movies

Stanley Cavell and the queer thought of movies

On the concept of childhood in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations

Abstract In the sparse literature that is concerned with Wittgenstein’s views regarding children and childhood, in his later work, it is often suggested that Wittgenstein presents, or at least is committed to, a romantic notion of the child according to which children should be conceived of as innocent beings who are ontologically different from adults. In this paper I argue that Wittgenstein’s remarks do not support such an interpretation. First, I investigate the arguments for this view presented by Stanley Cavell, Yasushi Maruyama, and Philip Shields. Second, I consider an anti-essentialist understanding of Wittgenstein’s concept of childhood that has been suggested in opposition to the treatment of the child as the ‘ontological other’ and argue that Wittgenstein refers to the child as intermediate link with which to state grammatical facts. In contrast to these various views, I hold, third, that the PI is committed to a strong and substantial concept of childhood. I argue for this claim on the basis of (i) the ‘Motto’ of the PI; (ii) Wittgenstein’s reference to the philosopher Augustine; and (iii) the use of ‘primitive’. I conclude that Wittgenstein’s concept of childhood in his later works neither romanticises nor dispraises the child as the ‘ontological other’.

What if it were True? Why Study the New Testament

AbstractThis article argues for a renewal of the discipline of New Testament studies through a focus on the question of truth. To make the argument, the article first engages a recent essay that is highly critical of mainstream NT scholarship and subsequently works with the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond and Hans-Georg Gadamer to pursue the interpreter's implications in the NT's assertions of truth. The article also briefly exegetes five passages from the NT to illustrate the way the NT makes claims that require judgements about truth. Along the way, the article also engages contemporary NT scholars who argue vociferously against ‘theological’ readings of the NT and others who argue for their inherent necessity.

Expressing an interest in mental health education

Abstract Despite the convergence of approaches to mental health in schools, criticisms have been levelled about the triviality of mindfulness and the reluctance of teachers to encourage more personal expression in the classroom, relying instead on a mixture of ancient practices and modern cognitive behavioural therapy. Furthermore, there are still real problems with self-harming, and the COVID-19 pandemic has placed huge strains on mental health services for the young. It would suggest the language of mental health education is inadequate for the needs of the young as it fails to provide them with the means to voice their experiences. The discussion first turns to Biesta's idea of ‘soul’ and how our contemporary usages capture something of the integrity of mind and body that is absent in speaking in terms of ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ health. Furthermore, ‘soul’ functions as a means of expressing what matters to us. This directs us towards the need in mental health education to express our experience of the world and our being within it as well as acquiring ‘the tools’ we need to manage our mental health. What, therefore, matters to us is our life with words and having an authoritative voice in our experience. For this reason, I turn to the work of Stanley Cavell as the philosopher for whom such concerns were central. Applying these insights to mental health education, I will argue that opportunities for more personal expression of the experience of mental health need to be created rather than avoided.

Some Notes on Philosophy and Redemption

In an earlier essay, I once drew a comparison between Theodor W. Adorno’s remark that, “philosophy, which once appeared obsolete, sustains itself because the moment for its actualization has been lost,” and Stanley Cavell’s suggestion that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Investigations can be seen as a philosophy of culture, one that relates itself to its time as a time in which the continuation of philosophy is at stake.” In this essay, I’d like to compare Adorno’s remark to a different but related remark of Cavell’s, namely his thought that “philosophy ends in a recovery from a terminable loss.” He pursues this thought in remarks on Emerson, noting that “philosophy begins in loss, in finding yourself at a loss, as Wittgenstein more or less says.” Many different traditions—Marxism, American transcendentalism, ordinary language philosophy, just to name a few—animate these thoughts. This is not the place to detail and tease out the ramifications and significances of each; instead, I want to take this very short essay merely to raise a different point of relation than I raised before (in a deep way, then, this essay—and especially its short length—may be seen as a sort of afterword to my earlier remarks).

Cavell on Color

One of the special challenges in approaching Stanley Cavell’s writing on the arts is how to understand the relation between what are often read as theoretical generalities with Cavell’s particular interpretations of individual works. The latter are not presented as mere applications of the former, while the former are clearly meant to be something more than mere generalizations from the latter. When it comes to Cavell’s writings on film, we find a representative methodological statement in the Foreword to the 1979 enlarged edition of The World Viewed, where he asserts that “what constitutes an ‘element’ of the medium of film is not knowable prior” to discoveries by filmmaking and criticism itself. He refers to this “reciprocity between element and significance” as “the cinematic circle.” But how are we to orient ourselves within the cinematic circle? What about those places in Cavell’s own writing where theoretical generalities and individual readings seem divorced?

Democratic freedom as an aesthetic achievement: Peirce, Schiller and Cavell on aesthetic experience, play and democratic freedom

In this essay, I reconsider the constitution of democratic freedom in aesthetic terms. My interest is in articulating a conception of aesthetic freedom that can be mapped onto a conception of democratic freedom. For this purpose, I bring together Charles Sanders Peirce’s ontology, which comprises fragments of an aesthetic theory, Friedrich Schiller’s concept of aesthetic play and Stanley Cavell’s democratic perfectionism. By providing a philosophical framework for constructing an aesthetics and politics that supports the recent aesthetic turn in political theory, which urges overcoming political theory’s excessive dependence on an epistemological theory of representation, and by proposing a modification to the turn’s heavy reliance on theories of affect, my reading of Peirce, Schiller and Cavell offers a new way to think about the political significance of the autonomy of aesthetic experience and affect for democratic freedom.

‘Psychoanalysis is one more way of taking people seriously’: Adam Phillips in conversation with Emma Williams

Adam Phillips is a leading psychoanalyst and author. Phillips was educated at Clifton College and studied English Literature at Oxford University. He trained to be a psychoanalyst at the Institute of Child Psychology. Across the course of his professional career, he has worked at Guys Hospital, with a school for ‘maladjusted children’, at Camberwell Child Guidance Clinic and at Charing Cross Hospital in the Department of Child Psychiatry. He now works in private practice. Phillips is the author of many works, including Terrors and Experts (1997), In Writing: Essays on Literature (2016), Attention Seeking (2019) and his most recent book, The Cure for Psychoanalysis (2021). He also served as the General Editor of the New Penguin Classics Translations of the works of Sigmund Freud. The conversation begins by exploring the way mental health has become a topic of public interest as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The opportunities and challenges in Phillips's experience working with schools and for young people's mental health services during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s are then discussed. Questions about the nature of psychoanalysis are introduced, and the discussion turns towards the relationship between philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis. There is a brief discussion of connections between Phillips's work and the philosophy of Stanley Cavell. Phillips's essays on schools and education are explored in connection with ideas of omniscience, sadomasochism and ‘experiments in living’. The conversation ends with a glimpse of school as a place to cultivate one's interest and one's sociability with others.