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Cavell and the Conditions of the World
Abstract
The chapter is devoted to Cavell’s analysis of the question of the world as it develops in his engagement with Descartes, Wittgenstein and Heidegger, but also with English Romanticism, Emerson and Thoreau. Cavell’s contention that the problem of philosophy is to accept ‘the truth of scepticism’—our relation to the world is not one of knowing with certainty—is traced in a detailed analysis of The Claim of Reason. The result of the skeptic’s investigation of the world rests in a desire for mastery that produces the death of the world at philosophy’s hands. If the skeptic’s gesture is death-dealing then one of the tasks of the reorienting of its conclusion would be to restore life to the world. Such recovery implies a change to philosophy’s understanding of its essential gesture.
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Reissued with a new essay on Macbeth this famous collection of essays on Shakespeare's tragedies considers these plays as responses to the crisis of knowledge and the emergence of modern skepticism provoked by the new science of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
The author of the book presents a full-length philosophical study of the work of Stanley Cavell, best known for his highly influential contributions to the fields of film studies, Shakespearian literary criticism, and the confluence of psychoanalysis and literary theory. It is not properly appreciated that Cavell's project originated in his interpretation of Austin's and Wittgenstein's philosophical interest in the criteria governing ordinary language, and is given unity by an abiding concern with the nature and the varying cultural manifestations of the sceptical impulse in modernity. This book elucidates the essentially philosophical roots and trajectory of Cavell's work, traces its links with Romanticism and its recent turn towards a species of moral pefectionism associated with Thoreau and Emerson, and concludes with an assessment of its relations to liberal-democratic political theory, Christian religious thought, and feminist literary studies.
Cavell is not one whose thought can be fixed easily with univocal determinacy. This is a thinking always on the move, and it moves more by perplexity and questioning than by arriving at assertoric claims, where finally rest at last offers itself. This is part of Cavell's great attraction and difficulty. Attraction: the subtlety of his interrogations lures one toward a moment of truth, less determined in conclusive propositions than in the question that now at last can be put and that, in being put, gives us access to a light that, just in being stayed briefly, also as quickly passes. Difficulty: there seems no place to lay one's head, so to say, and one is left to wonder if, in fact, there was that brief access of light, which after all now seems more a new perplexity than any perplexity dissolved or problem solved. To anyone who insists on a more settled univocity in philosophical argumentation, there will be cause enough here for chewing the carpet. And yet there is nothing excessively studied in this, as if it were the pose of unsettling us that Cavell struck, rather than in fact offering us access to that place of unsettling where a different thinking might catch fire. To say more univocally what cannot quite be so said: there is something of art in the philosophical writing of Cavell that draws water from a well whose secret spring still remains underground. © Cambridge University Press 2003 and Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Martin Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy reflects his famous philosophical "turning." In this work, Heidegger returns to the question of being from its inception in Being and Time to a new questioning of being as event. Heidegger opens up the essential dimensions of his thinking on the historicality of being that underlies all of his later writings. Contributions was composed as a series of private ponderings that were not originally intended for publication. They are nonlinear and radically at odds with the traditional understanding of thinking. This translation presents Heidegger in plain and straightforward terms, allowing surer access to this new turn in Heidegger's conception of being.
Preface and acknowledgments 1. Introduction 2. The Avoidance of Love: a reading of King Lear 3. Othello and the stake of the other 4. Coriolanus and interpretations of politics 5. Hamlet's burden of proof 6. Recounting gains, showing losses: reading The Winter's Tale Index of names and titles.
What is marriage? Can a relationship dedicated to equality, friendship, and mutual education flower in an atmosphere of romance? What are the paths between loving another and knowing another? Stanley Cavell identified a genre of classic American films that engaged these questions in his study of comedies of remarriage, Pursuits of Happiness. With Contesting Tears, Cavell demonstrates that a contrasting genre, which he calls "the melodrama of the unknown woman," shares a surprising number and weave of concerns with those comedies. Cavell provides close readings of four melodramas he finds definitive of the genre: Letter from an Unknown Woman, Gaslight, Now Voyager, and Stella Dallas. The women in these melodramas, like the women in the comedies, demand equality, shared education, and transfiguration, exemplifying for Cavell a moral perfectionism he identifies as Emersonian. But unlike the comedies, which portray a quest for a shared existence of expressiveness and joy, the melodramas trace instead the woman's recognition that in this quest she is isolated. Part of the melodrama concerns the various ways the men in the films (and the audiences of the films) interpret and desire to force the woman's consequent inaccessibility. "Film is an interest of mine," Stanley Cavell has written, "or say a love, not separate from my interest in, or love of, philosophy." In Contesting Tears Cavell once again brilliantly unites his two loves, using detailed and perceptive musings on melodrama to reflect on philosophical problems of skepticism, psychoanalysis, and perfectionism. As he shows, the fascination and intelligence of such great stars as Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, and Barbara Stanwyck illuminate, as they are illuminated by, the topics and events of these beloved and enduring films.
A pitch of philosophy. Autobiographical exercises
- S Cavell
Secular mysteries: Stanley Cavell and English romanticism
- R Duffy
Nature and selected essays
- R W Emerson
- RW Emerson
Philosophy and psychoanalysis
- J Wisdom
The principle of reason
- M Heidegger
Holderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister
- M Heidegger