the political theory of stanley cavell

8/13/2019 The Political Theory of Stanley Cavell

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Critical Exchange

The political theory of Stanley Cavell

Contemporary Political Theory (2012) 11,397429. doi:10.1057/cpt.2012.20;published online 23 October 2012

We invited five Cavell scholars to write on this topic. What follows is a vibrant

exchange among Paola Marrati, Andrew Norris, Jo rg Volbers, Cary Wolfe and

Thomas Dumm addressing the question whether, in the contemporary political

context, Cavells skepticism and his Emersonian perfectionism amount to apolitics at all.

Andrew Norris is guest editor for this Critical Exchange.

The ordinary life of democracy

There are many aspects of Cavells philosophy that are relevant for political

theory, but for the purpose of our present exchange I would like to focus on

one issue that has received relatively little attention and that seems to me tobe of critical importance. Namely the fact that a specific moral attitude that

Cavell calls moral perfectionism and sees as paradigmatically expressed by

Emerson is an essential dimension for the life of democratic societies. Before

explaining why Cavell gives such importance to a particular moral stance when

it comes to politics, and why I believe that his insights are not only correct

but badly needed in our contemporary intellectual and cultural landscape, let

me briefly outline how Cavell defines perfectionism.

In the first place, moral perfectionism is not an ethics or a moral doctrine in

the strict sense of the term. It does not offer a theory on the nature of the goodor the right; it does not advance universal or contextual principles of conduct

and even less sets up a list of virtues or norms to evaluate what a good life is

or should be. In this regard it is not an alternative to other moral philosophies;

in particular, it is not an alternative to either utilitarianism with its teleological

concept of the good or to Kantianism with its deontological emphasis on the

right: moral perfectionism does not take sides on the question as to whether

morality deals essentially with the consequences of our actions or with the

intentions that guide them. But if perfectionism is not a doctrine it is because it

is essentially an attitude of thinking, one that Cavell often describes as the

Socratic or romantic quest for the truth of the self. Although to avoid the easy

misunderstandings we have to keep in mind that for Cavell the self we are


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first to be discovered, as something strange to itself (Cavell, 2003, p. 217).

And, further, that the self is taken in a never ending process of becoming, onethat is uncompromisingly non-teleological not only because it is not guided by

any pre-established norm or ideal but also because every step, or state, of the

self has its own consistency and immanent value.

But in the absence of any regulative idea or vision of a virtuous life, what

motivates the uncertain quest of a better self? For Emerson, as Cavell reads

him, the desire for change never comes from abstract pictures of moral values,

but from the dissatisfaction with ourselves as we stand, from the sense that

something is deeply amiss with the current form of our lives in all its aspects

and not only in a few particulars, say in an ugly action we may have committed

or in some undignified habit we may have taken on. It is this dissatisfaction

with ourselves and things as they are that gives to the search for a better self

the urgency and necessity it has (or lacks). If moral perfectionism is primarily

an attitude of thinking, it is thus an essentially critical and therapeutic one,

a stance that originates in the discontent with the present state of the self and

its world and responds to it with the search for a transformative change.

And this is where politics, and more precisely democratic politics, enters into

the picture. The sense of dissatisfaction Cavell discusses is not a merely private

experience, if by private we mean some emotion that would depend upon

and concern only the psychological constitution or temperament of someindividuals, but is rather a political emotion both in its raisons detre and in

its consequences. It is largely motivated by the gap between the present state

of society and our aspirations to justice and strongly reinforced by the sense

that such a gap does not leave us untouched; that the unnecessary amount of

suffering, violence and discrimination as well as the vulgarity and stupidity of

dominant opinions do not remain at distance in the social world but on the

contrary contaminate the life of our minds; that there is no such thing as an

internal exile; and that the compromises of society are our own compromises

because if we are not directly and personally responsible for things as they are,we are not innocent or above reproach either. Cavell credits Emerson with

having understood as much with his insight that the institution of the private

and the constitution of the public cannot be neatly separated, that the quest of

a better self and the effort to build a more perfect union need one another

(Cavell, 1990, p. 45).

But what is particularly important for Cavell, and for my present purpose,

is that Emersons ideas do not express any nave optimism or idealized picture

of the American Dream. Democracy, as Emerson sees it, does not present the

pretty face of an egalitarian and self-confident society driven by the faith inprogress and reform in the manner of Tocqueville, but rather the disquieting

picture of a society that betrays its own promise of a new world with slavery

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disappointment is not exactly a novel idea: from the Athens of Socrates to the

America of Emerson and Obama nothing is more common, and more oftenthan not utterly justified, than a feeling of discouragement, some would say

disgust, in the face of the present state of democratic societies. Perhaps we

could even say that nothing better than disappointment describes this regime

with no intrinsic properties we call democracy (Derrida, 2009, p. 127). Most

philosophers, from Plato to Badiou, find the only appropriate response to such

a predicament in righteous contempt. Others voice resigned support: yes,

democracy is quite distasteful but not as much as its alternatives, it is the lesser

of evils and we really have no choice other than being democrats faute de

mieux. Only a few embrace democracy for its intrinsic virtues and values, blind

to its failures. But if the acknowledgment of the disappointing nature of

democracy is anything but new, Emerson, for Cavell, parts company from

these all too familiar and hardly satisfactory positions in the attempt to find

a different answer to our discouragement and a different way to reaffirm a

democratic hope at distance equally from any undue idealization of the present

and from the escape in false forms of transcendence.

As Cavell remarks, Emerson is relentless in his denunciation of all those

who celebrate the present state of society: This is part of Emersonian

Perfectionisms struggle against the moralistic, here the form of moralism that

fixates on the presence of ideals in ones culture and promotes them to distractfrom the presence of otherwise intolerable injustice (Cavell, 1990, p. 13). But

the fixation on ideals is not only dangerous when it leads us to uncritically

celebrate the present. The temptation to fault society for failing to meet

idealized and absolute visions of perfect justice is even more insidious. We may

no longer quite believe in a separate realm of transcendent or transcendental

values, perhaps not even in the future of revolution and human redemption,

but the sense that anything that falls short of fully embodying our ideals is not

truly worth fighting for is still pervasive. The problem with this stance is that it

is equally, although for different and may be more noble reasons, unreforming:it trades the idealization of things as they are for an idealized standard of

purity, for things as they should be in a world forever at a distance from ours,

and in so doing avoids, or seeks to avoid, the ordinary. But if we follow

Emerson and Cavell in believing that the ordinary world is the only one we

have, although we may not yet know how to inhabit it, such a stance is hardly

compelling.

Cavell is keenly aware that we all have reasons, and good ones, to be

disappointed with democracy and ourselves as we stand, that we are all

tempted by discouragement and despair, ready to seek protection in cynicism,to yield to false hopes, illusions of transcendence; that we are all in danger of

becoming creatures of resentment exposed as we are to a fear of life that can

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Emersons effort to counter the destructive power of despair with a call for

patience, the patience needed to take the path of transformative change,to hold on to the fragile, melancholic hope for a better self and a better world

in our time rather than at the dawn of a new time.

But how good is such a response? Patience seems hardly a match to counter

despair, hope in the ordinary much less exciting than apocalyptic or utopian

fantasies. Emerson knows encouragement is needed to sustain the perfectionist

quest, and Cavell feels the need to reaffirm his conviction that encouragement

is a political necessity, as much as despair is a political threat, for any

democratic society which after all can only reform itself if we share the desire

for some common good:

It is a characteristic criticism of Emerson to say that he lacks a sense of

tragedy; otherwise how can he seem so persistently to preach cheerful-

ness? But suppose what Emerson perceives when he speaks of his fellow

citizens as existing in a state of secret melancholy, is that in a democracy,

which depends upon a state of willingness to act for the common good,

despair is political emotion, discouraging both participation and

patience. So when Emerson asks of the American Scholar that he or

she raise and cheer us, he is asking for a step of political encouragement,

one that assures us that we are not alone in our sense of compromise withjustice, that our sense of an unattained self is not an escape from, it is

rather an index of, our commitment to the unattained city, one within the

one we sustain, one we know there is no good reason we perpetually fail

to attain. (Cavell, 2004, p. 18)

It is unquestionably difficult to accept that there are no good reasons

metaphysical, theological, structural or otherwise why we cannot attain a

more just society and a more decent life.1 But even such knowledge, when it

remains pure knowledge, is not enough to give us the energy we need to seekactual change. The only encouragement that is effective, for Cavell, does not

come in the form of intellectual clarity or dispassionate reason but in the

belief, and the experience, that something goodcan and does happen, that we

are capable of (some) good. Only the good is powerful enough to counter

the mortal temptation of despair; perfectionism, as Cavell defines it, sees the

problem of the moral life as that of liberating in each and all of us the power of

the good, rather than focusing on duties, norms and imperatives supposedly

capable of containing the bad: Perfectionism is the dimension of moral

thought directed less to restraining the bad than to releasing the good, as froma despair of good (of good and bad in each of us) (Cavell, 1990, p. 18). Such an

emphasis certainly sets Cavell apart in the contemporary intellectual scene

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done in the uncompromisingly non-moralistic and non-normative way that is

proper to Cavell. The good we have no reason (hence no excuse) not to becapable of, let us recall, is not sanctioned by present dominant values and

ideals particularly not ours at the exclusion of those of others has no

virtues to promote (or enforce), no universal criteria to be judged upon, no

transcendent or transcendental grounds. It is just an affirmation of existence,

of desires we can make our own, pursuits of happiness that do not need to

abandon the ordinary to transform the world.

To some, perhaps to many, it will seem that Cavells appeal to the power

of the good, to the desirability of the world, as the only force capable of

countering despair and thus keep the possibility of social justice open is beyond

nave.2 I do not share this view and would simply ask, if not on the good, on

what else should we count then?

Notes

1 It is certainly easier to blame the sinful nature of humans, the metaphysical destiny of the West,

selfish genes, technology, or whatever else one finds appealing according to his or her cultural

taste: the market after all offers quite a large choice of options both in the category of causes of

evil and in that of possible messiahs.

2 Probably because I am not myself completely sheltered from the temptation of despair andhence a bit anxious about the charge of navete I find reassuring to see concrete instances of

the Cavellian call for the power of the good in some contemporary forms of political activism.

Van Jones address to the Netroots Nation on 28 July 2010, shortly after his resignation

from the Obama administration, is one of the best recent examples of such a stance and

I recommend those who havent seen it to take a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

0ZgoZffDHB4.

References

Cavell, S. (1990)Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Cavell, S. (2003) Emersons Transcendental Etudes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Cavell, S. (2004) Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life. Cambridge,

MA: Belknap.

Derrida, J. (2009) The Beast and the Sovereign, Translated by G. Bennington. Chicago, IL:

University of Chicago Press.

Paola Marrati

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA

[email protected]

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Skepticism, finitude and politics in the work ofStanley Cavell

Stanley Cavells philosophical work is much more wide-ranging than that

of almost all of his contemporaries, including as it does serious contributions

to our understanding of the philosophy of language, epistemology, philo-

sophical aesthetics, Romanticism, Transcendentalism, Shakespeare and film.

Cavells work in these disparate fields is unified by his distinctive voice and

vocabulary, his habit of combining close textual analysis with startingallusions and associations, and a number of recurrent themes, including the

ordinary, perfectionism, modernism, remarriage, education, conversation

and conversion. The most central of these themes to Cavells work as a whole

is that of skepticism, and Cavells unique formulation of what skepticism

involves inflects each of the others. Accordingly, it is not easy to say

succinctly what skepticism is and means for Cavell. Its exposition has taken

him a fruitful lifetime of work. But it can profitably be thought of as a name

for an expression of human finitude and the human discontent with that

finitude. The acceptance of our finitude for Cavell entails accepting the worldand acknowledging those with whom we share it, tasks we find surprisingly

difficult and uncongenial.1 The desire to evade them lies at the heart of both

the skeptics procedures, and, I want to suggest, much of the pathology of

modern political life.

Given Cavells roots in the ordinary language philosophy of J.L. Austin

and the later Wittgenstein, his conception of our finitude will highlight its

expression in our words as Kants and Heideggers do not. In the tradition

from which Cavell emerged, skepticism is an epistemological problem (and not,

as in the ancient pursuit ofataraxia, an explicitly ethical project), a problemthat takes distinctive forms when it concerns material objects and when it

concerns the minds of others. Cavells treatment of the former emphasizes the

skeptics desire to mean by his statements something that he cannot mean;

while his analysis of the latter emphasizes the skeptics anxiety concerning his

ability to respond to the other as a sentient being. This contrast is easily

overstated, and Cavell is at pains to bring out the manner in which meaning

and responsibility entail one another. But the rough contrast stands.

Mid-twentieth century discussion of the skepticism of other minds routinely

focused on the pain of the other; to know that the other was minded entailed

knowing and not merely believing that he was in pain (see, for example,

Wittgenstein 1958 y303) For Cavell this was no coincidence as a central

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pain and person feeling it. Cavell cannot of course prove such an ad hominem

claim, but he does manifest its plausibility by demonstrating that it is hardlyclear what it would mean to know the others pain in a way that the skeptic

does not already. In his seminal essay Knowing and Acknowledging, Cavell

imagines a pair of brothers, one of whom, Second, suffers everything which

happens to his brother, First. At least some times when Second feels pain it is

because First feels it: the pain is then Firsts. While this might seem to be a

picture that would satisfy the skeptic, Cavell argues that neither brother could

be said to know the others pain in the way the skeptic wants him to.

Firsts knowledge is too intellectual: even though he has the same pain

as Second, he has to infer (or remember?) that Second is in pain. So the

phenomenological pang in having to say that knowing another mind is

a matter of inference [from similar behavior to similar feelings] remains

after we have granted what seemed to be lacking in our knowledge of the

other. In the latter case (Second knowing First), Seconds knowledge is

too immediate; his having Firsts pain is, one might say, an effect of

that pain, not a response to it. (Cavell, 1969, p. 253)

Cavell concludes that the idea of knowing the others pain as being a matter

of experiencing something oneself as opposed to responding to anothersexperience is misguided. For it to be the others pain one must respond to it,

that is, choose how to respond to it. It is precisely this that the skeptics pursuit

of knowledge evades. A world of others who can be known (or not known) in

the skeptics sense is a world of others whose plights and whose differences

from oneself do not stand to be acknowledged.

Skepticism about other minds is thus for Cavell not just an epistemological

position, but also a practical, existential stance in the world or, perhaps

better, a stance at one step removed from the world of others whose pain,

sorrow, disappointment and joy all call out for ones response. In this wayit engages with many of the issues raised by Axel Honneths politics of

recognition. But it does so in a distinctive manner. Honneth rests his normative

claims regarding self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem upon a philo-

sophical anthropology that he hopes will be empirically confirmed by

psychological and sociological study. Moral and political norms are thus

grounded in a naturalistic account of the prerequisites of human flourishing.

But this account may or may not receive the empirical confirmation for which

Honneth hopes; and it does not, in any event, do much to engage with those

who might resist it now or in the presence of such evidence. Cavells accountof acknowledgment addresses the same set of issues, but does so from the

perspective of precisely those who might deny others recognition or acknowl-

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to ones responsibility; and instead of an appeal to a (hopefully) impartial third

party, the appeal is to the individual who must determine for herself whatresponsibilities she will acknowledge and take up, and what she can and cannot

meaningfully say.2

In the case of material objects, the skeptic wants to test more than his ability to

know a particular fact about the world; what is at stake is knowledge of reality

uberhaupt. Cavells teacher Austin had contested the intelligibility of such a

project. On Austins account, real, is a trouser word in the sense that it is the

negative use that wears the trousers. That is, a definite sense attaches to the

assertion that something is real, a real such-and-such, only in the light of a

specific way in which it might be, or might have been, not real (Austin, 1962,

p. 70). Meaningful language-use is situated and contextualized. Just as we

cannot meaningfully say, I voluntarilywent to the bank today, when there is no

reason to believe that I might have been coerced (for example, I have a phobia of

banks that up to now has kept me from entering them of my own volition), so

we cannot meaningfully speak of reality outside of any particular context. As

Austin puts it, there could be no general answer to the questions what is

evidence for what, what is certain, what is doubtful, what needs or does not need

evidence, can or cant be verified. If the Theory of Knowledge consists in finding

grounds for such an answer, there is no such thing (Austin, 1962, p. 124). The

skeptic is thus forced to manufacture an object that will be at once generalenough for his purposes but specific enough to be spoken of meaningfully

something like Descartes ball of wax (Descartes, 1968, p. 108). Cavell terms this

object thegeneric object; and he argues that speaking of such an object proves to

be impossible. If the epistemologist were not imagining a claim [about a

particular thing in a particular context] to have been made, his procedure would

be as out of the ordinary as the ordinary language philosopher finds it to be. But,

on the other hand, if he were investigating a claim of the sort the coherence of his

procedures require y then his conclusion would not have the generality it seems

to have (Cavell, 1979, p. 218). The skeptic cannot say what he wants to say, notin the sense that he cannot say what he somehow means, as if meaning were a

silent speaking, but in the sense that he cannot mean what he wants to mean.

The skeptic believes that his investigations reveal a stark limitto his knowledge

of the world. But Cavell suggests that what the skeptic enacts is rather a feature

of human finitude (Cavell, 1979, p. 431). In a striking passage Cavell relates his

sense of this to Kants skeptical claim that though we can know the phenomena

we construct, we cannot know things as they are in themselves:

The reason we cannot say what the thing is in itself is not that there issomething we do not in fact know, but that we have deprived ourselves

of the conditions for saying anything in particular There is nothing we

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everything to be said. There is nothing we cannot know. That does not

mean we can know everything; there is no everything, no totality of factsor things, to be known. To say we do not (cannot) know things-

in-themselves is as much a Transcendental Illusion as to say we do.

(Cavell, 1979, pp. 239240)

The acceptance of our finitude plays a central role in the philosophical

conversion that becomes increasingly important in Cavells later work. In

Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, Cavell refers to the source of his title in

a passage of Emersons essay Experience in which Emerson names the most

unhandsome part of our condition to be the evanescence and lubricity of

all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch

hardest. It is the skeptic who clutches hardest, and who loses the things in his

grasp, who cannot deal with the world because he seeks to manipulate it.3

Cavell relates this clutching to Heideggers account of thinking as a greifen, a

grasping after concepts,Begriffe. Heidegger is famous here for his thematiza-

tion of this violence as expressed in the world dominion of technology, but

Emerson is no less explicit about it as a mode of thinking. The overcoming of

this conceptualizing will require the achievement of a form of knowledge both

Emerson and Heidegger call reception (Cavell, 1990, p. 38). We resist this in

large part because we seek to masterthe world and those with whom we shareit, to grasp and control them rather than passively suffering their difference

and exposing ourselves to the possible failures of our response to them. Cavells

acceptance, like Heideggers Gelassenheit, is not a simple collapse, but a mode

of passivity that requires extraordinary care and self-examination, and that

demands a fundamental conversion in our lives.4 And, again like Gelassenheit,

it is a conversion with political implications, as the violent grasping from which

it turns is manifested in the culture at large, and not just the life of the

individual.

That said, it remains the case that acceptance and acknowledgement aretasks of the individual, in Cavell as in Thoreau and Emerson. No doubt, in

each the individual must adopt the perspective of the citizen: this is not ethics

as opposed to politics, but ethics (in the broadest sense) as a central part of

politics. But Cavells union of the two is neither Aristotles nor Hegels. Access

to the political is via the self, not, say, institutional or sociological analysis. 5

This in itself is not a fatal limitation. Systematic political thought of the kind to

which Hegel aspired may no longer be possible, if it ever was, and a partial

contribution may be the most for which we can hope, any final political

analysis being a patchwork of such partialities.

6

But there is some reason tofear that, at least in the United States, the self-examination for which Cavell

calls is not simply partial but beside the point Can any kind of philosophical/

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environment, the exploding inequality dividing the American citizenry, or

the ever-increasing political power of supremely wealthy individual andinternational corporations in the wake ofCitizens United v. Federal Election

Commission? The problems here are only exacerbated in light of the grim

contemporary political scene. The complete failure of President Obamas

attempt to forge a post-partisan working compromise with the leadership of

the Republican Party and the evident refusal of many in that party to accept

the responsibilities of either dialogue or governance may well indicate that we

have entered a period like that of the late Weimar Republic, in which politics

resembles war more than it does a union requiring self-examination and

promising remarriage. That would hardly refute any of Cavells claims. But it

would add considerably to their poignancy. Cavell announces that his

perfectionism entails a disgust with or disdain for the present state of things

so complete as to require not merely reform, but a call for a transformation

of things, and before all a transformation of the self (Cavell, 1990, p. 46). The

fear is that we may have reached a point at which we cannot move beyond

communal self-disgust.

Notes

1 [W]hat skepticism suggests is that since we cannot know the world exists, its presentness to us

cannot be a function of knowing. The world is to be accepted; as the presentness of other minds

is not to be known, but acknowledged (Cavell, 1969, p. 324).

2 On the need for empirical confirmation, see Honneth (1995, p. 143); for the very strong claims he

makes regarding the universal human need for recognition, see pp. 173f. Honneth (2008) engages

with Cavells Knowing and Acknowledging, but he does not note the deep differences between

Cavells work and his own.

3 All of these being moments of the various definitions ofhandsome.

4 Likewise, it is, as Cavell writes here, a form of knowledge. I do not propose the idea of

acknowledgement as an alternative to knowing but rather as an interpretation of it, as I take the

word acknowledge, containing knowledge, itself to suggest (or perhaps it suggests that

knowing is an interpretation of acknowledging) (Cavell, 1988, p. 8).

5 I am indebted to John Lysaker for pressing this point with me.

6 There is ample evidence that this is Cavells own understanding of the matter.

References

Austin, J.L. (1962) Sense and Sensibilia. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.

Cavell, S. (1969) Must We Mean What We Say?. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Cavell, S. (1979)The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. New York,NY: Oxford University Press.

C ll S (1988) Q t f th O di Chi IL U i it f Chi P

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Descartes, R. (1968) Discourse on Method and the Meditations, Translated by F.E. Sutcliffe. New

York, NY: Penguin.

Honneth, A. (1995) The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts,

Translated by J. Anderson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Honneth, A. (2008) Reification. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1958) Philosophical Investigations, Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. New York,

NY: Macmillan.

Andrew Norris

University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA

[email protected]

Crossing the bounds of sense: Cavell and Foucault

In his (partly) critical discussion of Rawlss theory of justice, Stanley Cavell

uses Ibsens A Dolls House as an example to show the inherent limitations of

the liberal idea of the social contract. Emphasizing the conditions of possibility

of consensual debate, Cavell frames this idea as being the idea of our livingunder conditions in which we are enabled to say something to another and

the idea that what we are enabled to say is that we agree, or would agree

(Cavell, 1990, p. 106). Cavell is not the first to make the criticism that this idea

(or ideal) of consent is not as neutral as it presents itself as being. It

presupposes the possibility to participate in such a conversation of justice, as

Cavell terms it, a presupposition that masks the manifold social barriers which

de facto and often enough de jure exclude dissenting voices. But Cavells

perception of the problem runs deeper, or it is, if one likes, more paranoid. For

him, the case of Nora Helmes, the central character of the play, goes beyondthe mere possibility of exclusion through simple denial. Torvald, Noras

husband, does not just ignore her voice and thus her potential contribution to a

common conversation of justice. In treating her like a doll, as Nora begins to

realize, and in having treated her like a doll for years, Torvald excludes her

completely from the sphere of any rational moral conversation. Nora, the

doll, might be able to say something, like the dolls of our time with their

speech devices but neither Torvald nor her father would ever consider her as

being apartof a conversation where words, and the exchange of words, matter.

Since her reasons have no power, she has no power of reason. Nora is virtuallyunable to even begin the conversation of justice by simply saying something to

another though capable of speech she is mute with no voice of her own and

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A Dolls House exemplifies a problem Cavell has been grappling with

right from the beginning of his career as a philosopher: The philosophicalsignificance of the inability to express oneself, a subject-matter which Cavell

discovered first in Wittgensteins discussion of the private language (which is

for Cavell a fantasy of inexpressive privacy or suffocation) and then succes-

sively in Emerson and Thoreau (Cavell, 2001, p. 256). Noras voice has been

suffocated, so her problem is not the content of her reasons just as, for

Cavell, the skeptics true problem is not the epistemic status of the content of

his claim, but his practical relation to it. Challenging the social order as such

with her moral outrage, Nora puts herself beyond the accepted forms of what is

taken to be reasoning (Cavell, 1990, p. 109). Accordingly, Torvald accuses her

of being childish and of being out of her senses which is, as Cavell puts it,

not a refusal of conversation, but the denial that conversation has been

offered (Cavell, 1990, p. xxxvii).

The case of Nora shows that the social nature of reason, its dependence on

the way we treat each other, is not just a professional philosophical insight.

It touches the very idea of what reason is or actually can be, and especially

highlights our own implications in it the question of how we can and should

lead our lives, and in what relation we stand to the words we can use. In taking

this seriously, as Cavell does, one is immediately confronted with the

methodological problem of how the philosopher can assume a critical stancetowards the dominating possibilities of articulation. Can we really assume

Noras position, and if so, how can we claim to be comprehensible? Isnt one

condemned to silence (as the early Wittgenstein claimed), or at least to

senseless staggering? Cavell: In investigating ourselves, we are led to speak

outside language games (Cavell, 1979, p. 207).

The challenge of philosophy, which Cavell accepted so admirably, is to

continue the work of continuously crossing the bounds of sense without

succumbing to the typical philosophical arrogance of not sharing Noras

problems of intelligibility. I assume that in his discussion of moralperfectionism there is a consequence and articulation of this sensibility, since

it concentrates on the struggle to gain intelligibility (to oneself and to others) in

the light of these structural difficulties. It is in this way that perfectionism

precedes, or intervenes, in the specification of moral theories (Cavell, 2004,

p. 2). The way we treat ourselves and others can neither be fully derived

from reason (that is, moral theories), nor is it by consequence irrational.

The Emersonian attained but unattainable self is but one expression of this

paradoxical position that life and reason cannot be separated as neatly as, for

example, Kant had hoped.My contention, now, with Cavell concerns the way he frames the problem of

intelligibility He takes what I would like to call a hermeneutic stance towards

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conflict, articulation and clarification, justification and its skeptical discontents.

Philosophy being always essentially tied to the logos, this approach is veryproductive in order to elucidate thephilosophicalproblem of the assumed liminal

position. But it obscures, I think, its real political dimension. In order to show

this, I will compare and contrast Cavells view on intelligibility with Foucaults

perception of this issue.

It has often been noted, for example by David Owen or Arnold Davidson,

that the tradition of perfectionism bears close resemblances to what Foucault

has called practices of the self. Cavell himself describes perfectionism as an

emphasis of an aspect of moral choice having to do y with being true to

oneself, or as Michel Foucault has put the view, caring for the self (Cavell,

2004, p. 11). In contrast to Cavell, though, Foucault is interested in the

genealogy of the idea of being true to oneself, which always includes an

irreducible dimension of struggle and power. His late studies are part of his

general project to understand how forms of reasoning and subjectivity are

established and upheld through procedures of exclusion, marginalization and

physical coercion, and thus his engagement for those who speak outside

language games focuses on madmen, delinquents and rebels rather than on

skeptical philosophers.

In a late interview, Foucault states that [i]t is through revolt that subjectivity

y

introduces itself into history and gives it the breath of life (Foucault,1981a, p. 8, cited in Owen, 2006, p. 152). Noras conflict her not being

allowed to be a real subject is here put in terms ofpower. Schematically put:

Where Cavell sees a confrontation of voices, Foucaults use of the term revolt

signifies a confrontation of bodies and forces, of coercion and pleasures. It is

true, for Foucault as well, that these revolting subjectivities amount to an

unintelligible uproar of confused voices, as he notes in the same interview.

As early as The Order of the Discourse, he was well aware of the fact that

a proposition must fulfill complex and heavy requirements before it can be

called true or false, it must be in the true, as Canguilhem would say(Foucault, 1981b, p. 60).

For Foucault, subjectivity and consequently the intelligibility of the subject

has to be produced and kept alive through these complex and heavy

requirements. This perspective turns the attention to a wide array of material

and discursive practices, disciplinary exercises, bodily trainings and even

architectural arrangements such as the Panopticon or the big confinement of

madmen. Metaphysics is, if anything, an ex post reflection of these historical

and material conditions. What is important is that these practices are not

just external obstacles which impose themselves upon some prior subject. ForFoucault, subjectivity cannot be detached from these material and practical

conditions Think of the Aristotelian notion of capacity or of Gilbert Ryles

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views, bodily-practical abilities. Consequently, every form of subjectivity

has to be acquired through forms of training and conditioning which areby implication also exercises of power as Foucault puts it: Being a subject,

means also being subjected. In my view, this is also Wittgensteins position:

Here the teaching of language is not explanation, but training [abrichten]

(Wittgenstein, 1986, y5).1

This is why, for Foucault, the central philosophical problem is not the

individuals struggle to make herself intelligible. Or rather, the way he under-

stands this struggle puts it in a completely different light. First of all:

Foucaults methodological concentration on the practicalside of the formation

of the self does not exclude the possibility of a rational discourse in which one

tries to liberate oneself. But it reveals a tension between these discursive

aspirations and the mostly silent procedures which seem to uphold both the

aspiration and its practical constraints. Intelligibility, for Foucault, is not only

a problem of finding (and thus founding) a language. In his What is

Enlightenment? he diagnoses a paradox of the relations of capacity and

power. In order to acquire a free subjectivity, Western societies have always

tried to increase individual capabilities (Foucault alludes to the institution

of education, the growth of economic wealth and the improvement of the

means of communication). But this growth of capabilities did not, as

Foucault notes, result in a corresponding growth of freedom. Rather, it led toan intensification of power relations, an entanglement of the subject within

these disciplinary, normalizing or discursive practices. The problem of

intelligibility thus becomes an eminently political problem, which is always

aiming at some specific form of subjectivity and its genealogy.

To summarize: I believe that Cavells perception of the problem of the

intelligibility of the self to itself and to others offers important insights;

and to me, it seems to be especially fruitful within the realm to which Cavell

deliberately confines it: limited to these in positions of relative advantage,

which includes the modern academic philosopher (Cavell, 1990, p. xx). Butsomewhere on the way from Wittgenstein to Emerson, the idea that the logic

of language is always constituted in games in concrete spatio-temporal

material practices got lost. (Cavells early essay on King Lear, for example,

still displays a heightened sensibility for the importance of material arrange-

ments, in this case: the stage and the audience.) This leads to an implicit

exclusion of those to whom the perfectionists task to make even justified

anger and hatred intelligible is simply out of reach; those who cannot but

express themselves through madness, delinquency or revolt (Cavell, 2004, p.

26). The claim is not, as Foucault emphasizes, that these confused voicessound better than the others or even express the ultimate truth (Foucault,

1981a p 8 cited in Owen 2006 p 152) But their struggles point to the

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understanding and suffocated voice, namely, power and non-discursive

practices.

Notes

1 I elaborate this reading of Wittgenstein in Volbers (2009).

References

Cavell, S. (1979)The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. New York,NY: Oxford University Press.

Cavell, S. (1990)Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Cavell, S. (2001) The Investigations everyday aesthetics of itself. In: T. McCarthy and S.C. Stidd

(eds.), Wittgenstein in America. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.


MA: Belknap.

Foucault, M. (1981a) Is it useless to revolt? Philosophy and Social Criticism 8(1): 24.

Foucault, M. (1981b) The order of discourse. In: R. Young (ed.), Untying The Text. London:

Routledge, pp. 5264.

Owen, D. (2006) Perfectionism, parrhesia, and the care of the self. In: A. Norris (ed.), The Claim to

Community. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 128155.

Volbers, J. (2009) Selbsterkenntnis und Lebensform. Bielefeld, unpublished transcript.

Wittgenstein, L. (1986) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

Jo rg Volbers

Freie Universita t, Berlin 14195, Germany

[email protected]

Cavells forms of life and biopolitics

Stanley Cavells well-known obsession with skepticism is concerned with how

conventionalism might readily turn into a slippery slope leading us to (mere)

ethnocentrism. His particular twist on Wittgensteins Philosophical Investiga-

tions his emphasis on not forms of life but forms oflife is meant to mark

this difference from a reading of Wittgenstein that, in Cavells view, would find

in the latters putative conventionalism not just a refutation of skepticism but

also a kind of political conservatism (Cavell, 1989, pp. 4243). Cavells basicargument is that this emphasis on the human form of life gives us something

irreducible to the pure immanence (forms conventions) of language games

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or, you might say (even better) held responsible. In Must We Mean What We

Say?Cavell writes:

We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected,

and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts.

Nothing insures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the

grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing

insures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. That on

the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling

y [A]ll the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls forms of life. Human

speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but

nothing less, than this. (Cavell, 1999, p. 52)

So far so good.

The problem comes when Cavell wants it, in fact, to rest on somethingmore

than this, as he does in a section ofThis New Yet Unapproachable America

called Life Forms, in his essay Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a

Philosopher of Culture. There, Cavell confronts more or less the same

problem that Hannah Arendt (that biopolitical thinker avant la lettre)

confronts in The Origins of Totalitarianism, where her conventionalist idea

of rights runs up against the question of the right to have rights forced uponher by the stateless millions in the wake of World War II (Arendt, 1976,

pp. 296297). To make a long story short, she grounds the right to have rights

in the capacity for speech, and here Cavell does the same thing: Wittgenstein

gives a name for something to call the human form of life; he calls it, more or

less, talking (Cavell, 1989, p. 47).

Im not interested in pursuing any further in this limited space the point

that Cavell here takes his place in a very long line of philosophers, stretching

back to the Aristotle of the Politics, who attempt to use language to juridically

separate human beings from all other life forms on the planet a move that,I believe, is not just empirically but also philosophically untenable at this point,

for reasons Ive taken up elsewhere (Derrida, 2008, esp. pp. 151, 119140).1

What Im interested in here instead is that Cavell goes even further, insisting that

its not enough to understand Wittgensteins idea of forms of life as meaning

the social nature of human language and conduct over and against either an

emphasis on either isolated individuals on the one hand or following a rule on

the other (Cavell, 1989, p. 41). Against this ethnological or horizontal sense of

forms of life Cavell counterpoises (here and in The Claim of Reason) what he

calls a biological or vertical sense not forms of life but forms of life whichrecalls differences between the human and so-called lower or higher forms

(Cavell 1989 pp 4142) What he has in mind here is not just the idea of the

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designation that can mark the limit and give the conditions of the use of criteria

as applied to others. The criteria of pain, say, do not apply to what does notexhibit a form of life, and so not (for example) to the realm of machines

(Cavell, 1989, p. 43). I see no good reason to tether the ability to exhibit a form

of life presumptively to a particular material substrate or organization, or to a

particular biological designation a point that science fiction has gleefully

problematized, of course, for a long time now in films such as Blade Runnerand

TV series such as Star Trek: Next Generation (where, in one of its best episodes,

Commander Data [an android] argues before a court of law for his right not to

be subject to scheduled disassembly). Short of that, Id say were fairly hybrid

creatures at this point (pharmacology being only the most obvious example).

Cavell suggests in The Claim of Reason that there are not human criteria

which apprise me y why I take it, among all the things I encounter y that

some of them have feeling y unless the fact that humans beings apply

psychological concepts to certain things and not to others is such a criterion

(Cavell, 1979, p. 82). If I withhold that, then there is nothing the body is of,

theres only being a body and not having a body (Cavell, 1979, p. 84). The

problem here is not that Cavell is claiming that only humans can suffer; he

isnt. The problem is that the way other beings experience the world is forced

into the Procrustean bed of our own way. But of course, as Vicki Hearne

among many others has reminded us, animals experience the world verydifferently from us, and they make that manifest to us all the time in quite

unexpected ways. But be that as it may, its not clear why the material or

biological substrate of the being doing the projecting matters. Why do we need

the hard lines here between human and animal, higher and lower life forms,

biological and mechanical?

All of this may not seem to have much to do with politics or political theory,

but I think it does when viewed against the increasingly prominent backdrop of

biopolitical thought. In this context, opting for a biological sense of form of

life as a stay against ethnocentrism and conservatism and, I think cruciallyfor Cavell, against the temptation to take the individual and its responsibility

out of the picture looks rather different. Cavell writes in This New Yet

Unapproachable America that the biological interpretation of form of life is

not merely another available interpretation to that of the ethnological, but

contests its sense of political or social conservatismy In being asked to accept

this, or suffer it, as given for ourselves, we are being asked to accept not a

particular fact of power but the fact that I am a man, therefore ofthis(range or

scale) of capacity for work, for pleasure, for endurance, for appeal, for

command, for understanding, for wish, for will, for teaching, for suffering(Cavell, 1989, p. 44). But everything he lists here work, pleasure, endurance,

suffering has to do not with who is human in biological terms but with who

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condemning the ethnocentric practice of slavery, say, but one could just as well

find in it the means by which the idea that slaves were not people ever got afoothold in the first place. This is to say not (obviously) that Cavell is being

racist he sees the vertical sense as taking up arms against racism but rather

that he misses the autoimmunitary logic at work here. Namely (as Derrida,

Esposito, and others have emphasized), that once you start drawing lines

between us and them based upon biological or zoological designations as

grounding a zone of immunitary protection, the process is bound to turn back

upon itself and threaten the very zone it intended to secure, so that the we

becomes subject to further subdivision, further purification, thus turning the

body (including the body politic) against itself.2 Leaving intact the juridical

distinction between higher and lower, human and non-human, makes that

distinction permanently available for use against whatever body falls outside

our ken when the scales are sliced finely enough. To put this in biopolitical

terms, the political distinction betweenbiosand zoeis in constantly moving and

floating transposition with the biological distinction between human and

animal with race, as Foucault among others well realized, as their quilting

point.3 In this light, Cavells vertical rendering of forms of life would be an

example of the workings of what Agamben calls the anthropological machine,

which each time decides upon and recomposes the conflict between man and

animal (Agamben, 2004, p. 75).4

For these reasons, I think that forms of life are better understood and

rearticulated in terms of what biopolitical thought calls dispositifs or

apparatuses not just to move the discussion away from rules and toward

webs, contexts and networks of shared interest, forms of interaction and

projection and their overdeterminations (a position I very much share with

Cavell), but also because I dont think Cavells attempt to tether this to the

biological is either warranted or necessary. Foucaults definition will do as well

as anyones: a dispositif is a thoroughly heterogeneous set consisting of

discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, admin-istrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthro-

pic propositions, one that is essentially strategic and has as its major function

the response to an urgency as a concrete intervention in the relation of forces

(Foucault, 1980, pp. 194196). This gives Cavell everything he wants from form

of life it is not about rules, it cannot be decided in advance, it depends on

working and projecting from where we are without the guarantee of a saving

scenario or blueprint and without the baggage.

Except one thing, perhaps: one that underscores a final problem with

Cavells humanism. For Cavell, the alternative to following a rule seems to benot just form of life in the sense just articulated via Foucault but, in fact,

individual drama personal responsibility something very much like the

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vocabulary cluster. As one recent commentator puts it, it is precisely

narratives of the progress of individual selves, or souls that is central forCavell; he is less interested in structures and networks of the sort analyzed by

Foucault than in exemplars of wit, courage, cowardice, grace, skepticism,

hope, success, and failure (Bates, 2003, pp. 38, 43). But of course, one can only

do what one can do what one is in a position to do which is to say that the

entire project of self-transformation has, as it were, an unconscious: not just a

discursive unconscious but a material unconscious in the broadest sense, one

that actually bridges the gaps between worlds that seem to be pretty gaping in

Cavells rendering of forms of life. To put it another way, you might say that,

despite himself (or is it?), Cavell takes too much satisfaction in our lack of

satisfaction, our failure and the difficulty of our tasks, precisely because it is

too much ours (see Cavell, 1989, pp. 44). Politics isnt nearly as much about

us as Cavell thinks it is, and thats precisely what makes it so difficult: not

difficult in the sense of intestinal fortitude, but difficult in the sense of

articulating of our intentions and desires in a field of effectivity that is quite

qualitatively diverse and largely ahuman, moving at speeds and scales quite

different from our own. Or as the saying goes, theres what you think youre

doing, theres what you are actuallydoing, and theres what what youre doing

does. Those are three very different things. And thats political.

Notes

1 For my own discussion, see Wolfe (2003, pp. 4494).

2 On the autoimmunitary, see, for example, Borradori (2003).

3 The literature on this topic is vast, of course, but onbiosand zoe, see Agamben (1998). On race,

see Foucault (2003, pp. 255256).

4 Cavell, in his fashion, confronts the biopolitical and specifically the question of factory farming

and its analogy to the Holocaust, as dramatized by J.M. Coetzees character Elizabeth Costello

in The Lives of Animals with a degree of equivocation almost no one else could makecompelling in Cavell (2008).

References

Agamben, G. (1998)Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Translated by D. Heller-Roazen.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Agamben, G. (2004)The Open: Man and Animal, Translated by K. Attell. Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press.

Arendt, H. (1976) The Origins of Totalitarianism, new edition. New York, NY: Harcourt.

Bates, S. (2003) Stanley Cavell and ethics. In: R. Eldridge (ed.), Stanley Cavell. Cambridge, UK:Cambridge University Press, pp. 1447.

B d i G (2003) Phil h i Ti f T Di l ith J H b d J

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Cavell, S. (1979)The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. New York,

NY: Oxford University Press.

Cavell, S. (1989) This New Yet Unapproachable America. Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch Press.

Cavell, S. (2008) Companionable thinking. In: S. Cavell, C. Diamond, J. McDowell, I. Hacking

and C. Wolfe (eds.), Philosophy and Animal Life. New York, NY: Columbia University Press,

pp. 91126.

Derrida, J. (2008) The Animal That Therefore I Am, Translated by D. Wills. Ed. M.-L. Mallet.

New York, NY: Fordham University Press.

Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 19721977,

C. Gordon (ed.), New York, NY: Pantheon.

Foucault, M. (2003) Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 19751976, M.

Bertani and A. Fontana (eds.), Translated by D. Macey. New York, NY: Picador.

Wolfe, C. (2003) Animal Rites: American Culture, The Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist

Theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Cary Wolfe

Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA

[email protected]

Misgiving, or Cavells Gift

Wittgensteins advance is to have discovered the everyday and its

language themselves to be esoteric, strange to themselves, one could say,

to be irreducibly philosophical, prompting us unpredictably to say too

much or too little, as if we chronically fail to know what actually interests

us. It is with our inheritance of language as Lacan says Freud holds of the

Ego, that it continually misrecognizes or (mis)understands itself. Instead

of saying we are full of mistakes about what is closest to us, we might say

of ourselves that we are filled, as Thoreau might say, with misgivings.

Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know, pp. 414415.

Bio-Graphy

The writing of the bios by the body that is its own subject must be partial and

open. It remains open not simply because of the indeterminacy of writing, but also

because all life stories are contestable (even if they are uncontested, destined to

become part of the general obscurity into which most writing falls). After death, if

done well, the autobiography yields further insights of a contested character.When considering Stanley Cavell, a philosopher who claims that Freud is a

philosopher (albeit one who is in [Freudian] denial) it may be useful to think

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ask what role the act of writing in itself might play in philosophical autobio-

graphy.Cavell takes the risk of being misunderstood,andof being understood. In his

riskiest passages, the effect can be powerful. In one passage of Little Did I

Know (2010), he writes of a former friend, Thompson Clarke, who after

publishing a pair of brilliant papers early in his career, gradually stopped teaching

and writing. For Cavell, it is unfathomable that anyone who cares about

philosophy would stop writing it. This is a source of continued grievance on his

part, sometimes directed toward his former students, many of whom he believes

have not written as they should. For him they have given up on their voice. For

him, it is almost not possible to imagine that someone who has aspired to philo-

sophy could remain silent. He sees this intolerance of his as a flaw on his part.

But Cavell also writes,

If I were given a description of a man otherwise unknown to me who

essentially worked alone, eventually not even in discussion with a favorite

student or two, who composed philosophy primarily on small squares of

paper, and conceivably by now has amassed many thousands of them,

I too would doubt that these will be assembled into consecutive prose.

But I do otherwise know the man. Only his dying before I do would still

my expectation. (Cavell, 2010, p. 369)

How might this passage be understood? Cavell is both acknowledging the power

of Thompson Clarke as a thinker, and upbraiding him for not fulfilling his

promise. The echo is of Emerson. In Experience, Emerson writes, We see

young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but

they never acquit the debt; they die young and dodge the account: or if they live,

they lose themselves in the crowd (Emerson, 1988, p. 474). Cavell comments of

Clarke, What I sometimes figure as his intolerance for pretense or artificiality or

superficiality (or on occasion simple courtesy) increased. This is no more a moraljudgment on his part than, I might say, a physiological one (Cavell, 2010,

p. 368). Emerson, again: There is an optical illusion about every person we meet. In

truth, they are all creatures of a given temperament, which will appear in a given

character, whose boundaries they will never pass y (Emerson, 1988, p. 474).

Yet Cavell insists that Clarke can somehow overcome himself. Cavell still

expects Clarke to acquit the debt. This too is Emerson, the reversal of field that

Emerson springs on his reader immediately after his observation on tempera-

ment: But it is impossible that the creative power should exclude itself. Into

every intelligence there is a door which is never closed, through which thecreator passes (Emerson, 1988, p. 476). So, too, for Clarke: he succeeded in

going his way finishing a dissertation that no one at Harvard felt qualified to

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The Time of Philosophy

Time operates differently depending on certain writing strategies in the

autobiography. There can be smooth time, synchronic time, scales of time,

spatialization of time, personal and impersonal time, calendar time, killing time

and travel time, to name a few.1 This containment of time is absolutely

dependent on the formal qualities of the organization of temporality. In Little

Did I Know, Cavell (2010) adopts an unusual strategy to convey these time

bends, relying on notations and recollections that are dated to both the time of

his life and the time of his memory, believing that this would help convey what

he meant by y what counts as the time of philosophy (Cavell, 2010, p. 9).

He writes from the sense that he is not an adequate judge of what others will

feel is obvious or important in what he writes. This sense is consonant with the

sensibility of a philosopher of the ordinary.

Such a sensibility places unusual demands upon the readers, who are charged

with deciding what counts as a time of philosophy and what does not. But a

Cavell himself once said of Thoreau, we are to trust the book, to trust its

accuracy of intentions even as it may not always and everywhere bring us to its

conclusions, whatever they may be. We can reflect upon Cavells constancy,

even as he traces his growth and transfigurations. We should try to listen to

Thoreau, when he writes, Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly asthey were written.2 So how deliberately, how reservedly, is this book written?

And how deliberately should we read it?

Inevitably, in such an account, the excerpts from memory will focus on an

intellectual education, and for Cavell that is crucially true of the memories he

records of his childhood. Looking back two years after having first written the

entry I am quoting from here 4 July 2003 he notes how unsurprised he is by

the role of those stories whose telling has seemed to me to alternate between

the unnoticeably common and the incommunicably singular. I cannot say that

I am particularly surprised by this impression given that my emphasis onphilosophy as the education of grown-ups entails an interest in the intellec-

tual lives of children and adolescents(2010, p. 9). But for a philosopher who

takes Freud as a fellow thinker, childhood is a perilous territory. It is no

accident that Cavell reveals that he came to understand that his father hated

him, and that so much of the narrative, such as it is, constitutes a gradual and

partial coming to terms with his fathers lack and mothers fullness of love

for him.

When advising students how to read in his most explicitly pedagogic

book, Cities of Words, Cavell says, I ask you to read both very fast andvery slow (Cavell, 2004, p. 14). Reading is a process of going forward and

back criss-crossing thinkers and what they have thought in the form of

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Little Did I Know, we might ask: What are we returning to and what are

we going on from? I would suggest that we are reflecting on our continu-ing misunderstandings and misrecognitions, our mistakes and our mis-

givings.

Misgiving

In order to be mistaken one must have acted or thought on the basis of

information or assumption that is incorrect and as a consequence the action

has not produced the result one wished, or else one comes to think something

falsely. What constitutes a philosophical mistake? It may be that the process of

writing the self is itself nothing other than one huge mistake. That is, there is

never to be a point when it would be plausible, let alone possible, to show an

interested public that which is interior to ones self in such a way as to settle the

truth of the life under consideration. The act of writing is not the deployment

of a somatograph, an instrument able to capture the character of the person

who points it at himself. Yet, this is what a failed attempt will look like,

revealing the posture of the bios of the writer of the self. Taking a somatogram

is fulfilling, in Benjaminian terms, the promise that Wittgenstein makes in

Philosophical Investigations: The human body is the best picture of the humansoul (Cavell, 2004, p. 200).

In Cities of Words (2004, pp. 199200), Cavell refers to the optical

unconscious that is revealed in our postures, citing Emersons late essay,

Manners, from The Conduct of Life as an example of how in the pre-

photographic era, our behavior was so often betrayed by such little things as

gestures, postures, turns of phrase. He suggests that Emerson tries to return the

mind to the living body. But thinking and bodies do not necessarily fit each

other well. When restless with thought, we may wonder, does Cavell then turn

to music? Throughout Little Did I Know (2010) Cavell sees himself leavingmusic for philosophy. This is a mistake. A philosophy of voice is necessarily

musical. There was to be no return to the Julliard School of Music after he

dropped out in that fateful autumn of 1946, but there was, in the turn to

philosophy, a posture decidedly musical. Cavell is a musician in a world of

prose. This turn in his life is not a mistake. But to think that it is a turn away

from music is.

Where there is mistaking, there is also misgiving. The compulsion to write is

born, in some events, certainly in this one, out of deep sense of giving. The

character of Cavells is that of a misgiving. This book is his gift, a mis-gift in adeep, perhaps buried, sense of the term.

Roberto Esposito comments on the idea of the gift in the context of

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pp. 36; emphasis in original). He notes that the first meaning ofcommunitas

is that which becomes meaningful in opposition to what is proper, that whichbegins where what it proper ends. Such an opposition to the proper(ty?)

extends to the acts of those who give. There is an underestimated relation of

munus to donum he suggests. The munus in fact is to donum as species is

to genus, because, yes, it means gift, but a particular gift, distinguished by

its obligatory character implied by its root mei-, which denotes exchange

(Esposito, 2010, p. 4; emphasis in original). Esposito goes on to assert,

Yet it is in this withdrawal from being forced into an obligation that lies

the lesser intensity of the donum with respect to the unrelenting compuls-

ion [cogenza] of the munus. In short, this is the gift that one gives because

one must give and because one cannot not givey

Although produced by a

benefit that was previously received, the munus indicates only the gift

that one gives, not what one receives (Esposito, 2010, p. 5; emphasis in

original).

He notes:

Munus, in this sense, and even more, munificus, is he who shows the

proper grace, according to the equation of Plautuss gratus-munus:

giving something that one can not keep for oneself and over which,

therefore, one is not completely mastery

[W]hat else does the oneobliged [il riconoscente] accede to if not that he unequivocally owes

something of which he was the beneficiary and that he is called to

acknowledge in a form that places him at the disposition of or more

drastically at the mercy of someone else? (Esposito, 2010, p. 5; emphasis

in original)

The giving that places one at the mercy of someone else establishes for Esposito

a re-understanding of community that is united, not by common property, but

by common lack.This common lack is present through Cavells philosophical autobiography.

It is not surprising to find it there, because it is also to be found in almost

everything he has written. Cavells obligation is transfigured into the writing

of his bios as a giving. This is his working through of a life that is open,

incomplete and subject to further mis-giving. We cannot trace back everything

we receive. The gift was overflowing from the start. We can only give, and all

giving, in this sense, is misgiving.

Another way of putting the matter to suggest that Little Did I Know

(2010) is a fulfillment of Emersons pun, perhaps the most philosophicallyconsequent pun of all time: I am thankful for small mercies. Cavell notes

that this is the literal translation of the French expression for gratitude

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yet one more indication of the asymmetry of all gifts, and further evidence

for Espositos claim. Perhaps that is the point. The writing of the bios isalways a misgiving, an inheritance of a past that is always too much. As

important as it is to recognize departures from it, obligations to it, and

mistakes in the making and living of it, it is also as important to recognize it

as a gift. That is Cavells gift to us.

Notes

1 The best recent discussion of scales of time that I am aware of can be found in Connolly (2010).

2 This paragraph paraphrases Cavell (1992, pp. 1112). For the quote from Thoreau see Cavell(1992, p. 15).

References

Cavell, S. (1992) The Senses of Walden, 2nd, expanded edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago

Press.


MA: Belknap.

Cavell, S. (2008) Companionable thinking. In: S. Cavell, C. Diamond, J. McDowell, I. Hacking

and C. Wolfe (eds.), Philosophy and Animal Life. New York, NY: Columbia University Press,pp. 91126.

Cavell, S. (2010) Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University

Press.

Connolly, W.E. (2010) A World of Becoming. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Esposito, R. (2010) Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, Translated by

T. Campbell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Thomas Dumm

Amherst, MA 01002, USA

[email protected]

Response by Paola Marrati

It is striking if not completely surprising that at the exception of Thomas and

myself there seems to be an agreement that Cavells philosophy is not relevant

for our contemporary political landscape. It would require more than a few

paragraphs to address Andrews, Carys and Jo rgs arguments in detail as they

deserve, but there are some common threads in their criticisms that I would like

to respond to. The concerns they express could be summed up in two points:

1 Cavell is uninterested in or unaware of the relations of power that exceed

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2. his notion of conversation is relevant only for a specific group of citizens

(relatively wealthy and educated) and hence incapable of giving a politicalvoice to all those who arguably need it most let alone of offering a viable

option to counter deep crisis in democratic societies.

To the first concern I would like to respond by saying that Cavells insistence

on keeping the question of who or what the human is open is not blind to all

the a-human forces that shape society and subjectivity, but instead is a

reminder that no matter what dispositifs of power may be in place, such a

question is a necessary and eminently political one, at least until there will

be someone or something that will call herself human. To say it otherwise, the

crisis of classic notions of agency, responsibility and subjectivity does not

dispense with the problem of the human but instead requires new ways of

engaging it, a task that Foucault explicitly takes on later, as do in their own

way, authors as different as Derrida, Haraway, Le vinas and Butler. It seems to

me that Cavell participates in this configuration, and that it would be

misleading to take his emphasis on the necessity to recover the human voice in

philosophy as a nave reaffirmation of old forms of humanism. What such an

emphasis aims to counter is a neutral, objective or universal conception of

reason that is one of the defining aspects of humanism and philosophies of

subjectivity alike (it is no accident that the term subject does not belong toCavells vocabulary; Cavell prefers to talk of human creatures). To the second

concern my answer would be that, to be sure, Cavells conversation cannot

take place in all contexts, but neither should it be confused with an elitist

notion of refined and witty exchange that only few can successfully enjoy.

Further, Cavells insistence that conversation does not necessarily lead to

agreement highlights precisely the difficulty of both finding ones own political

voice and of accepting others expression verbal and non verbal as

politically relevant whenever they do not follow previously established

patterns. In this sense conversation is particularly relevant for moments ofcrisis when norms, values and the very meaning of words are no longer shared.

Take for instance a recent blog by Paul Krugman in theNew York Timeswhere

he wonders what has happened to the concept of hypocrisy now that it is

regularly applied to anyone who, being personally wealthy, nevertheless dares

to advocate a policy like higher income taxes or a stronger safety net that is not

in her immediate self-interest (Krugman, 2011). Rather than describing a gap

between, say, professed values and actual conduct, hypocrisy seems to mean

in this new context that no belief, conviction or political stance can be

authentic unless it is the direct expression of self-interest. This would certainlybe a major shift not only in how we understand the concept of hypocrisy,

but also in an whole configuration of related notions including the basic ideas

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dramatically reshape what we take the moral and political life to be about.

If we were to agree that everything that deviates from direct self-interest ishypocrisy (and let us bracket for the sake of simplicity the question of what

self-interest is or means), we would certainly find ourselves in a different

culture from the one we have known, with little hope left for conversation. But

in the meantime a conversation about what hypocrisy is or means is one worth

having and fighting for. Democracy after all is in a permanent state of crisis

and Cavells idea of conversation is a response to the crisis of consent and an

invitation to not give up on transformative change.

Response by Andrew Norris

As much as I admire each of these pieces, my limited space is probably more

profitably devoted to a single disagreement than it is to general agreement.

Accordingly, I shall restrict myself to aspects of Wolfes discussion that strike

me as somewhat over-hasty, and neglect even those parts of Wolfes essay that

I most appreciate, such as his concluding discussion of the nature of politics. It

is true that in Life Forms Cavell writes of the biological sense ofLebensform,

but his interest is less in the physical attributes of the speciesHomo sapiensthan

it is the nature or character of human life. (Indeed, it would be characteristicof Cavell to have in mind the archaic meaning of the term biology that relates

to biographical writing and to the study of human character and society.)

Immediately before introducing the term, Cavell references Wittgensteins

concern with the natural in the form of natural reactions, y fictitious

natural history y [and] the common behavior of mankind (Cavell, 1989,

p. 41). The first two of these are quite far from the biological in Wolfes sense

of the term; and the last plainly refers back to the long passage Wolfe cites

in which Cavell argues that our language use rests upon neither rules nor

decisions but all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls forms of life.Wolfe reads Cavell as critically contrasting the biologically human with lower

animals and the realm of machines, and argues that films like Blade Runner

demonstrate the specious character of the latter distinction. Wolfe disregards

the scare quotes that Cavell pointedly uses when referring to lower and

higher forms of life, and omits Cavells reference to the organic when writing

of Wittgensteins concern with the mechanical: The criteria of pain, say, do not

apply to what does not exhibit a form of life, so not to the realm of the

inorganic, and more specifically in the context of the Investigations, not to the

realm of machines (Cavell, 1989, p. 43). It may be that Wittgenstein (and, byextension, perhaps Cavell) has not considered the possibilities of mechanical

pain but I note that the Replicants in Blade Runner at least are organic

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when Wolfe cites Cavell on what we are and are not being asked to accept in

Wittgensteins appeal to the biological interpretation of form of life, Wolfeomits the point Cavell thinks important enough to place first, that we are not

asked to accept, let us say, private property, but separateness.2 Separateness is

not a feature that distinguishes Homo sapiens, but an aspect of what I have

termed our finitude as are the capacities which Wolfe does list. Our finitude is

revealed not just in the fact that we as embodied individuals are bounded by

one another, but also in the fact that we as humans live with animals who are

other to us. That these differences allow us to claim that some humans are less

than human, or that some animals are so much less as to deserve neither

respect nor care is not a function of the logic of autoimmunity, but a feature of

our condition.3

Response by Jo rg Volbers

Andrew Norris contribution to this discussion allows me to point out a further

interesting point of comparison between Cavell and Foucault, one which

displays once more a shared sensibility of the problems while at the same time

leading to completely different conclusions. In an interview published in 1980,

Foucault relates his project to the Frankfurt School. He agrees to their generalperception that the specific cultural and economic results of the occident could

not have been attained without [its] particular form of rationality, a diagnosis

giving rise to the question whether it is possible to detach this rationality from

its effects of power which we donot want to accept (Foucault, 1994, p. 73). It is

obvious that Foucault does not share the affirmative answer of the Enlight-

enment, as do neither Adorno, Heidegger nor Cavell. But there is one decisive

contrast in his perception of the issue. Norris brings to mind that a central part

of Cavell0s diagnosis of the skeptical problem is the focus on themasteryof our

relation to the world and to others, a focus which Cavell associates withepistemology and its quest for finding secure criteria. Here Cavell is on

common ground with Adorno and Heidegger, who take science to be

essentially a tool for the technological subjection of nature. This conception

naturally gives rise to philosophical topics such as Heideggers Gelassenheit,

Emersons reception or what Cavell calls aversive thinking, a mode of

reflection and self-criticism that tries to acknowledge all these elements of

shame, despair and discontent with oneself which do not fit into the

Enlightenment0s self-confident image of man.

Foucault, in contrast, does not identify one principal source of our problemswith occidental rationality. This is not due to some postmodern preconcep-

tions of plurality but has to be attributed to his principally historically oriented

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that his books are just fictions. They rather arrange historical knowledge in a

new, telling way. In the interview cited above, Foucault reproaches theFrankfurt school for relying too much on professional historians and their way

to present and interpret the past. His point is methodological, and his attitude

is more scientific than hermeneutic: Foucault uses history as the given which

can be approached systematically in a new way, leading to new insights. The

postmodern difference is that Foucault does not isolate historical laws or

necessities, but on the contrary uses the historical material as a tool to produce

new experiences for the readers of his books, as he puts it. An experience is

something you come out of changed,4 it opens a possibility of transgression

and transformation, and it is only through this form of unsettlement that a new

form of subjectivity becomes possible (Foucault, 1994, p. 41).

What is so astonishing about this attitude is its unrelenting optimism.

Foucault is, to some, a classical rationalist. Even though he places reason

within nets of power, coercion and non-discursive practices, he still sticks to

the productive value of systematic and thorough research. Foucault 0s project

takes part in a general French movement to, as Bourdieu explicitly demands,

transform philosophy in the face of our discontent with it (cf. Bourdieu,

1997).

Compare this with Cavell0s paradoxical perfectionist attitude of unjustified

and unjustifiable hope, which Paola Marrati articulates so well in hercontribution to this critical exchange. The comparison of Cavell and

Foucault brings to light that there might be a third option between the

skeptical quest for mastery of the world and its conversion into receptivity

and Heideggerian Gelassenheit.This middle course accepts Cavell0s diagnosis

of finitude while endorsing Foucault0s methodological transformation of

philosophy0s trust in reason. The real theoretical issue in this debate, then,

might not be the philosophical question of the self, but rather the practical

attitude towards empirically oriented forms and practices of thinking. They

seem to be the last form of transcendence still possible in a modernistframework which does not uncritically accept the authority of tradition or

religion.

Response by Cary Wolfe

Readers will no doubt find my thoughts, at first glance, closest to those of

Jo rg Volbers. In particular, his reframing of Foucaults idea of practices of

the self (which seems in many ways close, as he notes, to Cavells idea ofperfectionism) in terms of the non-linguistic, non-psychological and non-

moral exigencies of material and discursive practices and the like is close to

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his emphasis on the Foucauldian fact that the central philosophical problem is

not the individuals struggle to make herself intelligible. This would seem,understandably, a rather different emphasis from what we find in Thomas

Dumms contribution (centered, as it is, on Cavells autobiography), but in fact

Dumms twist on the problem late in his essay provides, I think, a common

point of contact. When he notes, with Cavell and with Emerson, that making

the self intelligible always involves an inheritance of the past that is always too

much, Im reminded of Cavells penetrating discussion of terms as

conditions in essays such as Finding as Founding and Emerson, Coleridge,

Kant a conditionality that is discursive, to be sure, but even for Cavell (and

certainly for the Emerson of Fate) only partly so (see Cavell, 2003). In that

light, I think Cavell would agree with Volbers Foucauldian assertion that

metaphysics is, if anything, an ex post reflection of these historical and

material conditions. Similarly, I think Dumms fascinating invocation of the

optical unconscious in Cavell and Emerson that before photography, our

behavior was so often betrayed by such little things as

the political theory of stanley cavell

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