Can we gain knowledge by reading literature? This essay defends an account of reading, developed by Stanley Cavell and Hans-Georg Gadamer, that phenomenologically describes the experience of acquiring self-knowledge by reading literary texts. Two possible criticisms of this account will be considered: first, that reading can provide other kinds of knowledge than self-knowledge; and, second, that the theory involves illegitimately imposing subjective meaning onto a text. It will be argued, in response, that the self-knowledge gained in reading allows one to (...) gain other sorts of knowledge too, and that the reading process described by Gadamer and Cavell avoids excessive subjectivism. (shrink)

It is generally recognized that Adorno and Levinas should both be read as urging a rethinking of ethics in light of Auschwitz. This demand should be understood in terms of the acknowledgement of transcendence. A phenomenological account of the event of Auschwitz developed by Todes motivates my use of Cavell’s distinction between acknowledgement and knowledge. Both Levinas and Adorno argue that an ethically adequate acknowledgement of transcendence requires that the traditional concept of transcendence as represented in theodicy must be rejected. (...) This rejection takes the form of a rejection of theodicy (Levinas) and a negative theodicy (Adorno). I argue that Adorno’s response is superior because it is a response to the specificity and particularity of the event of Auschwitz as the destruction of, rather than merely the denial of, the humanity of both perpetrators and victims. (shrink)

In this paper, I explored what Sartre referred to as Camus’ ‘most beautiful and least understood novel,’ The Fall. As a methodology, I applied textual hermeneutics to immerse in the text and got out of it what I deemed as the crux of its existentialism as founded in the two-in-one leitmotif of narration and hypocrisy. In Clamence, there was a profound need – a specter that lingered and haunted – to narrate his life, especially the fall that triggered it and (...) the judgment that allowed him to do it. I argued then that the nature of the text reflected a deep sense of narration that stemmed from hypocrisy, in which Clamence branded himself as ‘judge-penitent’ – what such a life entails, how it freed him, and how it mirrored life-callings or vocations in all walks of life. (shrink)

This paper will critically reconsider the potential of Dewey’s pragmatist idea of security without foundation. There is some potential in his anti-foundationalism as a form of wisdom for living beyond the risk society. I shall argue that Deweyan critical thinking needs to be further reconstructed, and even to be destabilized, if it is to exercise its best possible power of transcendence. One way to do this is to open its boundaries towards the ‘East’, towards European poststructuralism as well as towards (...) East Asia, thereby destabilizing and transcending the limit of pragmatism. And I propose to do this through the mediation of Stanley Cavell’s rereading of Emerson’s and Thoreau’s American transcendentalism. (shrink)

This article explores the philosophies of Heidegger and Wittgenstein to illustrate the thesis that philosophy is a human activity exhibiting a unity of investigative and therapeutic aims. For both philosophers, the purpose of philosophical concepts is to point toward a path of transformation rather than to explain. For both, a first step on this path is the recognition of constraining illusions, whether conventional or metaphysical. For both, such illusions are sedimented in linguistic practices, and for both, philosophical investigation is a (...) way of emancipating thought and life from illusion by bringing what is already prereflectively understood into the light of thematic explicitness. And what both philosophers bring into thematic explicitness are aspects of the context-embeddedness and finitude of human existence. It is hoped that comparing the works of these two philosophers will unveil features of each that are more difficult to discern in the works of either considered in isolation. (shrink)

This article examines the tension in Hannah Arendt’s thought between the creativity of political action and the worldlessness of labour in light of fieldwork with feminist activists in Mexico City. Drawing from my ethnographic research, I explore how labour and action are knitted together in the feminist practice of accompanying women who seek safe abortion in the city. Bringing Arendt’s thought into dialogue with anthropologies of illness experience as well as the reflections of my interlocutors in the field, I shift (...) from an approach to the situation of abortion as a decision-making event, to ask other questions about autonomy and dependency, freedom and necessity, mortality and political life. I argue that what is interesting about Arendt’s conceptualisation of the labouring body is not that she separates ‘bare life’ from the political sphere of ‘men’, but rather that it alerts us to the uncertain way our life is implicated with others. In conclusion, I argue that feminist accompaniment networks foster an ephemeral relation of care between activists and women in situations of abortion, one that invites us to re-imagine the temporality of political action and to ask, again, what it is to make a new world versus make this world livable. (shrink)

Having acknowledged the recurrent theme of education in Stanley Cavell's work, the discussion addresses the topic of scepticism, especially as this emerges in the interpretation of Wittgenstein. Questions concerning rule‐following, language and society are then turned towards political philosophy, specifically with regard to John Rawls. The discussion examines the idea of the social contract, the nature of moral reasoning and the possibility of our lives' being above reproach, as well as Rawls's criticisms of Nietzschean perfectionism. This lays the way for (...) the broaching of questions of race and America. The theme of the ordinary, which emerges variously in Cavell's reflections on Emerson, Wittgenstein and Austin, is taken up and extended into a consideration of Thoreau's ‘experiment in living’. The conversation closes with brief remarks about happiness. (shrink)

In the contemporary culture of accountability and the ‘economy’ of education this generates, pragmatism, as a philosophy for ordinary practice, needs to resist the totalising force of an ideology of practice, one that distracts us from the rich qualities of daily experience. In response to this need, and in mobilising Dewey's pragmatism, this paper introduces another standpoint in American philosophy: Stanley Cavell's account of the economy of living in Thoreau's Walden. By discussing some aspects of Cavell's The Senses of Walden (...) that suggest both apparent similarities and radical differences between Thoreau and Dewey, I shall argue that Cavell discovers rich dimensions of practice in Thoreau's American philosophy, ones that are overshadowed in Dewey's pragmatism: that he demonstrates another way of ‘making a difference in practice’. Cavell, as a critical interlocutor of Dewey, from within American philosophy, offers a way of using language in resistance to the rhetoric of accountability and in service to the creation of democracy as a way of life. I shall conclude by suggesting that the enriched tradition of American philosophy from Dewey to Cavell is to be found in their promotion of philosophy as education and education as philosophy. (shrink)

Despite considerable differences, Stanley Cavell and Jean-Luc Nancy share the demand for a renewal of thinking produced through and with the concept of the world. Their articulation of the legacy bequeathed by Heidegger and Wittgenstein begins with an understanding of the world in excess of knowledge and insists on this impossible mastery as the most productive incentive for thinking. Inasmuch as philosophy has understood itself as producer of worldviews, systems and principle, philosophy has constantly suppressed the thinking of the world, (...) for any worldview absorbs and dissolves the world in its vision. For both Cavell and Nancy an insistence on this suppression leads to an emphasis on film. Two gestures can be said to intertwine in their thinking of film: to recapture our relation to the world as one that is not based on knowing as certainty, but on the reception of the singular; to recapture thinking as that which is attracted and called for by the insurgence of the singular, by the seam in experience. Nancy and Cavell reverse the idea of cinema as completing the regime of representation stressing how cinema produces a step away from thinking as representation in view of what the article names thinking as patience. The article concludes by asking: what does it mean for philosophy to understand itself as patience? (shrink)

This article explores the possibilities of the antifoundationalist thought of Cavell with a particular focus on his idea of chance in aesthetic experience, as a framework through which to destabilize the prevailing discourse of education centering on freedom and control. I try to present the idea of chance in a particular way, which does not identify it with chaos or limitlessness but takes it rather as a condition of meaning-making, and more generally of a perfecting of culture, of a conscientious (...) sense of its further possibility and betterment. In Cavell's perfectionism, our aesthetic life models our political life, and such life requires our constant reengagement with our language. The cultural criticism this entails is to be understood not in merely negative terms but as itself a process of renewal. The interrelationship between the aesthetic, the political and language is at the heart of Cavellian education for self-knowledge, where this is understood as a matter of self-criticism. It connects, there.. (shrink)

Contemporary scenes of democracy and education exemplify a real scepticism about the point of political participation, and by implication about one's place in society in relation to others. What is called for is a recovery of desire per se ? of people's desire to say what they want to say and their desire to participate in the creation of the public. In response, this article examines Stanley Cavell's ordinary language philosophy. The way he reconstructs philosophy from the perspective of ordinary (...) language provides us with an alternative route to citizenship. Cavell's philosophy is turned towards our existential need to recover political passion, the mainspring of a desire to think that affirms humanity as necessarily political. And in the end this existential need dovetails with the need of the polis: that people speak in their own voice. That, I shall conclude, must be the basis of education for citizenship and political literacy. (shrink)

This article tries to bring out the implication of Cavell’s critical comments on Derrida, clustered around Cavell’s charge that deconstruction entails a flight from the ordinary. Cavell’s and Derrida’s different readings of Austin’s ordinary language philosophy provide a common ground for elaborating their respective positions. Their writings are at once the closest but also the most divergent when addressing the moral implication of speech, or more precisely, when addressing their understanding of responsibility and voice. Employing Derrida’s so-called ‘double reading’ as (...) a leitmotif will not only shed light on the moral dimension of deconstruction, but also bring the central target of Cavell’s critique into the open. (shrink)