Cavell

A discussion of the relationship between Wittgenstein's published work and the Wittgenstein papers which argues that attention to the way in which he wrote can cast light on the nature of his contribution to philosophy. Special attention is given to the editorial problems posed by Wittgenstein's repeated revision and rewriting of his remarks and the work on a complete electronic edition of his papers. Because the Wittgenstein papers are the product of such an extensive act of rewriting, they are not so much a collection of texts as a hypertext, an interconnected network of remarks.

I argue that Theodor W. Adorno is best understood as a moral perfectionist thinker in the stripe of Stanley Cavell. This is significant because Adorno’s moral philosophy has not received serious interest from moral philosophers, and much of this has to do with difficulties in situating his thought. I argue that once Adorno is situated in this way, then, like Cavell, he offers an interesting moral perspective that will be of value to a variety of moral theorists. My argument proceeds in two broad steps: first, I show that Cavell and Adorno share a distinct epistemological orientation, one that centers around the impossibility of knowledge in certain situations, and trades on a Kantian and post-Kantian picture. Second, I show that their moral perfectionism fundamentally rests on such epistemology.

Le problème des other minds est généralement posé de la manière suivante : à quel genre de connaissance pouvons-nous prétendre au sujet de l’esprit et des expériences d’autrui ? La réponse traditionnelle est habituellement formulée dans les termes d’une opposition entre deux genres de connaissance: une connaissance infaillible, et donc, par principe soustraite au doute (la connaissance de soi) et une connaissance essentiellement faillible, car de type conjectural (la connaissance de l’esprit des autres). Une évidente proximité se manifeste dans la manière dont Wittgenstein et Austin entendent traiter ce problème sceptique : par une dissolution de l’opposition entre les deux genres de connaissance qui sous-tend sa formulation en recourant au phénomène de l’expressivité. Toutefois, Austin admet une révision possible de notre terminologie en intégrant les cas anormaux au monde familier et ordinaire de nos relations avec autrui, là où Wittgenstein insiste plutôt sur les « distorsions » que ces cas produisent par rapport à l’usage ordinaire de nos concepts. Cette différence est finalement mineure en comparaison des divergences qui apparaissent entre les deux auteurs dans les conséquences qu’ils tirent de cette dissolution. Pour Austin, la dissolution du pseudo-problème sceptique signifie sa disparition pure et simple une fois opérée la reconduction de nos concepts épistémiques à l’usage ordinaire ; pour Wittgenstein, elle signifie la reconduction à une difficulté pratique : l’étrangeté de certaines pratiques (celles, par exemple, des vendeurs de bois dans la célèbre allégorie des Cours sur les fondements des mathématiques) à laquelle répond notre propre étrangeté aux leurs. C’est l’épreuve de cette étrangeté et la difficulté corrélative à comprendre des pratiques radicalement différentes des nôtres que prétend exprimer, sans y parvenir, la formulation traditionnelle du problème sceptique.

First, I examine the aspects of the political sovereignty on the Shakespearean stage. In the light of Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German baroque drama (1928) and of Carl Schmitt’s answer to Benjamin in Hamlet or Hecuba (1956), I show that Shakespeare stages the mortality of the political bodies and the new sovereignty of the plotter. Urged to master the art and the tempo of the plot, the prince is nonetheless unable to prevent the decomposition of the state. Then, drawing on the Elizabethan drama, I question the contemporary effort towards order and synchronization within the city. Hobbes’s theory of political and juridical representation breaks with the mystical conception of political unity and with any inspired legislation, whereas the civil scene is dedicated to the peace between individuals in order to ensure the possibility of a real autonomy in the private sphere. Reciprocally, this autonomy must consolidate the solutions to the problems of melancholy and skepticism conceptualized in Leviathan. While endorsing the tragedy of human condition and of knowledge already put on stage by Shakespeare, Leviathan prevents Schmitt’s exaltation as well as the « pure » violence which, according to Benjamin, lies in the subject’s state of exception. Yet, through the ghosts that Leviathan cannot tolerate within the public sphere, the Shakespearean stage unravels the mechanisms of perpetual order and synchronization without rejecting the law and the project of autonomy.

Keywords : Melancholy – Skepticism – Law – Discipline – Elizabethan drama – Shakespeare – Walter Benjamin – Carl Schmitt – Hobbes – Leviathan – Behemoth

In his first paper, 'Must We Mean What We Say?', Stanley Cavell defended the methods of ordinary language philosophy against various charges made by his senior colleague, Benson Mates, under the influence of the empirical semantics of Arne Naess. 1 Cavell's argument hinges on the claim that native speakers are a source of evidence for 'what is said' in language and, accordingly, need not base their claims about ordinary language upon evidence. In what follows, I maintain that this defence against empirical semantics applies equally well to experimental philosophy's attack on doing philosophy from the armchair. In so doing, I attempt to clarify-and adjust-Cavell's claim that statements about ordinary language are rule-descriptions that are neither analytic nor synthetic.

A l’issue des grandes batailles d’août 1914, des centaines de soldats alliés sont dépassés par l’avance allemande. En Belgique et en France occupées, des habitants les cachent et, bientôt, organisent une filière d’évasion. L’infirmière britannique Edith Cavell paie de sa vie cet engagement clandestin. Son exécution, le 12 octobre 1915, entraîne un tollé international. Son image de martyre de la cause alliée a quelque peu éclipsé les nombreuses personnes qui ont joué un rôle tout aussi crucial dans le même réseau. L’architecte Philippe Baucq, l’institutrice Louise Thuliez, le prince Réginald de Croÿ, l’ingénieur Herman Capiau, et plus de 180 anonymes belges, français et britanniques, catholiques ou francs-maçons, de condition aisée ou très modeste.
Cet ouvrage reconstruit le réseau qu’ils ont formé, un réseau tissé d'amitiés, de hasards et de rapports sociaux. Dans l'ombre de l'icône qu'est devenue Edith Cavell se sont joués les audaces, les risques, les souffrances et les déchirements qui ont marqué la vie de ces femmes et de ces hommes entrés en résistance.

It is uncontroversial that Cora Diamond changed deeply our understanding of the issue of solipsism, as it has been formulated by Wittgenstein and more broadly speaking. Nevertheless, in my opinion, the meaning of this change has not yet been fully made explicit. Whereas at first sight there might seem to be a discrepancy between her famous essay - “Does Bismarck have a Beetle in his box?” - and her more recent thoughts about “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy”, I shall argue that the link between both difficulties allows her to rephrase and to flesh out her previous insights on that topic. My point will not be merely exegetical, since I shall attempt to explain to what extent her approach to this problem casts a new light on it.
I shall therefore start by highlighting the continuity and also some tensions in her approach to this issue. I shall then delineate the kind of solipsism that would be best understood as embodying the sort of “resistance” of reality Diamond focused on. Notwithstanding one of her favorite examples is Elizabeth Costello, I shall finally sketch a reading of In the Heart of the Country – I will develop here some clues given by Rupert Read’s in “On “Delusions of Sense”- presented as a literary examination of the philosophical powerlessness to express the solipsistic threat.

Sartre’s famous claim that consciousness “is aware of itself in so far as it is consciousness of a transcendent object” commits him to an original and interesting version of the transparency model of self-knowledge. According to this view, experiencing a relation to a transcendent object is sufficient to make consciousness aware of itself, while reflecting on one’s experience diverts consciousness from itself. Reflection, Sartre argues, reverses the relation between consciousness and the Ego and conceals to consciousness its impersonal structure. One’s immediate awareness of her conscious experience is therefore unable to secure self-knowledge. On the contrary, Sartre establishes in Transcendence of the Ego a logical relation between the translucence of consciousness and the opacity of the Ego, the latter resulting from the former. The purpose of this article is to measure the consequences of this view on self-knowledge, and to show that this relationship between translucence and opacity makes the pursuit of self-knowledge both necessary and impossible. The last section attempts to address this paradox by drawing on Cavell’s analysis of the relation between first person narration and self-concealment.

La marque que la pensée de Kierkegaard a laissé sur Wittgenstein a le plus souvent été envisagée de manière binaire : soit comme une contribution à la réflexion sur la singularité de la croyance religieuse, soit comme la mise en évidence de la parenté des modes d’écriture des deux auteurs. Nous montrons dans cette contribution, en nous appuyant sur des extraits du Nachlass de Wittgenstein qui ont été rarement mobilisés, le soubassement de ces deux versants : l’usage du modèle scénique pour figurer l’intériorité.
The mark that Kierkegaard’s thought has left on Wittgenstein has most often been considered in a binary way: either as a contribution to the peculiar certainty of religious belief, or as highlighting the kinship of their writings. In this contribution we show by relying on new material from Wittgenstein’s Nachlass that the bedrock of these two exegetical tendencies proceeds from Kierkegaard’s use of the scenic model to figure out the interiority.

The author dissects the importance of animation, digital filmmaking, and the role of democracy in the nature of film as a medium by working through Cavell's ontology of film. The contradictions inherent in Cavell's The World View in the end point to only one possible locus that defines film's ontology: the physical camera itself. The popularity and democratic nature of the medium, for Cavell, restricts it from becoming a modern art form. Yet this popularity is inherent to what the movies are, and if anything, form the nature of film's essential being. For Cavell, the screen through which we perceive the movie is a world from which our presence is absent. This necessitates the conclusion that animated movies are not movies. However, this does not fit the current digital paradigm of filmmaking. If anything, the ontology of film lies somewhere in the nature of the democratic medium, in the shared consciousness the movie represents. It creates us, and we create it, in a constant dialectic.

L’enjeu de cette étude est double : la première partie de ce travail est consacrée à une clarification du sens du solipsisme. Elle montre comment ce spectre s’est diffracté en plusieurs figures dont on propose une typologie à partir d’une relecture des Méditations. Cinq figures sont ainsi distinguées : les trois premières – berkeleyenne, lockienne et leibnizienne - s’inscrivent dans un cadre cartésien, les deux suivantes – fichtéenne et schopenhauerienne - dans un cadre kantien. On envisage ensuite la spécificité des traitements analytiques du problème du solipsisme (ses différentes versions méthodologiques). Les limites des réponses constructionnistes conduisent à dégager l’angle depuis lequel Wittgenstein aborde ce problème en le replaçant dans le contexte d’une réponse aux Grundgesetze der Arithmetik de Frege. La seconde partie de ce travail, dont la démarche est évolutive, montre comment Wittgenstein déjoue chacune des figures traditionnelles du solipsisme pour mieux mettre en évidence la résistance d’une dernière figure qu’il invente : le solipsisme logique. Dans le Tractatus, Wittgenstein répond aux figures idéalistes du solipsisme et corrige les traitements russellien et frégéen de ce problème. L’universalisme logique étouffe en revanche la menace du solipsisme logique qui rejaillit durant la période intermédiaire. Alors que Wittgenstein récuse les versions empiristes du solipsisme - la figure machienne et le solipsisme méthodologique de l’Aufbau -, la rupture avec l’intentionalisme du Tractatus débouche sur le fond sceptique du solipsisme logique qui n’est pas tant réfuté dans les Recherches philosophiques que révélé pour lui-même.

The aim of this study is twofold. The first half of this work is dedicated to clarifying the meaning of solipsism by distinguishing between its varying forms. Within a Cartesian framework, I draw the distinctive features of Berkeleyan, Lockian, Leibnizian solipsistic forms, while within a Kantian framework I detail the distinctive shape of Fichtean and Schopenaurian forms. In France, analytical treatments of this problem have been overshadowed by a reduction of this problem to the one of intersubjectivity. Thus, I enumerate the methodological responses to the problem, in order to underline the specificity of Wittgenstein's treatment of it, which is here understood in the context of a reply to Frege's Grundgesetze. Secondly, the work aims to emphasize the ways Wittgenstein responds to each of these forms of solipsism, while highlighting the obstinate resistance to resolution of a version which I shall call logical solipsism. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein answers the idealist forms of solipism and corrects the Russellian and Fregean approaches to this problem. In the transition period, he shows why empiricist programs cannot be satisfactory, while revealing the truth of logical solipsism. Its resistance is confirmed in the Philosophical Investigations by revealing its threat rather than by its refutation.

Robert Gooding-Williams, in his essay “Aesthetics and Receptivity: Kant, Nietzsche, Cavell, and Astaire,” takes issue very strongly with Stanley Cavell’s readings of scenes from the 1953 Fred Astaire musical The Band Wagon. Where Cavell sees a general human difficulty, Gooding-Williams sees problems that come from privilege; where Cavell sees an acknowledgment of and tribute to black American culture, Gooding-Williams sees appropriation and exploitation.  This paper tries to defend Cavell’s reading, not by trying to prove Gooding-Williams wrong but by augmenting Cavell’s interpretation and expanding the scope of the tribute or homage Cavell finds in these dance numbers. It seems to me that under Minnelli’s direction, Astaire’s dancing becomes an acknowledgment of more than one kind of oppressed American group. This dance, this movie, and Hollywood movies like it illustrate a special kind of hope, goal, or ideal for America, and even for humanity beyond America.

This paper analyses the opposing accounts of ‘the ordinary’ given by Jacques Derrida and Stanley Cavell, beginning with their competing interpretations of J. L. Austin¹s thought on ordinary
language. These accounts are presented as mutually critiquing: Derrida¹s deconstructive method poses an effective challenge to Cavell¹s claim that the ordinary is irreducible by further philosophical analysis, while, conversely, Cavell¹s valor isation of the human draws attention to a residual humanity in Derrida¹s text which Derrida cannot account for. The two philosophers’ approaches are, in fact, predicated on each other like the famous Gestalt image of a vase and two faces: they cannot come into focus at the same time, but one cannot appear without the other to
furnish its background.

Présentation du premier livre d'essais de Veena Das traduit en français, "Voix de l'ordinaire. L'anthropologue face à la violence" (Lausanne, BSN Press, coll. A Contrario Campus, à paraître en août 2021).

http://www.bsnpress.com/a-contrario-campus/

https://www.ens.psl.eu/agenda/stanley-cavell-s-unapproachable-america-l-amerique-inapprochable-de-stanley-cavell/2021-06

Le présent article propose d'examiner les procédures de la philosophie du langage ordinaire à partir d'un angle d'attaque relativement inhabituel : leur supposé dogmatisme. De cette objection de principe aussi diffuse que virulente, Stanley Cavell a fait un problème philosophique qui l'a conduit à aménager les conditions d'un véritable dialogue entre les deux traditions et à produire une critique immanente d'une philosophie du langage ordinaire qui resterait sourde à la profondeur des questions philosophiques soulevées par la tradition. Nous examinons tout d'abord la généalogie de l'"air dogmatique" imputé aux procédures qui se fondent sur la normativité de l'ordinaire. Nous montrons dans un second temps comment cette généalogie débouche sur une confrontation féconde du dogmatisme moderne et du dogmatisme de l'ordinaire qui met en lumière leurs présupposés respectifs.

Since Rawl’s A theory of justice, political philosophy has been haunted by the moral and
epistemic problem of justification. The growing awareness of the irreducibility of human
disagreement has increased a sense of uneasiness towards the ambivalence of pluralism (a requirement for the flourishing of individuals and a constant source of conflict) that, in
turn, has fostered the hope that rationality, in its public use, could help us in grounding
the social order on more stable basis. Although Stanley Cavell is not usually considered a
significant participant in this debate, through his work he has developed an original and
strong interpretation of the nature of justification and rationality. Cavell’s search for a
new conception of rationality starts from an analysis of the rationality immanent to the
use of ordinary language. This model of explanation, whose origins are to be found in the
teaching of Wittgenstein and Austin, is then extended and articulated through an analysis
of aesthetic judgment. This vantage point is successively used by Cavell in order to redefine
the epistemological categories of political and moral philosophy. Cavell’s moral
and political philosophy is based on an original account of practical rationality and justification
built over the concepts of claim, articulation and expression. As Cavell himself has
never offered a complete account of his theory of rationality, in this paper I provide a
wide reconstruction of the linguistic, aesthetic and moral steps through which this theory
has been developed.

ABSTRACT: In this paper, I first lay out a definition of perfectionism drawing mainly
upon the works of Cora Diamond and Stanley Cavell. Secondly, I introduce the notion
of “expressive rationality” and show how it contributes to expanding the scope of prag-
matism beyond its original boundaries. I then proceed to examine pragmatism and
perfectionism as competing alternative accounts of moral experience, through a discus-
sion of Coetzee’s novel The Lives of Animals. In so doing, I intend to show that prag-
matism and perfectionism constitute two necessary and irreducible approaches to
moral experience, pointing towards two diverging and yet irreducibly joined spheres of
moral life.
RÉSUMÉ : Cet article commence par proposer une définition du perfectionnisme ins-
pirée en grande partie des travaux de Cora Diamond et Stanley Cavell. J’introduis
ensuite l’idée de «rationalité expressive» et je montre comment elle contribue à étendre
la portée du pragmatisme au-delà de ses frontières originales. Je fais enfin l’examen du
pragmatisme et du perfectionnisme comme offrant des explications concurrentes de
l’expérience morale en m’appuyant sur une discussion du roman The Lives of Animals
de Coetzee. J’entends ainsi montrer que perfectionnisme et pragmatisme, loin de proposer

Life and words é uma etnografia forjada no encontro entre a trajetória intelectual da antropóloga indiana Veena Das e algumas questões teóricas que a atravessam. O narrado e o vivido se entrecruzam constantemente e ensejam uma reflexão sobre um modo de fazer antropologia capaz de expressar e comunicar o sofrimento do outro. O livro é aberto com uma estimulante incursão pela filosofia de Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell e Deleuze e pela teoria do Estado e do poder de Benjamin e Aganben, através da qual Veena Das burila uma original teoria da violência. Os ensaios que compõem o livro, com temas e questões diversas, escritos e publicados em momentos distintos, são orquestrados sob uma mesma preocupação com a dimensão da vida cotidiana, que também transparece em outras obras da autora.

RESUMO O contexto é a Partição da Índia em 1949, que levou à criação do Paquistão, visto a partir da cultura punjabi (o Punjab era a província mais próxima da fronteira com o novo estado) e, particularmente, através dos olhos de Asha que, aos 21 anos, em 1941, ficara viúva e passara a viver com a família do falecido marido. As transformações impostas pela Partição alteraram essa situação e levaram Asha às seguintes reflexões. A comida de uma filha nunca é pesada para os pais. Mas quanto viverão nossos pais?