The Political Theory of Stanley Cavell

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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 a politics 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 to be 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 good or 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 in quest of has no substance or nature; as he writes: the human subject has
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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, one that 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 some individuals, 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 na ve 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 in progress 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 and mistakes conformity for equality. That the scene of democracy is one of
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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 often than 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 distract from 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 so easily turn into a hatred of life. And hence the importance he gives to
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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 cheerfulness? 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 with justice, 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 seek actual 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 good can 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 from a 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 where talking about the good is not quite fashionable, particularly when it is
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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 be capable 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 na ve.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 and I find reassuring to see concrete instances of hence a bit anxious about the charge of na vete 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 pmarrati@gmail.com
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Skepticism, finitude and politics in the work of Stanley 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, philosophical 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 starting allusions 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 world and 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 of ataraxia, an explicitly ethical project), a problem that 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 motivation for the skeptic here is to evade any responsibility to address that
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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 hardly clear 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 anothers experience 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 way it 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 philosophical 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 account of acknowledgment addresses the same set of issues, but does so from the perspective of precisely those who might deny others recognition or acknowledgment. Instead of a lack of consensus or proof, the problem is a resistance
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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 what responsibilities 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 voluntarily went 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 general enough 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 the generic 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, not in 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 limit to 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 is something we do not in fact know, but that we have deprived ourselves of the conditions for saying anything in particular. There is nothing we cannot say. That doesnt mean we can say everything; there is no
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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 facts or things, to be known. To say we do not (cannot) know thingsin-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 thematization 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 master the world and those with whom we share it, 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 are tasks 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 to fear 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/ political conversion address basic problems such as the destruction of our
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environment, the exploding inequality dividing the American citizenry, or the ever-increasing political power of supremely wealthy individual and international corporations in the wake of Citizens 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 of handsome. 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. Cavell, S. (1988) Quest of the Ordinary. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cavell, S. (1990) Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
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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 anorris@polsci.ucsb.edu
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 living under 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 beyond the 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 a part of a conversation where words, and the exchange of words, matter. Since her reasons have no power, she has no power of reason. Nora is virtually unable 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 no position from which to speak.
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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 philosophical significance 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 successively 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 stance towards 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 moral perfectionism 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 it. Concentrating on our linguistic (in)capacities, his subjects are dialogue and
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conflict, articulation and clarification, justification and its skeptical discontents. Philosophy being always essentially tied to the logos, this approach is very productive in order to elucidate the philosophical problem 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 of power. 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. For Foucault, subjectivity cannot be detached from these material and practical conditions. Think of the Aristotelian notion of capacity, or of Gilbert Ryles use of the idea of skills: the exercises of reason and language are, on these
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views, bodily-practical abilities. Consequently, every form of subjectivity has to be acquired through forms of training and conditioning which are by 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 understands this struggle puts it in a completely different light. First of all: Foucaults methodological concentration on the practical side 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 to an 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). But somewhere 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 arrangements, 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 voices sound 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 fact that there is something worth discussing beyond the opposition of
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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. Cavell, S. (2004) Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life. Cambridge, 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 jvolbers@zedat.fu-berlin.de
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 Investigations his emphasis on not forms of life but forms of life 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 basic argument is that this emphasis on the human form of life gives us something irreducible to the pure immanence (forms, conventions) of language games, and it thus provides a kind of background against which they may be judged
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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 something more than this, as he does in a section of This 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 upon her 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 which recalls 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 social as natural to the human being but something stronger a biological
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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 not exhibit 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 Runner and 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 very differently 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 crucially for 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 conservatism y 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 of this (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 we have called human. Cavell would find in this range or scale the ground for
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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 a foothold 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 between bios and zoe is 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, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic 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 be not just form of life in the sense just articulated via Foucault but, in fact, individual drama, personal responsibility something very much like the exercise of intestinal fortitude, around which the various terms in his moral
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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 for Cavell; 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 actually doing, 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 on bios and 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 make compelling 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. Borradori, G. (2003) Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Ju rgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
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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 Colle`ge 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 cewolfe@rice.edu
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 about how the struggle for meaning assumes a therapeutic role. That is, we might
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ask what role the act of writing in itself might play in philosophical autobiography. Cavell takes the risk of being misunderstood, and of 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 philosophy 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 moral judgment 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 temperament: But it is impossible that the creative power should exclude itself. Into every intelligence there is a door which is never closed, through which the creator 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 understand, but that all appreciated.
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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 as they 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 on philosophy as the education of grown-ups entails an interest in the intellectual 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 and very 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 words, paragraphs, chapters. If we were to apply this recommendation to
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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 continuing misunderstandings and misrecognitions, our mistakes and our misgivings.
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 human soul (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 prephotographic 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 leaving music 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 a deep, perhaps buried, sense of the term. Roberto Esposito comments on the idea of the gift in the context of retrieving a deep sense of the meaning of communitas (Esposito, 2010,
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pp. 36; emphasis in original). He notes that the first meaning of communitas is that which becomes meaningful in opposition to what is proper, that which begins 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 compulsion [cogenza] of the munus. In short, this is the gift that one gives because one must give and because one cannot not give y 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 master y[W]hat else does the one obliged [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 philosophically consequent pun of all time: I am thankful for small mercies. Cavell notes that this is the literal translation of the French expression for gratitude. Merci, beau coup! To give thanks by noting that thanks are a mercy, a plea, is
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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 is always 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. Cavell, S. (2004) Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life. Cambridge, 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 tldumm@amherst.edu
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 and largely constitute the human subject;
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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 political voice 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 vinas and Butler. It seems to way, authors as different as Derrida, Haraway, Le 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 na ve 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 to Cavells 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 of crisis when norms, values and the very meaning of words are no longer shared. Take for instance a recent blog by Paul Krugman in the New York Times where 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 certainly be 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 of what it means to be honest or have a conviction a shift that would
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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 is hypocrisy (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 of Lebensform, but his interest is less in the physical attributes of the species Homo sapiens than it is the nature or character of human life. (Indeed, it would be characteristic of 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, by extension, perhaps Cavell) has not considered the possibilities of mechanical pain, but I note that the Replicants in Blade Runner at least are organic, sentient and verbal, and as such participate in our form of life.1 Similarly,
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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, Wolfe omits 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
rg Volbers Response by Jo
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 general perception 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 do not want to accept (Foucault, 1994, p. 73). It is obvious that Foucault does not share the affirmative answer of the Enlightenment, 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 Cavell0 s diagnosis of the skeptical problem is the focus on the mastery of our relation to the world and to others, a focus which Cavell associates with epistemology 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 Enlightenment0 s self-confident image of man. Foucault, in contrast, does not identify one principal source of our problems with occidental rationality. This is not due to some postmodern preconceptions of plurality, but has to be attributed to his principally historically oriented mode of thinking. One should not be blinded by Foucault0 s ironic assertion
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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 the Frankfurt 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. Foucault0 s 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 Cavell0 s paradoxical perfectionist attitude of unjustified and unjustifiable hope, which Paola Marrati articulates so well in her contribution 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 Cavell0 s diagnosis of finitude while endorsing Foucault0 s methodological transformation of philosophy0 s 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 modernist framework 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 of perfectionism) in terms of the non-linguistic, non-psychological and nonmoral exigencies of material and discursive practices and the like is close to what I was driving at toward the end of my remarks. Similarly, my essay shares
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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 gestures, postures, turns of phrase is not at all at odds with Foucaults emphasis on the fact that the body thinks and does, and often quite otherwise than what the subject, ego, or consciousness intends hence what Foucault called the aleatory element of the body that biopolitics must train and control if it is to exploit it as a new political resource. To say as much and to say as much with regard not just to language, the archive and the conditionedness of our terms but also to that broader context invoked by Volbers via Foucault is to redouble the emphasis on finitude, and the destructive denials and repressions of it, captured so well by both Paola Marrati and Andrew Norris as a driving force of Cavells idea of the political.5 In other words and Ive tried to unpack this claim in some detail elsewhere theres not just one finitude here but two: not just our embodied mortality that we share with other forms of life, but also the finitude of the fact that what makes the world accessible to us (language, archives, discourse, and so on) is precisely what makes it inaccessible a point unpacked nimbly by Andrew Norris in his reading Cavell on Kant.6 I see this not as contradicting Norriss point that for Cavell access to the political is via the self, not, say, institutional or sociological analysis, but rather as refining and extending it through a thicker account of what exactly the self is.
Response by Thomas Dumm

Sometimes one learns best from critical reconsiderations of elements in the thought of those who have been so important to ones development as a
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thinker that it would seem somehow unfair or disloyal to take up those flaws oneself. There are no two thinkers who have influenced me more than Michel Foucault and Stanley Cavell. So I am especially grateful to Cary Wolfe for his critical interventions into Cavells thinking regarding the constitution of the boundaries of the human. (I am also grateful Jo rg Volbers for his critical comments concerning care of self and moral perfectionism, but space for response is limited here.) Put way too simply, for which I beg mercy, for Wolfe what is unviable in Cavells argument is his unnecessary resort to a closed, as opposed to porous, definition of the human as a talking animal, and his further embrace of Wittgensteins horizontal and vertical axes in situating the human in contradistinction to other animals, placing the human above the rest of biological life, in essence enacting, however unintentionally, a dangerous biopolitics. While in deep sympathy with Wolfe, I want to retrieve elements in Cavells way of addressing the human and other animals that may enable us to resituate some of this ongoing conversation. Wolfe may not want to accept such a resituating, sensing that any way of considering the human is too risky in its privileging, but my sense is that such a reconsideration is unavoidable. So I will more directly focus on the moment in Wolfes critique that seems to me to invoke a third thinker who may present another way of thinking of the limits of the human: Walter Benjamin. I do so in the spirit of appreciation for Wolfes introductory essay in Philosophy and Animal Life, especially his recreation of Cavells response to Derrida that invokes the arrogation of voice taken from A Pitch of Philosophy, and then Derridas later insistence in The Animal That Therefore I Am that the gaze of what is called animal offers to [Derridas] sight the abyssal limit of the human; the inhuman or the ahuman, from which man dares to announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself (Wolfe, 2008, p. 37, quoting Derrida, 2002, pp. 281282). So we have the arrogation of voice on the one hand and the announcement of man to himself, calling himself by the name he believes he gives himself on the other. For Benjamin, man is the naming animal, but man is not the only linguistic being. For in language the situation is this: the linguistic being of all things is in their language (Benjamin, 1978, p. 316). Benjamin goes on to note: Man y communicates his own mental being (insofar as it is communicable) by naming all other things. But do we know any other languages that name things? It should not be accepted that we know of no languages other than that of man, for this is untrue. We only know of no naming language other than that of man; to identify naming language
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with language as such is to rob linguistic theory of its deepest insights. It is therefore the linguistic being of man to name things. (Benjamin, 1978, p. 317) Benjamin associates this language of naming with the imperfect knowledge of man after the Fall, in some ways suggesting that the non-naming quality of other languages, such as that of objects, might be (mis)understood as muteness. But the point I wish to make here is that in suggesting that the language of man is the naming language we may see how the instabilities of iteration and the claims of arrogation both may be opened to the possibilities of being embedded in a more general language as such. And if that is the case, living through our skepticism, a basic tenet of moral perfectionism, might be reimagined as one of many ways of caring, not only for the self, but for the ahuman other that is the animal that I am. Such a way of situating animality, one that embraces the linguistic claims of all beings, may mark a starting point for more specific, less hierarchized, less moralistic and more pluralistic ways of being with, and becoming in, a world that is always going to be fraught.
Notes
1 I develop this point in a broadly Cavellian/Heideggerian interpretation of the film in Norris (2012). For Wittgensteins engagements with the mechanical which include human beings or some other creatures being used as reading machines see Wittgenstein, 1986, yy 156157, 170, 193194, 270271, 359360, 495, 559, 613, and 689. 2 Cavell (1989, p. 44). To be asked to accept private property would be characteristic of the politically conservative reading of Wittgenstein that Cavell contests. I discuss the limitations of the reading of Wittgenstein as conservative in Norris (2009a). 3 Wolfe expresses particular anxiety about the possibility that Cavells position provides an opening for proponents of slavery. I discuss Cavells analysis of slavery as entailing a form of other minds skepticism in Norris (2009b). rience est quelque chose dont on sort soit-me . 4 Une expe me transforme 5 And it is also to locate perhaps the deepest subterranean issue in the differences between Rawlsian contractualism and those who reject it, such as Cavell a divide that would lead us very quickly to the difference between so-called will-based and interest-based notions of rights in legal and political theory, and eventually, unavoidably, to the problematic nature of the rights framework altogether as something that deflects the problem of finitude in relation to the question of justice, as Cora Diamond, following Cavell, has eloquently argued. On will-based versus interest-based notions of rights, see the special issue of the journal Legal Theory devoted to Joel Feinbergs work, Legal Theory 11 (2005). On rights versus justice, see Cora Diamond (2008). 6 For more on double finitude, see the introduction to Wolfe (2010).
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References
Benjamin, W. (1978) Reflections, Translated by E. Jephcott. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Bourdieu, P. (1997) Meditations pascaliennes. Paris: Seuil. Cavell, S. (1989) This New Yet Unapproachable America. Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch Press. Cavell, S. (2003) Emersons Transcendental Etudes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J. (2002) The animal that therefore I am. Translated by David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28(2), (winter): 369418. Diamond, C. (2008) The difficulty of reality and the difficulty of philosophy. In: S. Cavell, C. Diamond, J. McDowell, I. Hacking and C. Wolfe (eds.), Philosophy and Animal Life. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 4390. crits IV. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, M. (1994) Dits et E Krugman, P. (2011) I do not think that word means what you think it means. Hypocrisy Edition. New York Times, 4 November. Norris, A. (2009a) La cha ne des raisons a une fin. Wittgenstein et Oakeshott sur le rationalisme et la pratique. Cites: Philosophie, Politique, Histoire 38: 95108. Norris, A. (2009b) Das Politische als das Metaphysische und das Allta gliche. In: G. Gebauer, F. Goppelsro der and J. Volbers (eds.), Wittgenstein: Philosophie als Arbeit an Einem selbst. Mu nchen, Germany: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, pp 129149. Norris, A. (2012) How can it not know what it is? Self and other in Ridley Scotts Blade Runner. Film-Philosophy 16(2). Wolfe, C. (2008) Exposures. In: S. Cavell, C. Diamond, J. McDowell, I. Hacking and C. Wolfe (eds.), Philosophy and Animal Life. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 142. Wolfe, C. (2010) What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
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The Political Theory of Stanley Cavell

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Critical Exchange

The political theory of Stanley Cavell

The ordinary life of democracy

Paola Marrati Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA pmarrati@gmail.com

r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914

Contemporary Political Theory

Vol. 11, 4, 397429 401

Skepticism, finitude and politics in the work of Stanley Cavell

Andrew Norris University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA anorris@polsci.ucsb.edu

Crossing the bounds of sense: Cavell and Foucault

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

Jo rg Volbers Freie Universita t, Berlin 14195, Germany jvolbers@zedat.fu-berlin.de

Cavells forms of life and biopolitics

Cary Wolfe Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA cewolfe@rice.edu

Misgiving, or Cavells Gift

The Time of Philosophy

Thomas Dumm Amherst, MA 01002, USA tldumm@amherst.edu

Response by Paola Marrati

Response by Andrew Norris

Response by Cary Wolfe

Response by Thomas Dumm

428 r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914

Contemporary Political Theory

Vol. 11, 4, 397429

r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914

Contemporary Political Theory

Vol. 11, 4, 397429 429

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