47.2.Larocca

Th d t n f r n p : n th t f R d nv llDavid LaRocca

The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Volume 47, Number 2, Summer2013, pp. 109-131 (Article)

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Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 47, No. 2, Summer 2013 © 2013 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Education of Grown-ups: An Aesthetics of Reading Cavell1

DAVID LAROCCA

But then I think of how often I have cast the world I want to live in as one in which my capacities for playfulness and for seriousness are not used against one another, so against me. I am the lady they always want to saw in half.

—Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness

Just as there was a time when it was uncommon, not to say unfashionable and perhaps professionally treacherous, for philosophers to write about Ralph Waldo Emerson, there was also a time when the pertinence of Stanley Cavell’s work for philosophy was a point of controversy. For some philoso-phers, as well as literary scholars who read and use work by philosophers, Cavell’s achievements were in evidence early and consistently—even as he ably ventured into new fields of research such as opera, film, Shakespeare, the American Transcendentalists, and so on—and writing about him did not pose a problem but instead offered the pleasure of reading and comment-ing. Yet even with many points of critical celebration along the way, there was a long stretch when Cavell’s place in, and impact on, philosophy and other humanistic fields was either marginalized or in doubt. It seems that as the “repression” of Emerson has been overcome, so too the trial period for Cavell’s full membership has elapsed. Now there is little reason to worry or complain that his work is not getting sufficient attention. In the last half doz-en years, for example, there have been as many international conferences celebrating his work, and as Cavell himself notes in his 2010 autobiography,

David LaRocca, PhD, is Writer-in-Residence in the F. L. Allen Room at the New York Public Library and a Fellow at the Moving Picture Institute in New York. He is the author of On Emerson (Wadsworth, 2003), and the editor of Stanley Cavell’s book Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (Stanford University Press, 2003) and The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman (University Press of Kentucky, 2011), and Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). His articles on aesthetic theory, autobiography, film, and American philosophy have appeared in Epoché, Afterimage, Transactions, Liminalities, Film and Philosophy, Midwest Quarterly, and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory, “there are now roughly as many books on my work as works by me.”2 Cavell has said that while he may be the “victim of unfortunate timing,” his academic life has, for all its compli-cations and disappointments, been “charmed,” and that “being odd and, staying odd” has its benefits, including “remaining, however precariously, contemporary.”3 It may be precisely Cavell’s “belatedness,” as I have heard him refer to it, that contributes to the careful and ongoing reception of his work, since it can often take time to find one’s best readers.4

Given the improving and continually hopeful condition of Cavell’s inheri-tance, I do not proceed here in a mode of defense or complaint, but instead in a mood of wonder—as a philosophical anthropologist might when inquiring after the rituals and beliefs of a tribe. I am interested in the phenomenon and practice of reading texts that, because of their power, are capable of inspiring new writing while also causing the inspired to feel afraid of, or otherwise estranged from, the work. Panicked by its pedagogical force, a reader trying to write new things may be led to defer or diminish the work that inspired those new things, finding that the inspiration suffocates new initiatives in prose. In this essay I attend closely to how these and other issues in the aes-thetics of reading appear when engaged with the interpretation of Cavell’s writing, noting along the way what might be called the manner or sensibility of his works’ diverse range of inheritors as well as their philosophical com-mitments and reservations. Being summoned to thought by writing does not mean one knows what to do with it, much less how to produce new work of comparable quality. And yet reading and writing must go on. Why should the nature of inheriting Cavell’s writing be of interest to a group larger than, say, his most devoted readers and supporters? First, be-cause the phenomenon, while made concrete in Cavell’s case, is sufficient-ly generic to warrant a wider fascination with everything from a reader’s self-consciousness as a reader to a reader’s encounter with the criteria that make up her professional interests, including the categories with which she conducts scholarship. Thus my invocation, in the title of the present essay, of Cavell’s notion that “philosophy becomes the education of grown-ups” is meant to associate the aesthetics of reading Cavell’s work with the more general experience of education as it continues into maturity, regard-less of discipline.5 Cavell’s writing is especially pertinent to an audience interested in the aesthetics of education, because he has both argued and exemplified (in his own writing) how, as he finds in Thoreau, “reading is a variation of writing, where they meet in meditation and achieve accounts of their opportunities; and writing is a variation of reading, since to write is to cast words together that you did not make, so as to give or take readings.”6 Since Cavell’s work perpetually occupies that space of meditation, owing to its fundamental awareness of itself as enacting the “interplay of writing and reading,” the

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audience for his prose is naturally broader and more diverse than the realm of strictly defined professional philosophy. Like Thoreau, Cavell has trans-formed and enlarged the space where philosophy is said to occur—that is, where such readings can be given and taken. Consequently, the aesthetics of reading Cavell reveals to us how his writing is primarily conducted as a form of education for grown-ups. Secondly, the present investigation can be taken as part of a larger proj-ect of finding interest in the ways philosophical works are inherited by the culture they are intended for or addressed to. Mine is a limited undertaking with modest aspirations, but it is, hopefully, worthwhile nonetheless for the way it suggests the specific difficulty of inheriting Cavell’s work, which is, for some, connected to an understanding about the specific claim it makes on its readers. Since critique and analysis are grounded in the practice of reading, it may be highly relevant to consider those moments of blindness, deafness, and other forms of obscuration—leading variously to avoidance, deferral, or disavowal—that show one hasn’t been reading after all. At least for the time being, then, perhaps we can take up positions as readers and inheritors of Cavell’s work and thereby face an issue that has been present all along but, for good reasons, has been confused with the initial or early problem of neglect or marginalization—namely, how to read Cavell and write about his work in ways that honor the achievements of the work while also going on from it. For many years it seemed that complaints about Cavell’s work as “personal”—or some version of the playful and seri-ous mentioned in the epigraph—obstructed his readers. What had earlier seemed like a criterion for dismissal or exclusion is now, in many fields of research (from feminist philosophy to anthropology, from political theory to film studies), a principal feature of his work’s attraction. And yet the per-sonal, among other quintessential attributes of his work, remains an issue for readers and critics since it amplifies Cavell’s achievements even while it problematizes how those achievements can be assessed and analyzed. In short, we are now in a position to ask not whether Cavell should be part of our mainstream in philosophical and literary thinking but how we can ably interpret his work. This is precisely what prompts me, on this occasion, to take a closer look at a few instances of Cavell’s critical inheritance by schol-ars, mainly philosophers, in order to elucidate and clarify what new kinds of reading methods we might prefer to adopt, avoid, or innovate when reading his work. Some years ago Richard Eldridge began his edited volume of essays Stanley Cavell with an introduction titled “Between Acknowledgment and Avoidance,” in which he aimed to orient readers to the questions that animate Cavell’s work, including its range and ambition.7 More recently, Eldridge, now collaborating with Bernie Rhie on an edited volume of es-says titled Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Skepticism,8 has

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continued theorizing what remains of perennial interest to some readers of Cavell’s work: the occasional, but still prominent, instances when his work is in some form or another neglected or awkwardly esteemed—as we find in moments of misreading, as well as nonreading or disengagement. As fa-mous and influential as Cavell’s work appears to be (again, the evidence of myriad monographs, anthologies, articles, and conferences on his work attests to this fact), it can often seem as if those features of acclaim hide a per-nicious and counterintuitive fact: that scholars, perhaps especially scholars who should benefit from his work, do not seek to deeply engage it or wed themselves to it professionally. As a form of intellectual history, then, I pro-pose to spend a little time—in the wake of Eldridge and Rhie’s work—in the midst of some ideas and texts that illuminate features of Cavell’s reception in academic scholarship, more particularly, in philosophy. Eldridge and Rhie suggest that part of the work of “reframing” Cavell’s writing is intimately caught up with “a therapeutic uncovering of the resis-tances that have led to the repression of his voice and work in the past. The two tasks—taking up the critical past so as to engage productively with in-terests and work that lie, so far, aslant of Cavell’s, and reanimating his work for the future—must go hand in hand.”9 Eldridge and Rhie direct their intro-ductory remarks to the “sources of resistance” that inhabit literary studies, and it seems highly plausible to count these as the same points of resistance among some philosophers.10 Two qualities, or we might say presumptions, of Cavell’s work that may have generated the “allergic reaction” that El-dridge and Rhie diagnose are highly pertinent to what follows in the present investigation: (1) Cavell’s “appeal to ordinary language is entered precisely when the very existence of any ‘we’ is in doubt, and claims to ‘what we say’ are by their very nature vulnerable, naked, and exposed (subject to rebuke, indifference, or any other number of ways such claims might misfire)”; and (2) humanism pervades Cavell’s writing.11 As Eldridge and Rhie suggest, and I think reasonably encourage, it is incumbent upon Cavell’s readers to critically explore what it would mean to achieve “a new or transformed ‘we’ . . . consisting of new or transformed subjects, who have entered into this new we from the resources of their own subjectivities.”12 And in so doing, one imagines, readers will be in a position to appreciate Cavell’s sense that there is “nothing more uncanny than the human,” and therefore nothing more worthy of our dedicated attention.13 In conversation Cavell has de-fined the primary paradox of his work as the conflict between his deeply democratic impulse and his writing style. The paradox, to be sure, depends on the assessment that Cavell—his voice, a presence that promotes his alle-giances to humanism—complicates the reception of his work in philosophy and other fields in the humanities. Eldridge and Rhie’s project is so helpful and illuminating precisely be-cause it makes evident the two issues that have shadowed Cavell’s work

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from the very beginning—namely, the contestation of inclusion/exclusion in an academic community (e.g., the “we” of philosophers or any other type of scholar), and the challenge of defining and defending one’s capacities for inclusion/exclusion in the human community. The two are, it appears, vitally and frighteningly bound together in Cavell’s work. This intimacy, of course, has had consequences, which Eldridge and Rhie explore along with the contributors to their volume, among them that “the reclamation of the human self against its neglect by modern thought is as necessary and urgent today as it was when Cavell first began his long career.”14 In an im-portant and surprising way, then, regardless of how we want to describe Cavell’s relation to mainstream philosophy and literary studies—as being resisted, repressed, neglected, causing allergies, and so on—we should take seriously the way in which his work provokes these reactions because it is exemplary in its achievement of reminding us of the central role of the hu-man community and the human subject. Therefore, the trouble is impersonal after all. It just has felt personal because Cavell so steadfastly holds to his conviction in these important questions. Part of my work, then, is to dis-ambiguate between these personal and impersonal factors. For example, to analyze concrete instances when Cavell is read by others in order to consider how his writing—in content and style—itself enables or resists reading. I am interested in how the interaction between reader and text illuminates something interesting about both: how we learn things about Cavell’s writ-ing—as much as his readers—by the moments that exist “between acknowl-edgment and avoidance”; or in instances when acknowledgment becomes an occasion of apology—in both senses—as an expression of one’s regret or lapse and as a kind of defense, excuse, and justification. In all such cases we are presented with illustrations of our continual and difficult effort to read well, a project that in Cavell’s writing is thoroughly bound up with the very nature of being human. As I move ahead to consider some points of resistance or complication in reading Cavell’s work, I also want to contribute a few more factors that, if they are not exclusive to reading Cavell, are at least exacerbated by the writ-ing we have inherited from him. Adding to (1) and (2) above (drawn from Eldridge and Rhie), I continue with (3) that precisely because Cavell has said tone is so important to one’s writing, that “in philosophy it is the sound which makes all the difference,” his voice can, at times, overwhelm the read-er to the degree that when she turns to writing of her own, especially writing about Cavell, the prose can seem to be an enacted paraphrase.15 Imitation may be a form of flattery, but in Cavell’s estimation, one’s voice is precious, and not a feature a writer should mimic or arrogate; indeed, Cavell’s prose reinforces our awareness of the embeddedness of content and style. Given our proximity to Emerson’s texts, we might consider instead that for Cavell imitation is more akin to suicide than compliment. In short, the objective


for any reader of Cavell is to write about him with one’s own voice. The impulse to paraphrase Cavell’s voice is understandable: his philosophical acumen and personal volubility are intoxicating, entrancing. Some cannot help, it seems, but wish to adopt his voice—such as it is possible, such as they can—as a way of managing troubled hopes for exceptional expression. Living with the fear that one has no voice, or not a consistent voice for philo-sophical prose, Cavell’s distinctive style is an easy mark for paraphrase. The risk of paraphrase when writing about Cavell is coupled with a fur-ther complication: (4) the art of quotation. How much quotation from Cavell is enough when one risks losing touch with the seam between one’s own voice and Cavell’s? Bringing Cavell quotations into one’s written work, it sometimes seems, threatens one’s own chances for distinctive expression—as if his prose and the voice it contains—is always potent enough to overpower even one’s best efforts at vital composition. After a few quotations one may become hypnotized by Cavell’s presence on the page and soon enough give over to paraphrase and other forms of rehearsing his texts and arguments. Furthermore, the extensiveness of Cavell’s writing—its diversity of subjects that are yet bound up with a unity and clarity of purpose—make it highly tempting to simply quote Cavell as a way of explaining Cavell. Cavell, it of-ten seems, is his own best interpreter, and thus may be confidently invoked to convey authority and insight. Indeed, in the last decade or so Cavell has, when invited, undertaken significant labor to preface, conclude, or other-wise respond to many books and anthologies on his work. Is this a form of “authorizing” that lends credibility to the new scholarship—a kind of con-secration by its subject? Or does Cavell agree to write as part of some wish to engage a community of scholars he finds himself desiring to be a part of, however belatedly it emerges? Or does Cavell write preludes and codas to guide the inheritance of his work, to control the interpretations presented by his readers—as if all can be said as long as he has something to say about it? The art of quotation coupled with the practice of paraphrase leads to a further issue, and the penultimate one I will enumerate—namely, (5) the degree to which one can be taught without getting lost in the lesson.16 This is a much more diffuse issue and lies at the heart of many theories of “influ-ence,” such as we find in Harold Bloom’s work; indeed, Bloom refracts our present concern when he writes: “The critic of Emerson is little better off than the biographer, since Emerson, again like Nietzsche and remarkably akin to Freud, anticipates his critics and does their work for them. Emerson resembles his own hero, Montaigne, in that you cannot combat him without being contaminated by him.”17 With Cavell the rewards one gains in reading his work—including the satisfaction of responses to perennial philosophical conundrums—also seem to invite “contamination” or court a certain dis-orientation. A reader can get lost in Cavell’s prose—happily, to be sure, but then also and often anxiously. Having learned things from Cavell, one wants

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to find a way back to one’s page, one’s own voice. Where was I? What was I thinking? Cavell’s work, in all its competency and compellingly supple style, can make these questions seemingly irresolvable. Therefore, it would be a real service to know if, or how, one can be taught by Cavell’s texts how not to get lost in them and, perhaps ideally, to know how to go on from his writ-ing—while still keeping it close at hand. There are additional factors worth considering, as Michael Fischer notes in “Using Stanley Cavell,” his review of recent anthologies of Cavell criti-cism edited by Richard Eldridge, Russell Goodman, and a third coedited by Alice Crary and Sanford Shieh:

The contributors in these three volumes [Stanley Cavell, Contending with Stanley Cavell, and Reading Cavell] all begin from the assumption that Cavell, like the writers who have influenced him [e.g., Emer-son, Thoreau, Austin, and Wittgenstein], remains marginalized even though interest in his work has grown. But his isolation can be over-stated. In an otherwise insightful essay on Cavell’s literary criticism (“The Avoidance of Stanley Cavell” in Contending with Stanley Cavell), Garrett Stewart laments “the regrettable undercirculation of Cavell’s ideas” in literary studies and predicts that “mainstream literary schol-ars will increasingly have a hard time” with his writing—Stewart calls it “literary prose”—because it calls on reading skills that in the “ep-och of cultural studies, discourse analysis, and the semiotics of social energy” have “atrophied.” In the introduction to this same volume, Russell Goodman offers a more measured, less pessimistic assessment that gets Cavell’s peculiar professional status exactly right: “Cavell occupies a curious position in all the fields in which he works: he is at the same time a major figure and one whose work people do not quite know how to use.”18

And yet Garrett Stewart’s “lament” about atrophied reading skills seems just the diagnosis we should be attending to; his concern seems squarely aligned with the aesthetics of reading Cavell—how it is possible, and why it is im-portant. If Stewart is overstating the reasons for his despair, we still need to determine by how much. After all, Fischer concludes that “the reception of Cavell’s work will finally depend on his individual readers,” so it would seem that having readers equipped with skills to read that work is para-mount.19 Still, the curious fact reflected by Stewart’s assessment is precisely that reading Cavell is not an issue that will go away or be resolved, and if reading skills in general are imperiled, what are we to make of the prognosis for specialized reading skills—that is, just the kind of skills Cavell’s work summons and demands? While Fischer tries to get the true measure of Cavell’s “isolation” within the mainstream, he adds another useful category to our taxonomy of issues: (6) the conditions for teaching Cavell in the classroom and ways that practice


is supported or hampered. Naoko Saito’s The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfection-ism and Education in Dewey and Emerson and her coedited volume with Paul Standish, Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grown-ups, may go some way to-ward addressing Fischer’s own lament. Still, even in the wake of such work on educational and pedagogical matters, Fischer’s concern may persist, as he writes:

Complicating the use of Cavell in the classroom, his writing is still under-anthologized, partly because his contributions to different dis-ciplines remain unassimilated, partly because each of his essays is in-tertwined with his work as a whole, not to mention the writers he draws on. Sampling him in an English department course on Shake-speare, for example, potentially puts the class in touch with unfamil-iar figures such as Wittgenstein, much as introducing Cavell in a phi-losophy course can bring along American movies. Instead of adding to a course, the excerpt from Cavell (thoroughly studied) thus risks eclipsing it, one week’s assignment becoming the whole course.20

The very last point—about eclipsing—shows how the issue of teaching Cavell in the classroom, noted above as (6), is intimately bound up with earlier issues, especially (3) paraphrase, (4) quotation, and (5) orientation within the text. The foregoing taxonomy describes attributes of one kind of reader, but there is another kind that is just as interesting: not the reader who finds Cavell’s work overwhelming but, as it were, the reader who finds it under-whelming. This latter kind of reader, one who may in a certain sense be deaf to Cavell’s particular tone, or dismissive of his methods and intellectual refer-ences, should not himself be dismissed as misguided or ignorant. As much as I am intrigued by the issues stated above (1 through 6) and the impact they might have on a scholar’s life, I am also interested in the occasions when Cavell’s work is inaudible or otherwise unavailable to intelligent, highly competent, celebrated readers and critics. What accounts for this seemingly radical divide? Anecdotal, but salient, evidence suggests that the reception of Cavell’s work is split into two primary modes of engagement: radical devo-tion (including reading and referencing his work; perhaps being hypnotized by the sound of his voice) and radical dismissal (remaining unable to have an ear for his prose and project). Having already devoted time to the former side of the divergence (again, 1 through 6 above), for the next few pages I explore the latter phenomenon with an emphasis on Cavell’s expertise on Emerson—in particular, how his contributions to Emerson scholarship have been received among philosophers. I aim to provide a small cross-section of instances in which Cavell’s work is read by philosophers—two of them, we might say, who cite his work but do not engage it, and two of them who, in writing monographs on his work, deem it necessary to address the nature of his writing and its potential for intelligibility and pertinence.

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When nearly forty years ago Stanley Cavell asked “Why has America never expressed itself philosophically? Or has it. . . ?” the query had more to do with putting up for debate the criteria of what counts as philosophical than with founding such criteria by finding this or that text to fulfill them.21 If America has expressed itself philosophically—in the work of Emerson and Thoreau, as Cavell suggests—why is this appraisal unknown to us, or why, if familiar, does it sound odd to say it, to claim it? A reply to Cavell’s question is not difficult because we don’t have evidence to show America’s philosophical expression, but, rather, because we are unsure what we mean by the term “philosophical.” It is no wonder that our inheritance of Emerson and Thoreau, much less Cavell, has been problematical. As a kind of echo across the decades, then, we might want to ask in reply: how does America express itself philosophically when the thinkers it produces call into ques-tion the nature of philosophical expression? That is, thinkers who take the question of philosophy itself as central to the activity of philosophizing. Because Cavell, like Emerson before him, altered the nature of what might count as philosophy, he may complicate the chances that others will recog-nize it as such. It it not my intention to criticize or embarrass fellow scholars for their use, or their neglect, of Cavell’s work (or for that matter Emerson’s). If my tone belies this genuine desire and I come across as disparaging, it is a fault of my prose, not my mood. My intention is inquisitive, not punitive. I am interested in the phenomenon of reading Cavell, not judging whether it is being done according to a preexisting or preconceived standard. I don’t pre-sume there is any way to predict how a writer’s work will be or should be read; what we have here instead are limited occasions and instances of that reading. I tried to write this essay using generalizations and wider trends, but it wasn’t nearly as instructive until I employed extremely precise, em-pirical cases. I decided that I could add a further hedge against offending colleagues and readers by drawing the examples from the work of philoso-phers I admire. Finding ways to read Cavell may be usefully informed by a closer look at how Emerson was, and sometimes still is, received in academic philosophy. And we need look no further than Cavell’s own crucial series of contribu-tions to that inquiry—for example, where he asks in earnest perplexity why philosophy in its “professionalization” recurrently “represses” Emerson as a philosopher.22 To repress him means, in part, to deny him a voice in philosophy, and thus to deprive him relevance to the projects and problems philosophers hold dear—which it seems philosophers believe Emerson does not cherish; or if they grant that he does, they contend that he is either insuf-ficiently articulate or rigorous to handle them. Or when Emerson’s work is sufficiently clear and robust, it is not speaking to philosophy, or philosophi-cally. Though Cavell has written of this condition many times and over the


course of many years in many disparate texts, his consternation is legitimate, not a consequence of curricular paranoia. Cavell is no conspiracy theorist. The worry, as it might best be described, is not just that Emerson has been deprived a deserved place in the conversation of philosophy, but that there is something peculiar—and telling—in the fact that he has been deprived such a place. Cavell does not have to argue for Emerson’s membership card; mere-ly writing about Emerson, as Cavell does, contributes to this habilitation. Cavell instead inquires after what it is or might be about Emerson that so upsets or offends or confuses the professionals of philosophy—moments of intellectual allergy that in themselves should be of interest to philosophers. Much of the secondary literature on Emerson is written from departments of English, literary studies, American studies, comparative literature, histo-ry, education, and, increasingly, political theory. Those who write about Em-erson from these places, as if I were speaking of certain embassies of thought with their own perceived but undefined and undeclared boundaries, often make reference to Cavell’s work. In an effort to achieve a fair assessment of who is writing mainstream academic studies of Emerson, I attempted to select a representative sample of work. In a review of fifteen fairly recent books on Emerson—including eight monographs, three anthologies of sec-ondary essays, and three compendiums of Emerson’s work—only one of the thirty-five authors was cited as a professor of philosophy.23 A similar ratio is found in The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, where among forty-three contributors, only one teaches in a department of philosophy.24 One of the two philosophers in the sample, Stephen L. Esquith, in an essay that aims “toward an Emersonian theory of democratic citizenship,” finds room only to footnote a reference to Cavell’s Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism.25 Cavell’s name is not mentioned in the essay, and there is no explanation in the note why Cavell’s book should be consulted on the point under discussion. Such a silence seems peculiar after reading Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, where the question of democratic citizenship is among the most honed and nuanced that we have. Had I selected books on similar subjects that were written by professors of philosophy, ipso facto the paucity of philosophers in this demographic would diminish. But are there such books? Certainly there are philosophers writing about Cavell and Emerson whose works should be cited, many of them collected in edited volumes noted above, such as Stanley Cavell, Con-tending with Stanley Cavell, Reading Cavell, and Stanley Cavell and the Claim to Community.26 I think these anthologies give us the best evidence and in-timation of how writing about Cavell’s Emerson can look from within a community of philosophers. And there are an ever increasing number of exceptional single-author books by philosophers writing about Cavell, in-cluding Russell Goodman’s American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition; Stephen Mulhall’s Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary; Si-

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mon Critchley’s Very Little, Almost Nothing; and Espen Hammer’s Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary.27 Given the authors’ ambi-tions, the works understandably have Cavell’s Emerson as only a portion of a larger project. And yet, work that takes up Cavell’s Emerson more explic-itly and centrally, such as Paul Grimstad and Branka Arsić’s The Other Em-erson, is comprised mainly of scholars in fields other than philosophy, aside from Goodman, Sandra Laugier, and Cavell (who wrote the afterword). In The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson, Naoko Saito, a professor of education, draws Cavell’s Emerson into the core of her project to enrich Dewey’s theory of progressive education through an encounter with moral perfectionism. In Saito’s coedited book with Paul Standish (who is also a professor of education), Stanley Cavell and the Educa-tion of Grown-ups, they and their contributors address pedagogical theory and educational philosophy in Cavell’s work, with its abundant references to Emerson’s notions of instruction, tuition, and quotation. In Cavell, Com-panionship, and Christian Theology, Peter Dula considers Cavell’s relevance to ecclesiology and highlights the moral perfectionism Cavell finds in Em-erson (and Nietzsche); he teaches in a seminary and in a department called Bible and Religion. In American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, a professor of history, devotes a section of her final chapter to Cavell’s claim that Nietzsche helped America find Emerson again. In Stanley Cavell’s American Dream: Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Hol-lywood Movies, Lawrence Rhu, a professor of English, Renaissance studies, and Shakespeare, dedicates his eloquent book to studying the “convergence and elaboration of three major subjects in the philosophy of Stanley Cavell: Shakespeare, Emerson, and Hollywood Movies.” (The trade of “Emerson” for “Philosophy” in the subtitle of the book appears to generate a market-ing decision with philosophical import.) In Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading, Richard Deming, a poet and literary critic who teaches in a department of English, develops a model of literary ethics in-spired by Cavell’s assessment of Emerson and related initiatives in ordinary language philosophy and contributes new thinking about “Emersonian modernism” that meaningfully illuminates the poetics of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and others.28 In American Spaces of Conversion: The Conductive Imaginaries of Edwards, Emerson, and James, Andrea Kurston “builds on the scholarship” of Cavell, work she notes that has “clarified the coordinately repellent and attractive aspects of Emerson’s style”; she, too, teaches in a department of English.29 After these occasions of reading Cavell’s work on Emerson, I simply note that while philosophers contin-ue to expand the field of interest in Cavell generally (from film studies to Shakespeare to ordinary language philosophy, and even posthumanism—as seen in Philosophy and Animal Life, edited by Cary Wolfe and his colleagues—a collection populated by philosophers), the work that gets done on Cavell’s


Emerson tends, in large measure, to be done by scholars who do not identify themselves as philosophers.30

In an issue of the journal Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society, the phi-losopher Vincent Colapietro writes approvingly of Hugo Münsterberg, en-couraging American philosophers to make use of his writing as they would work by William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana—all familiar, now canonical, names in philosophy.31 Yet Colapietro creates a surprising categorical wedge when in the same essay he adduces “film theorists” such as “Sergei Eisenstein, André Bazin, Christian Metz, Siegfried Kracauer, Ro-land Barthes,” and “. . . Stanley Cavell.”32 Why is Cavell part of the second list, and not part of the genealogy of the first? Why isn’t Cavell listed as a philosopher who writes about film instead of as a film theorist? Is that a dif-ference Cavell makes possible or makes interesting for us; or is it a difference that contributes to his miscategorization and misreading? The distinction may be of interest only to those with patience for the politics and rhetoric that divides philosophers from one another, and one academic discipline from another—divisions that are often as vigorously defended as they are vaguely defined. Should we then understand this move of overt inclusion (viz., “Eisenstein, Bazin, Metz, . . . Cavell”) as simultaneously a move of (un-intended?) exclusion—of dismissal? It might make sense to think of Cavell as a film theorist when reading The World Viewed, Pursuits of Happiness, or Contesting Tears, yet isn’t that work—as defined by its philosophical preoc-cupations as its filmic ones—sufficient to restrain an impulse to see Cavell primarily as a film theorist? After all, what sort of film theorist could pro-duce Must We Mean What We Say? and The Claim of Reason? Or what kind of philosophical authority does a film theorist have when writing about the Bi-ble, Kant, Shakespeare, Emerson, and Wittgenstein? Thinking of Cavell first as a “film theorist” creates what might be counted as an unwarranted habit of denying him a philosophical voice. To depersonalize the critique—taking the weight off Colapietro—we can simply ask if the resistance or denial is part of an unarticulated disciplinary convention in philosophy, a silence that in turn makes it impossible to identify or amend. Colapietro’s article, with endnotes as long as the essay, offers one such note to Cavell. In it he cites Cavell as “a notable exception” to the habit of American philosophers who omit any sustained considerations of film.33 Observe how in his endnote Colapietro positions, or repositions, Cavell as a philosopher. Colapietro is pointing out the novelty of this American philoso-pher who writes on film, as opposed to, say, so-called continental philoso-phers who write about film apparently without the subject matter posing a problem for their status as philosophers. Yet does Colapietro’s emphasis on “American” turn this moment of acknowledgment into a moment of apol-ogy? He writes—in an endnote: “But even counting Cavell as someone who in some measure and manner truly represents American philosophy makes

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my point: he is the exception to the rule. He is an American philosopher (it would be unfair, not simply ungracious, to deny him this status) who is concerned with the philosophy of film; his efforts in this regard make him somewhat exceptional.”34 Are Colapietro’s italics meant to signal a moment of disciplinary distinction between the American philosopher and the An-glo-American or analytic philosopher? To be the former, it is presumed, one must take seriously the work of transcendentalists and pragmatists. To be the latter, it is also presumed, one must find the work of logical positivists, the Vienna school, and certain varieties of scientism of central importance. Neither of these descriptions are comprehensive, but merely indicative. Co-lapietro’s attempt to be fair and gracious, which we can presume is genuine, nevertheless highlights how philosophers are trained to categorize them-selves and others and signals the difference that contributes to how they are treated—for example, and more concretely, how they are read and if they are read. Thus if Colapietro’s description leads in some instances to distraction, it can also, paradoxically, be the occasion for just the sort of institutional recognition Cavell’s work would need in order to be read—and taken se-riously—in certain circles. Somehow the diminishment and habilitation of one’s work may be caught up in the same process. I have been calling this process reading. While there are now robust forums of discussion on Cavell’s work by phi-losophers, the variability of Colapietro’s description suggests that many in-stances remain in which other philosophers approach Cavell with hesitancy or reverence—perhaps ending with an occasion of citing his work in order to go on from him, or without him. The citation is thus honorific, another case of acknowledgment that nevertheless confirms disengagement—an excuse for not dealing with his writing. The fact that Colapietro felt he had to say such things about Cavell—to remind his audience, an audience comprised largely of American philosophers in a premiere journal of American philoso-phy, that Cavell is an exception to the rule—may have the unintended conse-quence of reigniting the question of Cavell’s location in philosophy, perhaps even more peculiarly, his legitimacy as a philosopher. Given the taxonomy adduced above (1–6), I suspect that readers of Cavell’s work will continue to struggle with the alternation between deference and deferral. Another illustrative endnote appears in George Stack’s Nietzsche and Em-erson: An Elective Affinity. On the second page of his book, Stack, a professor of philosophy, writes, like Colapietro, of Cavell being an exception to a rule:

A number of American literary critics have, from time to time, called attention to the linkage between Emerson and Nietzsche, but they have not delved into the detailed nature of this curious association. Ironically, the American deconstructionist critics who have probed and dismantled Nietzsche’s texts seem to be uninterested in or un-aware of his relationship to Emerson. Even though a few American


philosophers—notably Stanley Cavell—are cognizant of the connec-tion between the central figure of literary transcendentalism and the philosopher of “the will to power” and “the transvaluation of values,” they have not pursued this rich and revealing clue to some of the ma-jor and many of the minor themes in Nietzsche’s philosophy.35

Stack does not pause on Cavell’s status in the academy—that Cavell is an American philosopher goes by without any self-consciousness or disci-plinary defensiveness. What does emerge, however, is that Cavell is men-tioned—alone, apparently without match—as being the one American philosopher who does see in Nietzsche’s work lines of consanguinity with Emerson. Readers who are familiar with Cavell’s early and extensive devel-opment of the influence of Emerson on Nietzsche will recognize the nature of Stack’s understatement: Cavell is much more than “cognizant” of the re-lationship. A similar understatement appears in Colapietro’s qualified end-note, where he finds Cavell “in some measure” representative and “some-what” exceptional. Stack’s endnote—one of only two on Cavell in the entire nearly four-hundred-page book—like Colapietro’s endnote, pushes Stack’s assessment of Cavell to the side, making it an aside. Yet unlike Esquith’s quick biblio-graphical reference to Conditions, Stack writes three pages on Cavell’s work in the miniature, compressed space that defines endnotes. But why is this extensive series of remarks hidden away? Why does Stack find that he has so much to say about Cavell, and yet not the initiative or desire to include those remarks in the flow of his chapter? Does writing about Cavell seem to him a diversion from his argument? Stack’s thesis in this book is that Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche is still largely unknown or, if recognized, disavowed. Intriguingly, it is precisely in support of his thesis that Stack mentions Cavell—as having “touched upon the association between Em-erson and Nietzsche in a perceptive way.”36 The connotations of touching upon a topic are clear enough—in terms of being superficial or of passing interest or without much extended consideration—and gravely misapplied to Cavell’s seminal work on the topic. So why is Cavell’s “perceptive way” of addressing and advancing the topic not welcomed into the main text? In Stack’s seventy-line endnote there seems to be a crucial admission that Cavell has some “insightful things to say” about Emerson and Nietzsche.37 Yet much of what Stack admits in his note seems mentioned primarily as an opportunity to demonstrate his own theses and theories about the two nineteenth-century writers. More than once Stack writes that Cavell “paral-lels my own independent perception of the same phenomenon.”38 It would appear that Stack’s appraisal of Cavell—as an American philosopher who is “cognizant” of the influence of Emerson on Nietzsche and who has “done a great deal to rejuvenate Emerson as a thinker who ought to be taken seri-ously”—should make Cavell an exceptional, perhaps the only, voice suited to complement Stack’s lengthy argument. Granted, Stack does not set out

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to write about Cavell’s interpretation of Emerson and Nietzsche. Yet are we not intrigued why a philosopher writing about Emerson and Nietzsche in 1992—when works such as The Senses of Walden, In Quest of the Ordinary, This New Yet Unapproachable America, and Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome are already well established—would keep Cavell’s contributions to the idea of Emerson “as a thinker who ought to be taken seriously” sequestered in back matter? After saying in his lengthy endnote that “Cavell has attempted to rejuvenate an interest in Emerson as philosopher and to overcome the ‘repression’ of Emerson in American philosophy,” Stack does not seem to appreciate that this so-called rejuvenation would be of immense service to his book’s thesis—and yet, was there ever a time when Emerson was known as a philosopher? If not, then Cavell does not rejuvenate this idea so much as give birth to it.39 In acknowledging Cavell’s contribution of trying to over-come Emerson’s repression, Stack appears to repress Cavell’s rejuvenation of Emerson. Of course I accept that the non-Cavell texts I cite and the places where those texts have appeared will be read as anecdotal, perhaps incidental—again, though, hopefully not taken as cited with accusation. Why, after all, should such attention be devoted to a couple of endnotes written by phi-losophers? I hope to have shown why these moments of clear acknowledg-ment summon one’s concern about disciplinary practices of reading—in-cluding citation and interpretation—and more specifically the aesthetics of reading Cavell’s writing. What in the shape or tone or content of Cavell’s prose prompted these instances of furtive inheritance by philosophers? It needn’t be the case that the kind of acknowledgment we see in Colapietro and Stack is a form of apology, though that is possible, but rather that it suggests philosophers may have a troubled relationship with praise. As I stated at the beginning of this essay, though, praise in the ordinary sense of acclaim and recognition is not what Cavell stands in need of; rather, the need is for something more like the possibility of one’s finding or discovering that one’s work is known or otherwise recognized for what it is and makes pos-sible for others—namely, as writing that addresses the particularity and the humanity necessarily implied in the education of grown-ups. Recall when Cavell discusses the reception of his work by J. L. Austin, and he is at first disparaged and subsequently angered by the “silence” with which his writing was received.40 Cavell takes this reminiscence as an occa-sion to highlight a lesson in the “economies of praise,” which he says made it “quite impossible for me to be realistic about the degree to which any work I do can be known.”41 What is the work Cavell may be said to do? And once such work is known, how can we know it as his? Imagining a situation in which he was asked to tersely encapsulate the raison d’être of his mas-sive The Claim of Reason, Cavell replied: “to help bring the human voice back into philosophy.”42 I put these responses in apposition to show the degree to which the silence and voice of philosophy are both aspects of speech,


and if we are to account for a knowledge of Cavell’s work, it will be done fittingly—in some fashion of acknowledgment—that is, neither as apology nor as praise. The puzzle or paradox of inheriting Cavell’s work, like that of inheriting Emerson’s, is knowing how to find or sense when our reading lies between apology and praise—that is, in the space of acknowledgment. How-ever, this acknowledgment is not something attributed to Cavell’s writing but to one’s own reading of it. The acknowledgment dawns precisely when reading begins: we recognize Cavell sufficiently to recognize ourselves—in other words, when the claims of this particular human subject suddenly connect to the claims of the human community; when Cavell’s prominently personal style sounds like it can join a conversation of other voices. Cavell has addressed how the quality of Emerson’s writing is tied to his fate in philosophy. I wonder whether we ought to consider the quality and the fate of Cavell’s writing as sharing in this history and anthropology of inheritance. What Cavell says here of Emerson we might read in sym-pathetic disbelief as perceptibly self-reflexive—if unfortunate, and as yet without explanation:

It is the sort of outbreak that seems to explain straight off why Emer-son is the writer about whom it is characteristically insisted, continuing in the 1980s as in the 1840s, by admirers as much as by detractors, that he is not a philosopher, accompanied (proven?) by the repetitive find-ing of his prose to be a fog (sometimes intensified as metaphysical) or a mist (sometimes tempered as golden). The mystery is that anyone would, under that description of his prose, take the trouble to deny that he is a philosopher.43

Cavell has certainly had less trouble earning name recognition—and acco-lades—as a philosopher than Emerson, but the question of Emerson’s writ-ing as “a fog” or “a mist” seems to parallel familiar accusations of Cavell’s writings as a place where one loses one’s orientation—for good or ill, as noted above in (5). In Cavell’s case, his “voice” is repeatedly cited as con-tributing to the difficulty of navigating his prose—as if the person or the personal were an encumbrance to satisfying and intelligible philosophical writing instead of a cause for its manifestation. Why is a reader not guided by Cavell’s voice instead of thrown off by it? If Cavell’s work is sometimes invoked in order to be shelved, perhaps we should not only ask what is going on in philosophy that his work would not be taken up in straightforward ways, but also what is going on in Cavell’s writing that makes such an integration and appropriation dif-ficult? As Russell Goodman notes above, it seems that Cavell is well known but not yet or not often enough well read. Are the writers who are pro-voked to write in response to his work able to find their way not just in their prose but in the profession?

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In conversation Cavell has asked whether he is responsible for how his work has been received, and, more recently, in Little Did I Know he dedicated appreciable space to a firsthand assessment of this responsibility: he admits that he wishes to understand why episodes of his interpretation “make cer-tain readers impatient,” since that reaction “tends to make the reception of my work as a whole grudging, even when its results are not challenged.”44 This fact, Cavell adds, is “something that has caused me considerable disqui-et over the years.”45 Since affirmed, however, what does or should Cavell’s responsibility look like? And why would one be led to believe that such culpability was his, and not, say, ours? There are several philosophers who have not only extensively and eloquently engaged Cavell’s work but who have also staked something of their own work and reputation on Cavell’s viability and significance. Admittedly, some of these works transfer anoth-er valence of anxiety—one that leads their authors to defend themselves, their subject, before the argument begins. Stephen Mulhall commences his foreword to Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary, which he titles “An Audience for Cavell’s Philosophy,” by saying: “A key motivation behind the writing of this book is therefore to overcome the undeserved but deleterious consequences of the belated discovery and the unfashionable tone of Cavell’s philosophy.46 And he concludes his opening remarks with an assurance:

It might be best to think of this Foreword as an attempt to make ini-tially plausible the possibility that many of the obstacles in the way of establishing an audience for Cavell’s philosophy—of recognizing it as philosophy at all—are not only internal to the nature of his particular project (and therefore unavoidable but not necessarily insuperable) but are also central topics within it and so fundamental to Cavell’s self-understanding. In other words, and to a degree that is both exhila-rating and threatening, his readers are likely to find that the difficul-ties they most often encounter in gaining access to Cavell’s thought are something that he has already identified and explored within it.47

Timothy Gould, in Hearing Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell, initiates his study by suggesting that Cavell’s reception in philosophy is partially a result of what may be called certain failures to hear what Cavell is saying—as if Cavell’s voice gets in the way of our capacity to register its sense. How can we account for this kind of deafness in ourselves? And if training is needed to hear such things, how we do undertake it, or know that we are in need of it?

Cavell’s very insistence on the human voice might have been heard as an effort to make the struggles concerning the voice into a theme for philosophy. . . . Instead, Cavell’s writing is heard as his insistence on his own particular voice. . . . The interlocking network of these


concepts of voice, style, and personal manner has tended to confine the discussion of Cavell’s writing within a series of sterile controver-sies. . . . Thus one fate of his writing is to raise issues and contro-versies about itself that obscure precisely the original issues that the writing was intended to raise.48

It is difficult to adjudicate whether Gould’s is an apt description of someone whose philosophical writing has betrayed itself or of a community that has betrayed someone’s philosophical writing. In this way, explaining Cavell’s philosophy to others as Mulhall and Gould aim to do is complicated by the burden of having to explain—or, depending on the audience, to defend or defeat—certain prevailing habits of reading his work; or as Stewart suggest-ed above, degeneration in reading habits and aptitudes more generally. Tu-ition in this respect is akin to a reeducation in reading, where certain sounds that have been perennially muted or drowned out or otherwise unheard come back into an audible sonic register. If Mulhall and Gould, both philosophers, begin this way, should we infer that writing about Cavell requires more from us than writing about some other philosopher? Does such writing, first of all, require a justification for heeding Cavell’s voice—perhaps dangerously, as a prelude or a coda to one’s own? Does Cavell’s writing impel or compel a more explicitly confessional, autobiographical, or “personal” manner as part of that response? Is it this question of style, not content, that most often repels, confuses, or incites? Has style become content or, as Cavell has asked: “What does it betoken about the relation of philosophy and literature that a piece of writing can be seen to consist of what is for all the world a philosophical essay preceding, even turning into, a fictional tale—as it happens, a fictional confession from a prison cell?”49 In this light, writing about Cavell is more aptly seen as writ-ing about oneself—where the act of criticism becomes self-critical, where the moments of vision are realized as revision—seeing, or seeing anew—per-haps something familiar but as yet unseen. Philosophy in this key is critical, autobiographical, and fictional. If this holds, then we share the trauma of seeing our words and thoughts, as Emerson says, “come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”50 This discovery, however, is not one of relief, but shame. It is not that Cavell has thought our thoughts, or thought all thoughts that can be thought, but that he has thought them thoughtfully—as if with his whole body, as if admitting in his writing that he has a body—and so a history, a personal history. This may be why writing about Cavell poses the risk that more is getting said than one wants to say—or wishes others to know. The only way to counter the risk is to admit that such confessions are being made and that a writer should try, as Cavell has said, to take responsi-bility for every one of her sentences. Can contemporary professional philosophy recognize its ancient origins in spiritual exercises, as described for example by Pierre Hadot, where phi-

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losophy matured through the methodology of autobiography and spiritual confession?51 Today one will be recommended to write a memoir or a piece of fiction but not to let such exposures inhabit a philosophical text. William Rothman suggests that we not consider Cavell’s The World Viewed “auto-biographical” but, instead, treat it as a “metaphysical memoir”—a distinc-tion meant, we might assume, to make the work seem less personal and thereby to inflate its philosophical credentials.52 But if a memoir—even a metaphysical one—engages a history of personal memories, then by virtue of its intimacy with the self who writes in remembrance, it is also autobio-graphical.53 In the context of professional philosophy, it seems the distinc-tion between memoir and autobiography, even when articulately defined by Rothman, remains unconvincing as a method or style for such writing to assume, at least consciously. In other words, Rothman’s defense of Cavell as writing a memoir instead of an autobiography does not save Cavell from certain prevailing criticisms of his writing as a personal, self-reflexive, or intimate. Until the appearance of Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory, a work promoted as memoir, autobiography, epistolary, and even as “philo-sophical diary,” Cavell’s most overt and least self-conscious performance of the interlacing relationship between philosophy and autobiography was A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises. In the book’s “Overture” Cavell writes that “there is an internal connection between philosophy and autobiography, that each is a dimension of the other” and “that there are events of a life that turn its dedication toward philosophy.”54 Does the “in-ternal connection” confirm the notion that philosophy is always autobio-graphical even when not consciously staged as such—that is, even when not presented with the directness and transparency we find in A Pitch of Philosophy and Little Did I Know? Cavell’s work stands as evidence that a philosopher need not abandon his or her body in order to write philosophy. The memoir—including its fictions—is part of the process and the truths it illuminates: both immanent and ineluctable. It would seem this description is not worth contesting in Cavell’s writing, how much less worth denial: if A Pitch of Philosophy gave us a first indication of how this is possible, Little Did I Know actualizes it to a new degree. Writing about Cavell, it would seem, implicates a reader in this kind of intimacy between bodies and texts and leaves him or her haunted by the notion that philosophy depends on it. Perhaps this is why reading Cavell instigates such strong readerly reactions, defined as they sometimes are by attraction and sometimes by aversion. The debate over canon formation and the establishment of philosophi-cal authority continues to unfold. I am suggesting that insofar as we trace certain lines of a genealogy and inheritance in philosophy, we might benefit from how these specific reading practices rouse a continual self-reflection on the nature, meaning, and potencies of reading more generally. Cavell


describes losing touch with this attention to difference as a cost of Richard Rorty’s project, something “achieved” “at the expense of giving up the ques-tion of the question of philosophy, of what it is, if anything, that calls for philosophy now, in favor of an idea that we are, or should be, past interest in the distinctions between philosophy and other modes of thought or of the presentation of thought.”55 It is clear that, for Cavell, getting past an interest in such distinctions has a deleterious effect on our chances for recognizing our interest in what defines our motives to undertake philosophy as a mode of expression that calls its identity and inheritance into question. Yet to pre-serve our interest in distinctions and criteria—what counts as philosophy and why—returns us to the very issues that have complicated the reading of Cavell’s prose. Since the sound of writing “makes all the difference,” readers must learn to hear the sound.56 The difficulty of hearing it in Cavell’s work may, of itself, constitute one of its achievements. In a forum for the journal Philosophical Investigations in which Cavell was invited along with several others to offer remarks on his experiences read-ing Wittgenstein, he exposes the stakes of forcing disciplinary boundaries in philosophy—not because such a preoccupation is wasteful or embarrass-ing or at odds with the spirit of meaningful investigation, but because, in palpable ways, it threatens to dispossess readers of their relation to, and use of or for, philosophy. In other words, achieving a clear definition of what philosophy is does not engender a safe domain where “philosophy” takes place; rather, it deprives philosophy of its sanguinity with the world it aims to serve and inhabit—the space that both inspires it and sustains it, even if often with difficulty.

That the claim to philosophy has become inherently questionable is part of my conviction about philosophy. So it will, as recently, fall to me to be asked, for example, whether Walter Benjamin is to be considered a philosopher. To get past the “in a sense yes and in a sense no” response, I note that Benjamin is alive to the question of whether I am in possession of my own experience, or instead follow dictations laid down by profession or by fashion or by some more private identification. . . . So what? Am I prepared to conclude that Benjamin is a philosopher if Wittgenstein is one? I am much more interested in whether the way I have arrived at the conjunction has created philosophy in me.57

The fate of a work lies with its audience—whether it can find one, and keep one, and perhaps nurture one. And if it is understood that asking questions an audience cannot or does not want to hear endangers a work’s viability, we can either neglect the work or lean in closer to see what in the work solicits these reactions. In one view the very thing that Cavell’s work makes possible for philosophy is keeping alive the question of an ongoing inquiry into the nature of philosophical investigation itself. Unlike the scenario Wittgenstein imag-

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ines in which “we are combating a trend” that “will die out” and find our-selves in some future where “the way we are arguing against it will no longer be understood; people will not see why all this needed saying,” the question of what it means to speak philosophically, to manifest and maintain a voice for philosophy, will be of perpetual significance.58 How strange to discover that resistance to Cavell’s work may be coextensive with its availability for insight into human expression. In short, these remarks about the nature or definition of philosophical expression—what it means to speak philosophically and be heard, to find or make readers—will always need to be said, addressed, re-viewed and revised, and undertaken anew. Precisely because Cavell’s writing engages the core of Emerson’s work—on the writer’s life as a reader—we are continually invited to an awareness of our relationship to texts. In our reading we are called to attest to the aesthetics of that experience through our writing; for Cavell, through such meditation “philosophy becomes the education of grownups.” Our best hope, and not just as philosophers but as readers, can only be addressed in a vigilant practice of reading and through provisional reports on that experience through writing—work that shows how we create and are created by the texts we read.

Notes

I wish to thank an anonymous reader for the journal for helpful remarks on an earlier version of this essay.

1. One typographical usage note: in the original quotation from Cavell (1979) “philosophy becomes the education of grownups”—he doesn’t use a hyphen in “grownups.” However, in all of Cavell’s subsequent work that references the term, and in all the secondary literature by others, the hyphen is present. Thus, I use the hyphen throughout the essay, save the times when I directly quote from the 1979 source.

2. Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 304.

3. The quotations in this line are selected from Russell Goodman, ed., Contending with Stanley Cavell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 175–76, except the term “charmed,” which is drawn from personal conversation with Cavell.

4. Among other occasions, Cavell commented on the nature of “belatedness” (as it pertains to his work and its reception) at the conferences “Stanley Cavell and Literary Criticism” (University of Edinburgh, 2008) and “Stanley Cavell and Lit-erary Studies” (Harvard University, 2010).

5. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 125; Cavell mentions his account more recently in Little Did I Know, 9.

6. Stanley Cavell, “The Philosopher in American Life (Toward Thoreau and Em-erson),” Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, ed. David Justin Hodge (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 49.

7. Richard Eldridge, ed., Stanley Cavell (Contemporary Philosophers in Focus) (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

8. Richard Eldridge and Bernie Rhie, eds., Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Conse-quences of Skepticism (New York: Continuum, 2011).


9. Ibid., 3.10. Ibid.11. Ibid., 4–5.12. Ibid., 4.13. Ibid., 6. See Stanley Cavell, “The Uncanniness of the Ordinary,” In Quest of the

Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 154.

14. Eldridge and Rhie, Stanley Cavell, 7.15. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press, 1976), 36n31.16. For more on quotation and paraphrase in Cavell’s work, see my “Reading Cavell

Reading,” in Stanley Cavell, Literature, and Film: The Idea of America, eds. Andrew Taylor and Áine Kelly (New York: Routledge, 2013), 26–41.

17. Harold Bloom, “Mr. America,” Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell, ed. David LaRocca (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 502.

18. Michael Fischer, “Using Stanley Cavell,” Philosophy and Literature 32, no. 1 (2008): 199.

19. Ibid., 203.20. Ibid.21. Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (An Expanded Edition) (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1992), 32–33, 123.22. For example, see page 14 of Cavell’s In Quest of the Ordinary.23. For brevity I note only the single-author monographs, in chronological order:

Pamela J. Schirmeister, Less Legible Meanings: Between Poetry and Philosophy in the Work of Emerson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Gustaaf Van Cromphout, Emerson’s Ethics (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999); Jonathan Levin, The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Liter-ary Modernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); T. S. McMillin, Our Preposterous Use of Literature: Emerson and the Nature of Reading (Chicago: Univer-sity of Illinois Press, 2000); Sam McGuire Worley, Emerson, Thoreau, and the Role of the Cultural Critic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); Michael Magee, Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing (Tusca-loosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004); Robert D. Richardson, First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009); and Branka Arsić, On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

24. Joel Myerson, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, and Laura Dassow Walls, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

25. See Stephen L. Esquith’s essay “Power, Poise, and Place: Toward an Emersonian Theory of Democratic Citizenship,” in The Emerson Dilemma: Essays on Emerson and Social Reform, ed. T. Gregory Garvey (Athens: University Press of Georgia, 2001).

26. Eldridge, Stanley Cavell; Goodman, Contending with Stanley Cavell; Alice Crary and Sanford Shieh, eds., Reading Cavell (New York: Routledge, 2006); and An-drew Norris, ed., The Claim to Community: Essays on Stanley Cavell and Political Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). The Eldridge, Good-man, and Crary-Shieh volumes are reviewed by Michael Fischer in “Using Stan-ley Cavell” cited above.

27. Russell Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philoso-phy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Simon Critchley, Very Little, Almost Nothing (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).

28. Paul Grimstad and Branka Arsic, The Other Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Naoko Saito, The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and

130 LaRocca

Education in Dewey and Emerson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006); Naoko Saito and Paul Standish, ed. Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grown-ups (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012); Peter Dula, Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 2011); Lawrence Rhu, Stanley Cavell’s American Dream: Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Hollywood Movies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006); and Richard Deming, Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).

29. Andrea Kurston, American Spaces of Conversion: The Conductive Imaginaries of Ed-wards, Emerson, and James (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 11, 94.

30. Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe, Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

31. Vincent Colapietro, “Let’s All Go to the Movies: Two Thumbs Up for Hugo Mün-sterberg’s The Photoplay (1916),” in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 36, no. 4 (2000): 477–501.

32. Ibid., 477.33. Ibid., 479, 494.34. Ibid., 494; italics by Colapietro.35. George Stack, Nietzsche and Emerson: An Elective Affinity (Athens: Ohio Univer-

sity Press, 1992), 2.36. Ibid., 62n5.37. Ibid.38. Ibid.39. Ibid.40. Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1994), 56.41. Ibid., 57.42. Ibid., 58.43. Stanley Cavell, “Staying the Course,” Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chi-

cago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 22.44. See Cavell, Little Did I Know, 192.45. Ibid.46. Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1994), viii.47. Ibid., xvi.48. Timothy Gould, Hearing Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1–2.49. Stanley Cavell, “Being Odd, Getting Even,” in In Quest of the Ordinary, 126.50. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 259.51. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault,

ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

52. William Rothman, Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 35.

53. Ibid.54. Cavell, Pitch of Philosophy, vii.55. Cavell, “Staying the Course,” 15.56. Cavell describes his essay “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?”

“as a brief gloss” on his observation that “in philosophy it is the sound which makes all the difference.” See Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say?” Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Scribner, 1969), 36n10; and LaRocca, ed., Estimat-ing Emerson, 689.

57. Stanley Cavell, “On Wittgenstein,” Philosophical Investigations 24, no. 2 (2001): 94–95.58. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 43.


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