scholarly journals Undinge, Coffee Cup Lids, and Reinhabiting Spaces: Some Notes on a Register of a (Post-)Critical Philosophical Life

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (9) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Ramaekers
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Philosophical Life

The analyses in this issue on post-critique strike me as doing a particular kind of work, which I discuss in terms of ‘finding (post-)critique’s exact space’. And the philosophers developing the analyses all seem to be engaged, each in their own way, in a practice which I will discuss in terms of ‘reinhabiting a space of (post-)critique’. I will draw on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell to develop a few reflections on this.

Doubt, our modern Crown of Thorns

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 437-455
Author(s):  
Charles M. Stang
Keyword(s):  
Chronic Illness ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
As If

This essay uses T. E. Lawrence's characterization of doubt as ‘our modern crown of thorns’, as an entrée into thinking through the coincidence of doubt and faith in the four canonical gospels. However much each of the gospels may wish to induce faith, it leaves its readers with the distinct impression that doubt, understood differently in each, cannot be fully dispelled. The gospels thereby testify to a lively, ancient appreciation for the irrepressibility of doubt. This essay then turns to the problem of scepticism in modern philosophy. In his work on Ludwig Wittgenstein, the American philosopher Stanley Cavell suggests that scepticism is a ‘condition’ of knowledge, both in the sense of something from which we suffer as if from a chronic illness, and in the sense of that which makes knowledge possible at all. The reader is invited to think of the dialectics of doubt and faith in a similar way, of doubt as the very condition of faith.

Revolutions of the Ordinary: Victorian Studies and the Turn to Ordinary Language

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Wright
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
As If

“To engage seriously with ordinary language philosophy,” Toril Moi tells us in the introduction to Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell, “is a little like undergoing psychoanalysis. Wittgenstein assumes that we don't begin doing philosophy just for the sake of it, but because something is making us feel confused, as if we had lost our way.” As Moi begins her project of explaining to an audience of literary critics the insights of ordinary-language philosophy, represented primarily by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell, and making a case for the value of their ideas for the practice we usually call close reading, this psychoanalytic metaphor makes a sudden turn to diagnosis, or to the initiation of a kind of therapeutic address that can feel coercive even in its charisma. You must recognize your sickness, Moi insists, before you can be receptive to the treatment. “Who wants to undergo philosophical therapy,” she goes on to ask, “if they feel that everything in their intellectual life is just fine as it is? Paradoxically, then, the best readers of the reputedly ‘conservative’ Wittgenstein might be those who genuinely feel the need for a change” (12). What kind of therapeutic project does Moi want to pursue in this book, which begins by distinguishing the best readers (the readiest patients) from those who think, conservatively, that everything is “just fine as it is”?

Introduction: unsettling subjects of justice and ethics

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Sheldon
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Democratic Life

This chapter begins with an ethnographic account of the high profile student conflicts around free speech and racism which unfolded across UK campuses in 2008-9 in response to ‘Operation Cast Lead’. The discussion focuses on the unsettling quality of these events in order to introduce a number of key elements in the framing of this study. First, the chapter highlights how campus struggles around Palestine-Israel are not only constituted through competing discourses in the abstract but are also the locus of intense feelings, contradictory desires and visceral interpersonal encounters. Second, is argued that these raging campus conflicts over Palestine-Israel involve the destabilisation of established spatial boundaries under conditions of globalisation and so can be helpfully connected to Nancy Fraser’s theory of ‘abnormal justice’. Third, by highlighting how this case is also the focus of disputed historical claims, the chapter introduces helpful resonances with aesthetic notions of the tragic. The chapter concludes by introducing some key interlocutors - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell and Veena Das - who will help with a key task of this book: to develop an ethnographic imagination attentive to movements between the discursive/embodied and public/personal dimensions of democratic life.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Rebecca A. Sheehan
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Cinema Studies ◽  
Avant Garde

The book’s introductory chapter situates its study of American avant-garde cinema in the context of the field of film-philosophy and the post-theory debates within cinema studies. The chapter rectifies influential misreadings of American avant-garde films by film-philosophers, and goes on to trace philosophy’s influences on the avant-garde, laying the groundwork for putting their films in conversation with the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This chapter outlines the various kinds of dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens at work in American avant-garde cinema, and explains the various ways in which American avant-garde filmmakers have used this figure to advance a philosophy that promotes behaviors of re-encounter and review applicable to the off-screen world.

Face of Mystery, Mystery of a Face: An Anthropological Trajectory in Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Kaufman's Biohistorical Theology

1995 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-409
Author(s):  
Alec Irwin
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Theological Anthropology ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Everyday Language ◽  
Face To Face

The work of Ludwig Wittgenstein counts among the most significant philosophical influences on Gordon Kaufman's recent theology. Yet important convergences between Kaufman's theological worldview and Wittgenstein's philosophical teaching remain unexplored. In this essay I shall examine a number of such convergences connected with the concept of the human. The thought of Stanley Cavell will play a central role in the discussion. Kaufman shares with the skeptical Wittgenstein revealed in Cavell's writings an abiding concern with the ordinary in human life—for example, everyday language, the human body—but both are interested in this ordinariness as the locus of ineradicable mystery. A richly textured treatment of the ordinary (and mysterious) situation of face-to-face human encounter emerges when relevant passages of Wittgenstein's, Cavell's, and Kaufman's writings are compared. This article will develop some of the implications of this comparison that hold particular promise for theological anthropology. The orientation and concerns of the paper are thus primarily constructive.

Friend as Enemy

2018 ◽  
pp. 54-69
Author(s):  
Rastislav Dinić
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Richard Rorty ◽  
Constitutional Democracy ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
The Difference

Richard Rorty famously claimed that the difference between analytic and continental philosophers, boils down to a political one—analytical philosophers are predominantly liberals who share a belief in the rule of law and the institutions of modern constitutional democracy, while the continental ones tend to be more pessimistic about this political arrangement, and much more prone to experiment with the alternatives. But where does this leave the members of that rare breed—philosophers who see themselves as working in both traditions? In order to answer that question for himself, Rorty has written several books proclaiming his faith in liberalism and America as its most prominent example. But what about Stanley Cavell—a philosopher inspired equally by Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austen, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger? It is difficult to answer this question straightforwardly, since, although many of his writings are in some sense deeply political, Cavell rarely wrote explicitly on politics, especially in respect of modern ideological struggles. One way someone interested in this question could go about trying to answer it is by turning to Cavell’s encounters with more explicit representatives of certain ideological positions. That is exactly what I intend to do in this paper—by turning to Cavell’s engagement with Yugoslav director Dušan Makavejev.

Hedda’s Words

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toril Moi
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World

For ordinary language philosophy—the philosophical tradition after Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, as constituted and extended by Stanley Cavell—meaning arises in use. Utterances are actions and expressions. This philosophy, therefore, is closely attuned to the work of language in theater. This paper shows that ordinary language philosophy gives rise to a kind of literary criticism that considers reading an practice of acknowledgment, as en effort to understand exactly why the characters say precisely these words in precisely this situation. By paying close attention to Hedda’s interactions with three different linguistic worlds—the Tesman world, the Brack world, and the world she shared with Løvborg in the past—this chapter brings out the contrast between the conventionality and brutality of Hedda’s surroundings and Hedda’s ideals of courage and freedom, and shows that Hedda is more vulnerable, and more damaged, than previous readings have assumed.

The Advanced U.S. Citizenship of David Foster Wallace

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Chodat
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Practical Wisdom ◽  
David Foster Wallace ◽  
Philosophical Logic ◽  
Civic Humanism ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Infinite Jest ◽  
Human Voice ◽  
Civic Virtues

This chapter begins by examining the ways that Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell helped David Foster Wallace overcome the allure of philosophical logic, and allowed him to appreciate the artistic and moral powers of the improvisatory human voice. More persistently than Cavell, however, Wallace sought a broad account of our contemporary sociopolitical condition. This impulse led Wallace to take seriously the virtues of civic humanism—mature temperance, skilled knowledge, practical wisdom—that begins with Aristotle and descends to Dewey and Wallace’s own father, the philosopher James D. Wallace. Wallace’s fiction, however, allots little space for the civic virtues that most capture Wallace the essayist. Everywhere in Infinite Jest we see meaning reduced to matter, purposeful action reduced to compulsion, and when Wallace tries in The Pale King to give body to his highest words, he ends up—as one character in the text puts it—“talking like a civics class.”

Profound farce

2018 ◽  
Vol 97 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-19
Author(s):  
Reto Winckler
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Nature And Society

As the genre of farce more generally, Shakespeare’s early farce The Comedy of Errors is often dismissed as superficial because of its farcical elements, or its farcical nature is downplayed by well-meaning critics. In this essay, I argue that it is precisely in its farcical superficiality that the play unfolds sceptical philosophical potential. Employing concepts developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, I try to show how this farce, in comically unsettling the very foundations of human language, culture and identity, gestures at uncomfortable truths about the fundamental conventionality of human nature and society.

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