{"title":"The Merge","authors":"G. C. Bearn","doi":"10.18192/cjcs.v0i6.4106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18192/cjcs.v0i6.4106","url":null,"abstract":"Cavell’s conviction that there is an American transcendentalist underwriting of the philosophical return to the ordinary appears in his writings only after the completion, in 1979, of The Claim of Reason, and I suspect there is a story to tell about how the completion of that book, the writing of its inimitable Part IV, prepared the ground for that conviction. For the moment, I leave the telling of that story to others. In this paper I simply want to understand what Cavell might have meant by the claim to a transcendentalist underwriting of the ordinary, and in addition, to suggest that this underwriting could be even further secured by including what Whitman calls “the merge” and “the outlet.” This paper is therefore a contribution to determining Whitman’s position in Cavell’s writing, both why Whitman’s voice is so rarely invoked, and how Whitman’s voice might have supplemented that of Emerson and of Thoreau. My suggestion is that Whitman’s merge underwrites the underwriting.","PeriodicalId":342666,"journal":{"name":"Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies","volume":"81 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121676978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Essay Concerning Beauvoir, Cavell, Etc.","authors":"N. Bauer","doi":"10.18192/cjcs.v0i6.4105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18192/cjcs.v0i6.4105","url":null,"abstract":"This is the story of my coming to read Le Deuxième Sexe in the rather unusual way that I do.I was raised, as it were, in the Philosophy Department at Harvard University as part of the last generation working seriously under the tutelage of Stanley Cavell. Though Cavell’s tastes in philosophy were strikingly wide-ranging, crisscrossing the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, not to mention genres and mediums, there were limits to his tastes, as there of course are in every person’s case. He was interested in Heidegger, but not in European phenomenology more generally. (The one thing I recall him saying about Sartre was this offhand remark, perhaps something he had heard or read before, during a seminar: “Sartre thinks it’s very important that no one can die my death for me. Well, no one can take my bath for me, either.”) He was interested in the great film actresses of Hollywood’s golden period—Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Irene Dunne, Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman—and even thought of them as, in their own way, philosophers on screen; but he was not as interested, at least publicly, in women writers. He did engage with feminist thinkers in his own writing about film, but he was concerned in those moments mostly to worry about what he experienced as a certain theoretical rigidity in feminist film theory and what he saw as its failing to allow the objects of it criticism breathing room and to give his own way of thinking, which he saw as very much sympathetic to women’s concerns, a chance.","PeriodicalId":342666,"journal":{"name":"Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies","volume":"85 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132445862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cavell and Critique","authors":"Alice Crary","doi":"10.18192/cjcs.v0i6.4104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18192/cjcs.v0i6.4104","url":null,"abstract":"Stanley Cavell—my mentor and good friend—died on June 19, 2018, a week before I sat down to revise this tribute to him. I first presented these words in Cavell’s presence at a 2017 workshop at Tufts University on “Changing Politics: Conversations with Stanley Cavell.” I was then concerned with a crucial political dimension of Cavell’s thought that even admiring readers of his work sometimes overlook. This topic strikes me as, if anything, even more pertinent now. Within a day of Cavell’s death, obituaries began to appear in the U.S. and abroad, and a common theme was Cavell’s astonishing breadth as a thinker. He was, different papers reported, as eloquent and engaging on topics as various as Emerson and Thoreau, movies from Hollywood’s “golden age,” Shakespeare, Wittgenstein and Austin, what he called “the fact of television,” Heidegger, Kleist, Kierkegaard, Hitchcock and Beckett. It is certainly true that Cavell had a great range. At the same time, as Nancy Bauer, Sandra Laugier and I observed in a post in the New York Times philosophy blog, The Stone, there is an important political thread running through Cavell’s explorations of his many topics and questions, namely, a preoccupation with what it is to be a responsible participant in a democratic polis and, specifically, a democratic polis as brutally and profoundly imperfect as the United States of America. Cavell’s commitment to liberating, democratic politics was reflected in his actions beyond his writings, with some of his political endeavors described in his autobiographical tome Little Did I Know and others recorded in the work of his students and friends.","PeriodicalId":342666,"journal":{"name":"Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133159848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Between Mourning and Desire","authors":"Victor J. Krebs","doi":"10.18192/CJCS.V0I6.4097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18192/CJCS.V0I6.4097","url":null,"abstract":"During the month of November 1998, Stanley Cavell visited Caracas, Venezuela, invited by the Museum of Fine Arts and the philosophy department of Simon Bolivar University, to hold a three-day seminar on art and philosophy. During those days, Cavell presented and commented on the films Jean Dillman, by Chantal Ackerman and Sans Soleil by Chris Marker, as well as two lectures on material he was working on at that time: “The World as Things: Collecting Thoughts on Collecting,” which was published in a volume by the Guggenheim Museum with the Pompidou Center, where he also read that conference that same year (it later appeared in a final version in 2005 in Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow). The second lecture was “Trials of Praise,” where he talked about Henry James and Fred Astaire.","PeriodicalId":342666,"journal":{"name":"Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128220357","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}