Bearing the Beyond: Women and the Limits of Language in Stanley Cavell — Intro
1 The American philosopher Stanley Cavell is one of the very few thinkers in the Anglo-Saxon dispensation of philosophy who address the role of gender and desire in our possessing language. While Cavell's oeuvre is receiving more and more attention in Europe, the issues of gender discussed in and raised by his writing are not systematically explored.[1]For example, gender appears only as an afterthought in Stephen Mulhall's Stanley Cavell: <em>Philosophy's Recounting of the Ordinary</em>. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Likewise Richard Eldridge's superb 2003 collection of essays on Cavell does not systematically explore the issue of gender (<em>Stanley Cavell</em>. Ed. Richard Elridge. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003). My <em>Beyond the Philosopher's Fear: A Cavellian Reading of Gender, Origin and Religion in Modern Skepticism</em> (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2007) aims to rectify this situation. That the topic of gender is shrouded in silence is even more surprising, since in his later writings on theatre, film, and opera Cavell ponders explicitly what women can say in the face of the violence of masculine ways of knowing and speaking.
2 Against this silence in Cavell scholarship, this paper aims to show exegetically how philosophizing about language and about sexuality are connected in Cavell's work. Systematically, I will argue that for Cavell not metaphysics but concrete gender and sexual arrangements motivate the yearning for the impossible, which characterizes so much of modern western philosophy.[2]For the importance of this yearning for the impossible for the continental tradition in general and for Derrida in particular see: Dooley, Mark, and Liam Kavanagh. <em>The Philosophy of Derrida, Continental European Philosophy</em>. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2007; as well as Vries, Hent de. <em>Philosophy and the Turn to Religion</em>. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. To this end I will discuss in some detail Cavell's analysis of what kind of understanding of speech and knowledge fuels skepticism as the opening gambit of modern philosophy. This discussion will make clear that for him the skeptical worry is motivated not by the structures of language as such, but by a specific form of structuring knowledge and desire. Turning to Cavell's work on film and opera will allow us secondly to identify these forms of knowledge and desire as specifically gendered. The analysis of Hollywood comedies and melodrama will finally make it possible to examine the violent consequences of this kind of knowledge and desire for women and to characterize their powers for overcoming it.
Skepticism and Language: From Rules to Masculine Desire
Doubting without Context
3 In Cavell's analysis, modern philosophy is haunted by a form of skepticism that is characterized by a deep dissatisfaction with our ordinary claims to knowledge, and he raises the question of whence this particular dissatisfaction? Why should we need to defend our ability to answer in specific contexts the doubting question "how do you know" or why should consider ordinary and contextual knowledge to be unsatisfactory?
4 According to Cavell, the skeptical quest for knowledge results from a removal from the concrete circumstances of our practices of knowing or doubting whether something is the case. The skeptic desires epistemic certainty in-and-of-itself. Not the status of my claim that "I know that 'this here is a gold finch'" (to which I could answer, don't you see the color of the feathers and the beak) is in question. Rather, the skeptic transfers a question ("how do you know") out of contexts in which it can make sense into one where nothing is claimed and thus nothing can be doubted. Instead of asking "how do you know this or that," the question becomes, "how do you know in principle." Cavell considers this move to be illegitimate. The skeptic may defend it along the following lines: we can surely project the word "know" into new contexts; for example, we can move from "how do I know whether this is a gold-finch" to "how do I know whether this is a Louis XVI chair." Why not extend and generalize the projection to "how do you know whether x" and thus ask whether I can know anything? For Cavell this move however is the point where the skeptics speak as if they were outside the world of concrete contexts, phenomena, and acts of claiming. A consequence of this quest for noumenal knowledge (knowledge an sich) is that the skeptic loses his or her moorings in the phenomenal world. And in so doing the skeptic's doubt loses intelligibility itself. Without the concrete contexts within which we ordinarily asks for clarification of claims to knowledge we cannot know what doubting consists in. Yet a consequence of this radical doubt is that the phenomenal world of concrete interactions itself, the life-world of the skeptic, becomes condensed into an abstract x, and is imagined to be situated in opposition to the skeptic. Thus, Cavell writes that the skeptic deals with the world as if it were like a giant "tomato" or the dark side of the moon (Cavell, Claim 237, 202). The world in its totality becomes objectified.
5 In this imagination the skeptic expresses simultaneously a vision of penetrating potency and of isolated impotence: The skeptic seems to imagine the world as a suitable object of intellectual desire, something readily available for his epistemic grasp, all the while he envisions the knowing subject as one who is (ideally) mastering its object. In this master-vision of the subject, the epistemic ideal has to be total epistemic access and access to totality. I have to know all of the object under all circumstances. Yet, at the same time, the epistemic subject is construed as being impotent vis-á-vis the world, because the knowing subject's position is eternally fixed as one of separation. I am isolated from the world. The same distance that makes possible the vision of mastering the totality of the world, engenders the fearful suspicion that the object of intellectual desire is perpetually removed from my grasp. The skeptic gazes longingly at the world with a desire for total epistemic control, and he experiences himself as being "sealed off from the world" (Claim 144).