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  • Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory
  • Christopher D. Johnson
Stanley Cavell . Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Print. 584 pp.

Contemplating the "silence or dismay" that greeted his first book, Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), and "being told that what I was publishing was inherently private, even secret," Stanley Cavell in this luminous, moving autobiography recalls a remark he tentatively attributes to Gertrude Stein: "I write for friends and strangers" (444). But Stein, in The Making of Americans, actually writes: "I am writing for myself and strangers" (289). That Cavell slightly misremembers is telling, since the task he sets himself here, which he has dedicated a lifetime of writing and teaching to accomplishing, is to describe the "perpetually contested relation of public and private" (203), whether this occurs in philosophy, literature, or film. Cavell writes for "friends" who share or at least understand his conviction that thinking must respond to how people ordinarily use language to describe themselves, their relations, and their world. But in these unstintingly generous, eloquent pages, he invites "strangers," too, to consider how his experience of growing up, finding a vocation, and, now, growing older might afford some moral knowledge if not also aesthetic delight.

The epistemological modesty of Cavell's title points to a recurrent, perhaps even the central theme of this autobiography: the difficulty of staking a claim, of being what Emerson calls a representative man. Toward the end of these Excerpts, Cavell writes: "The claim to represent philosophy is unverifiable not because one lacks knowledge, but because in philosophizing one must not claim to know what others do not know or cannot know by bethinking themselves" (500). More concretely, the crux of these many pages is the saying why and how Cavell was finally able to find his philosophical voice in The Claim of Reason (1979), especially in its fourth part, where he decisively breaks with the expectations of professional philosophy as it was then practiced in this country, where, in short, he finds his characteristic way of reconciling the claims that philosophy and literature (or any aesthetic activity) have made on him since adolescence.

That Cavell casts this tale of "academic nomadism" in the light of the "picaresque" (342) speaks to his impatience with disciplinary boundaries, to his scorn for what Aby Warburg dubbed the "Grenzwächertum" (border surveillance) of those who would police such artificial divisions. But this surprising gesture also raises the question, central to the form and substance of his memoir, of the style one adopts to think and write, a style that, as he observes, has confounded some readers even as it has instructed others to think anew questions that have long troubled philosophy. Thus Cavell's penultimate chapter rehearses charges that his writing is marred by "eccentricities" (504) and "intractable oddness" (517) not so much to argue with critics, but rather to affirm that his writing responds to his "perception" of the many contours which philosophical skepticism assumes: ". . . I can see that my incessant perception, or imagination of the claim for acknowledgment comes from a [End Page 1147] perception of a world bent on denial, interest in the world withdrawn to the point of chronic boredom, lost in lovelessness" (514). Put another way, the Emersonian balance Cavell pursues in his essays on Shakespearean tragedy, Disowning Knowledge, between "intuition" and "tuition" (4), the former rooted in experience as much as philosophical reflection, the latter coincident with teaching and writing, helps him acknowledge the tragedy of skepticism and find ways to lessen its baleful effects.

Autobiography has long been such a way for Cavell. In the 1994 essay, "Philosophy and Arrogation of the Voice," he commented on the "massive, insistent arrogance" of "philosophical autobiographies" such as Thoreau's Walden and Nietzsche's Ecce Homo and wondered what "claiming his inheritance" (39) of these and other voices might mean. Little Did I Know further endeavors to understand this "inheritance." But other voices here means initially those of his family: that of his mother, who, with her musical talent and silent suffering, strikes the deepest, warmest chord in these memoirs; his father's, which tells superb Yiddish stories, but cannot...

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