Time is a Trickster and Other Fleeting Thoughts on Cavell, his Life, his Work

In what words might I speak of my delight and my gratitude for the life and work of Stanley Cavell? Beyond the attraction certain regions of philosophy hold for anthropology, I might ask what is it in this philosopher that invites me to his world? The publication of Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory is first and foremost (for me at any rate), an affirmation of the question Cavell once asked: Does the biblical injunction, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” (Exodus 20:16), include the injunction that you shall not bear false witness to yourself? The resonance of this idea with the words he recorded on July 4^th 2003 is worth noting.

Trying to fall asleep last night I realized that if I had wished to construct an autobiography in which to disperse the bulk of the terrible things I know about myself, and the shameful things I have seen in others, I would have tried writing novels in which to disguise them. . . . (Conversely) to do something analogous to that work (of Wordsworth) I would have to show that telling the accidental, anonymous, in a sense posthumous, days of my life is the making of philosophy, however minor marginal or impure, which means to show those days can be written, in some sense are called to be written, philosophically.

(Little 5–6)

In the discourse on the Bhagvad Gita, the first sentence that provides a frame is written in the past tense (Sanjay said)—yet, our experience of what follows is that of a war being remembered now. Some such image of time is in play here—or at least it is playing with time that allows Cavell to engage in autobiographical writing at all.¹

In my case the experiment of calling upon a steady companionship of philosophy in telling my life involved a decision, or it was coming accidentally upon a simple thought, to begin entries of memories by dating myself on each day of writing (not however on consciously doubling back for the purposes of editing or elaborating an entry), allowing me to follow a double time scheme, so that I can accept an invitation in any present from or to any past, as memory serves and demands to be served, that seemed to have freed me to press onward with my necessity to find an account of myself without denying that I may be at a loss as to who it is that at any time speaks, varying no doubt with varying times, or for whom I am writing. What is thus further left explicitly open is precisely what counts as the time of philosophy.

(Little 9)

Not only the autobiographical form as a mode of doing philosophy toward which he has always felt an affinity, but also the texture of the rough ground in the book seems to show that the temptation to bear false witness to oneself can only be countered by a certain descent into the everyday. Reading his text from front to back, back to front, I am also stuck by the fact that as in the case of texts we learn to inherit, so in moments of leave taking, we want to write in a way that we can leave things alright for ourselves, for others. In reading his works I set myself the task of reading by taking Cavell’s own words to heart, “. . . it is not for the text to answer the questions you put to it, but for you to respond to the questions you discover it asks (of itself, of you)” (“Finding” 248).

For an anthropologist with no obvious claims to philosophy, Cavell’s work makes me welcome, almost in advance of any specific discoveries I might make of it because of the picture of knowledge it contains. First there is a turning to the humble use of words—a realization that the gift of philosophy is a gift from the ordinary. Even the problem of skepticism that haunts the scene of Western philosophy is, for him, part of the story of...