The Triumph of the Gift over the Curse in Stanley Cavell's Little Did I Know

The remarks below were first delivered on the occasion of an event at Harvard University, on October 14^th, 2010, celebrating the publication of Stanley Cavell's autobiographical work, Little Did I Know. Each of the invited speakers was given the following instructions by the organizers of the event: (1) to select a handful of passages from Little Did I Know (perhaps pairing them with related passages from Cavell's earlier work), (2) to make the handful of selected passages available in advance for distribution to the audience of the event, and (3) to confine their remarks on the occasion of the event itself to a meditation on the significance of the selected passages. This text is the result of my attempt to follow these instructions as faithfully as possible.

I will speak about four passages from Cavell's work. (I will refer to my four passages as Quotations #1, #2, #3 and #4 respectively.) The first three of these passages are drawn from Stanley Cavell's last major piece of writing, Little Did I Know—a work which most philosophers of my acquaintance will not hesitate to classify as at best only secondarily a work of philosophy just because it is in the first place so evidently a work of autobiography. The fourth of my passages is drawn from one of Cavell's earliest major pieces of writing, his monograph-length essay The Avoidance of Love—a work which, despite its apparent assumption of the outward form of the philosophical essay, most philosophers of my acquaintance will hesitate to regard as that, not only because of its endless preoccupation with minute questions pertaining to the interpretation of a Shakespeare play, King Lear, but more urgently because of its tendency occasionally (as a number of contemporaneous reviewers saw the matter) to lapse into reflections on the supposed pertinence of these questions to further matters of an evidently autobiographical nature.¹

In the early work, The Avoidance of Love, it is, in the eyes of these professional philosophical acquaintances of mine, the element of the autobiographical which, it is felt, intrudes itself. In the case of this work, the intrusion is into a form of writing which, if better disciplined (at least according to the dictates of such a sensibility), ought to remain firmly within the plane of the properly philosophical. In the last major work, Little Did I Know, it is rather the note of the philosophical which is now felt to be the intrusive element—the element which is now felt to jar and grate. In this case, the intrusion enters from the opposite direction, as it were: with the note of the inappropriately ambitiously philosophical appearing to intrude itself into a form of writing, which, if better disciplined (on this same view of what discipline requires), ought to stick to the apparent business at hand, or at least what starts out appearing to be the business at hand, namely that of supplying the reader with a properly autobiographical account of the author's life and times (beginning with where he was born, moving on to where he grew up, how he was formed by his circumstances, etc.). In the case of both of these works, there is a sense of transgression experienced by these readers of my acquaintance. There is therefore a certain parallel in the reception of this most recent work to that of Cavell's earlier work among such readers: The outbreak of these allegedly inappropriate “interludes” within these texts are chalked up to the author's failures of self-discipline, or, as it is sometimes put, his tendency to self-indulgence.

It ought to be difficult, however, for a less reactive, and hence more charitable, reader to avoid the conclusion that it is just these reactions, among others, which our author self-consciously seeks to elicit—indeed, that, in seeking to reshape his reader's sensibility in the ways in which he does, it is, among other things, the very ground of such reactions which the author seeks to expose and draw into question...