The Fragility of Words, the Vulnerability of Life

Not long ago I was asked to participate in an issue of Contemporary Political Theory debating the relevance of Stanley Cavell’s philosophy for contemporary politics. The contributors were invited to write short essays and offered the possibility of responding to one another. To my surprise, most commentators, including sympathetic readers of Cavell such as Christopher Norris and Cary Wolfe, came to the conclusion that his emphasis on individual responsibility, the fragility of agreements and understanding in human conversation, the crucial role of hope and despair as political emotions, in sum Cavell’s version of moral perfectionism and forms of life, was of little significance for politics, at least in its present configuration. I cannot do justice in this context to the different arguments proposed, but they all had in common the idea that the field of politics largely exceeds human agency and that Cavell remains too much of a “humanist” to understand and address its complexities and difficulties. At the time I was not convinced by this line of criticism, nor am I at the moment, but something kept nagging at me, a certain sense of uncertainty I couldn’t quite spell out, and when I started thinking about from what perspective to engage with the topic of this symposium dedicated to the Practices of the Ordinary, it seemed an appropriate occasion to return to Cavell’s notion of human forms of life and try to better express how and why it still speaks, in my view, to the present while simultaneously addressing my own sense of uncertainty.

Such uncertainty is not limited to the matter of assessing one singular author’s relevance, but has to do more broadly with how to situate oneself in the present, how to respond to a certain sense of disorientation in the present that is after all an important theme in many philosophical approaches to the ordinary. I do not presume to know what “our present” is actually about: Foucault was right in emphasizing that the task of understanding the present is as important as it is daunting. There are however some aspects of the contemporary social landscape that stand out and contribute to create a widespread sense of uneasiness and anxiety.¹ There is the economic insecurity in the face of the staggering rise of inequality, precarious working conditions, decline of the middle class, mass unemployment or underemployment, the fragility of the welfare state, the specter of financial collapse of entire nations, and so on. It is no wonder that Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century has become an instant international best seller in spite of its considerable length and rather scholarly nature. There are anxieties about war and peace in a geo-politically fragmented world that may seem increasingly difficult to read while the rise of new and old forms of racism and anti-Semitism, terrorist threats, refugee crises, and the list could go on, reveal that “global” problems have a very real impact “at home,” no matter how many walls some may dream to build. There is the distrust of institutions, perceived as remote, powerless, corrupt, or all of the above. There is, perhaps most importantly, the awareness that the ecological crisis is no longer an abstract threat for the distant future but a present menace no one is really equipped to counter. And the same holds true, it seems to me, for all the problems I have mentioned in a list that is certainly not exhaustive: what is most disturbing and anxiety-provoking is perhaps the sense that we are not a match, either individually or collectively, for the challenges we face, that we are, in fact, powerless.

At the same time, when it comes to academic and intellectual debates, most of the recent developments in the humanities and social sciences have taken a decisive turn away from–-If not against–the human.² I am thinking here of animal studies–where some voices in light of the many similarities between human and non-human animals call into question the value of the very concept of the human; but also of new forms...