Little Did I Know: Excerpts From Memory (review)
- Little Did I Know: Excerpts From Memory
No philosopher could compose an autobiography without reflecting upon the conditions of its possibility; few would aspire actually to reflect (say, embody) them in its words. Stanley Cavell's memoir presents its individually dated excerpts from memory in strict calendrical order of composition, while the loosely chronological order of the remembered events repeatedly suffers local displacement; so his text foregrounds its composition as a further event in the life it recounts. Since each entry also registers the events immediately attending its composition, it further declares them as conditioning whether and how events are remembered just as much as those events have conditioned the one remembering, each day (in either direction) differently. So this autobiographer's life depicts selfhood as diurnal self-confrontation, as a questioning of one's standing terms of self-assessment that every day commences and concludes—as if every self, each day, finds its own death, or fails to. [End Page 542]
Stephen Mulhall is professor of philosophy at Oxford University and a fellow of New College. His books include The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy; Stanley Cavell: Philosophy's Recounting of the Ordinary; The Conversation of Humanity; Philosophical Myths of the Fall; On Film; and several books on Wittgenstein and Heidegger.
