Abstract

This article focuses on pastness in the work of Stanley Cavell. For Cavell the past is only real to the extent that it reveals itself in our present, and the only proper way to attend to the historical past is to absorb it in an orphic mode, with our back turned, without looking. The sustained attention to the present is the best and the only archaeology of the past: "the time is always now." Absorption of the past in the present is here opposed to the attitude of spectatorship with respect to the past. But is absorption without loss possible? Already in 1980, Michael Fried had to concede that "there can be no such thing as an absolutely anti-theatrical work of art." This remark can be taken to apply to historiography, too. Is an absolutely anti-theatrical approach to the past possible (i.e., one in which the past would be absorbed without loss, but also without facing it directly)? To what extent should the proposed absorption of the past in the ordinary language philosophy be seen as an evacuation?

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