Stanley Cavell on St. Paul

You may battle against the Christian’s self-understanding from within, as Kierkegaard declares, or from beyond Christianity, as Nietzsche declares. In both cases you are embattled because you find the words of the Christian to be the right words.

(Cavell, The Claim 352)

It has been a good day, a good Friday. As we were planning this symposium, I recalled that it just so happened that its timing would coincide with “Good Friday.” I may not have given this much thought at first—or simply forgot this after we set the date—both of which is telling enough. Why make much of it now? What significance would it have to pause at this date and proper name (“Good Friday”) in the context of a discussion of Stanley Cavell’s work and, more specifically, while we celebrate the publication of its latest fruit, the autobiographical series of meditations—perhaps, spiritual exercises—entitled Little Did I Know: Excerpts From Memory? After all, Good Friday and the central Christian doctrine hardly play a role there, even though they are not fully absent either. Is there a point, then, in asking once more why and how or to what extent religion and, notably, Christianity figure so crucially—if not always prominently and, often, in an all too subterraneous or indirect manner—in much of Cavell’s thinking and writing, the text that we celebrate here, on this Good Friday, not excluded? Last but not least, why do I feel tempted to stress this point of entry rather than so many possible others that would seem equally—perhaps, even more—pertinent and promising in this context (and definitely more in tune with the consensus in the overall reception and interpretation his work has received so far)?

I firmly believe that our relationship to texts and authors, ideas and concepts, arguments and styles of thought is at best tangential, often based on a chance encounter (at times the chance of a life time, yet a chance we may miss to sufficiently register, precisely if we are caught unawares or were ill-prepared). A deeply admired philosopher strikes us at points and not at others; we find points of interest that matter the world to us now and that may well lose their relevance later. And, no doubt, these points may well be realized with a certain delay, after the fact, as it were, not least because great thinkers and teachers are always ahead of us (and, indeed, as a rule, well ahead of themselves as well).

In making “Cavell and St. Paul”—or, for that matter, Cavell and Good Friday, Christianity, Religion—my theme here, am I thus merely repaying an intellectual and moral debt, however inadequately and insufficiently registered and returned, in trying to make serious sense of words (the “right words”) that were once kindly handed to me: words whose very meaning and consequence, although based on a chance encounter (at a Harvard lecture given by Thomas Nagel, on “Last Words,” “Part One,” to be precise) and touching me tangentially, if deeply, started to fully resonate with me in their inimitable Cavellian tonality only many years later, as I finally began studying his works more extensively and at much greater depth?

Cavell’s words—hardly “Christian” per se, but conveying a sense that religion, to begin with the choice between Judaism and Christianity, was “still a live issue” (“Interview” 136) for him as for so many moderns—were expressed in the dubious if generous academic genre of the so-called “blurb,” in this case a book on modern philosophy’s somewhat startling “turn to religion” that I published in 1999. By reiterating a simple set of questions (very much his own, as I like to think), namely, “Where—or where not?—does religion exist in contemporary culture, and in what forms or by what symptoms does its perennial encounter with philosophy now manifest itself?” (136), Cavell here diagnosed these “new/old” queries, asked by so many of his contemporaries, such as Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, upon whom he would not cease (or, in some cases, would eventually come) to comment, as “tracing...