Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology

295 Pages·2010·3.496 MB·English

by  Peter Dula

Cavell, Companionship, and
Christian Theology
REFLECTION AND THEORY IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION SERIES
Series Editor
Theodore M. Vial, Jr., Iliff School of Theology
A Publication Series of
The American Academy of Religion
and
Oxford University Press
LESSING’S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION AND THE GERMAN ENLIGHTENMENT
Toshimasa Yasukata
AMERICAN PRAGMATISM
A Religious Genealogy
M. Gail Hamner
OPTING FOR THE MARGINS
Postmodernity and Liberation in Christian Theology
Edited by Joerg Rieger
MAKING MAGIC
Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World
Randall Styers
THE METAPHYSICS OF DANTE’s COMEDY
Christian Moevs
PILGRIMAGE OF LOVE
Moltmann on the Trinity and Christian Life
Joy Ann McDougall
MORAL CREATIVITY
Paul Ricoeur and the Poetics of Moral Life
John Wall
MELANCHOLIC FREEDOM
Agency and the Spirit of Politics
David Kyuman Kim
FEMINIST THEOLOGY AND THE CHALLENGE OF DIFFERENCE
Margaret D. Kamitsuka
PLATO’s GHOST
Spiritualism in the American Renaissance
Cathy Gutierrez
TOWARD A GENEROUS ORTHODOXY
Prospects for Hans Frei’s Postliberal Theology
Jason A. Springs
CAVELL, COMPANIONSHIP, AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY
Peter Dula
Cavell, Companionship,
and Christian Theology

PETER DULA
1
2011
1

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dula, Peter, 1970–
Cavell, companionship, and Christian theology / Peter Dula.
p. cm.—(Refl ection and theory in the study of religion series)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
ISBN 978–0–19–539503–7
1. Cavell, Stanley, 1926– 2. Philosophy and religion.
3. Church. I. Title.
B945.C274D86 2010
191—dc22 2010000842
The lines from “Transcendental Etude,” Poem VII of “Twenty-One Love Poems,” from The Dream
of Common Language: Poems of 1974–1977, by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1978 by W. W. Norton &
Company, Inc. Used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness. . . . I am
equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant
to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is
mine . . . . Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. . . . Let it be
an alliance of two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared,
before yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath these disparities
unites them. . . . Guard him as thy counterpart. Let him be to thee for ever a
sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conve-
niency to be soon outgrown and cast aside.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Friendship”
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Contents
The Ordinary: An Introduction to Stanley Cavell, 3
Part I
1. Companionship and Community in Cavell and MacIntyre, 33
2. Scenes of Instruction in Cavell and Liberalism, 57
3. Private Languages in Cavell and Sebald, 75
4. Fugitive Ecclesia, 95
Part II
5. The Claim of Reason ’s Apophatic Anthropology, 117
6. “Can We Believe All This?”: Cavell’s Annexation of Theology, 155
7. Evidence of Habitation, 179
8. Truly Human, 209
Conclusion, 223
Notes, 231
Bibliography, 267
Index, 275
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Preface
Theology has always been in conversation with philosophy. Those
conversations can be amicable, antagonistic, illuminating,
uncomprehending. In the English-speaking world in recent decades,
those conversations have been wide ranging. But few theologians
have taken up the work of the man Richard Rorty referred to as “the
least defended, the gutsiest, the most vulnerable” of American
philosophers—Stanley Cavell.1
As the analytic tradition came under increasing pressure in the
late twentieth century, its mid-century orthodoxies increasingly worn,
those challenging it or those on its fringes became important
resources. Theologians, in particular, welcomed neo-Aristotelianism,
pragmatism, and poststructuralism. But somehow Cavell got missed,
allowed to fall through the cracks between, say, Dewey and Derrida.
Cavell’s relative obscurity in philosophy departments is perhaps not
surprising. Cavell wrote books on Emerson and Thoreau, a book on
Shakespeare, and three books on fi lm and, to the annoyance of many
colleagues, called them all philosophy. His repeated gestures toward
theology didn’t help him in many philosophical circles, but they do
make the theologians’ lack of interest all the more disturbing. Like a
few of the French postmodernists, and unlike the Anglo-American
analytical philosophers, Cavell cannot let go of the issue of faith.
He once told an interviewer, “To choose between Judaism and
Christianity is, I suppose, still a live issue for me.”2 Cavell is fascinated