Here and There: Sites of Philosophy

337 Pages·2022·2.289 MB·English

by  Stanley Cavell, Nancy Bauer (editor), Alice Crary (editor), Sandra Laugier (editor)

Here and There

H ere and There
sites of philosophy
Stanley Cavell
Edited by Nancy Bauer, Alice Crary, and Sandra Laugier
Harvard University Press
cambridge, mas sa chu setts
london, england
2022
Copyright © 2022 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
First printing
Jacket design: Monograph / Matt Avery
Jacket photograph: © Charles Bernstein
9780674276420 (EPUB)
9780674276437 (PDF)
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Cavell, Stanley, 1926–2018, author. | Bauer, Nancy, 1960– editor. |
Crary, Alice, 1967– editor. | Laugier, Sandra, editor.
Title: Here and there : sites of philosophy / Stanley Cavell ;
edited by Nancy Bauer, Alice Crary, and Sandra Laugier.
Description: Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts : Harvard University Press, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021044220 | ISBN 9780674270480 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, Modern. | Criticism (Philosophy) |
Psychoanalysis and philosophy.
Classification: LCC B945 .C271 2022 | DDC 170— dc23/eng/20211008
LC rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2021044220
Contents
Editors’ Introduction 1
Prologue: A Site for Philosophy? 14
part i. departures
1. Time after Time 21
2. The World as Things: Collecting Thoughts
on Collecting 33
3. The Division of Talent 72
4. To Place Wittgenstein 93
5. Notes after Austin 101
part ii. assignments
6. Silences Noises Voices 111
7. Benjamin and Wittgenstein: Signals and Affinities 120
8. Remains to Be Seen: Initial Responses
to The Arcades Proj ect 132
9. Finding Words: Adam Phillips’s Ordinary
Language Psychoanalysis 138
10. Welcoming Jean Laplanche 153
vi | Contents
11. On a Psychoanalytical Response
to Faulkner’s Form 158
12. Notes Mostly about Empathy 164
13. Comments on Veena Das, “Language and Body” 181
14. Foreword to Veena Das, Life and Words 187
15. Foreword to Northrop Frye, A Natu ral Perspective 193
16. In the Meantime 201
17. Who Disappoints Whom? Allan Bloom at Harvard 210
18. Preface to the Italian Edition of The Claim of Reason 215
19. Reflections on Wallace Stevens at Mount Holyoke 223
20. Foreword to Qu’est-ce que la philosophie américaine? 241
part iii. music
21. An Understanding with Music 247
22. Kivy on Idomeneo 255
23. Philosophy and the Unheard 260
24. Impressions of Revolution 269
25. A Scale of Eternity 279
Epilogue: Bon Voyage 287
appendix: draft preface to here and there 291
notes 293
editors’ acknowl edgments 309
index 311
Here and There

Editors’ Introduction
There is the audience of philosophy; but there also, while it lasts, is its
per for mance.
— stanley cavell, foreword to Must We Mean What We Say?
On January 20, 2001, the American phi los o pher Stanley Cavell drafted a preface
to a book he was planning to call Here and There: Sites of Philosophy. The book
was to consist of unpublished lectures and essays of his reaching back over
more than a de cade.1 In his draft preface, Cavell wrote:
Gathered in this place from h ere and there are the pieces of work, con­
centrated within recent years but in a few cases g oing back to the
1980s, that I find worth rescuing e ither from oblivion or from the eva­
nescence or specialization of their original locations of publication. . . .
The idea of a here with a there as sites of philosophy, namely as
suggesting mea sures of distance between dif er ent philosophical
proj ects, but as a sense or meas ure of the task within each proje ct,
became explicit in a comparatively recent essay of mine on the
aesthetics of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, where the or­
dinary in which we exist and from which we philosophize, and the
fervor of aspiration with and toward which we philosophize, are pic­
tured as near and far shores between which the river of philosophy
has to take and modify its way. It is the peculiarity of this river that it
is incessantly tempted to deny the necessity of one or other of its
shores.2
Within this brief text, Cavell gives the titular phrase “h ere and there” a par­
tic u lar inflection. For him, philosophical reflection is a drive of all human