Becoming Who We Are: Politics and Practical Philosophy in the Work of Stanley Cavell

ISBN-13: 9780190673949 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 328 str.

Andrew Norris

Opis

While much literature exists on the work of Stanley Cavell, this is the first monograph on his contribution to politics and practical philosophy. As Andrew Norris demonstrates, though skepticism is Cavell's central topic, Cavell understands it not as an epistemological problem or position, but as an existential one. The central question is not what we know or fail to know, but to what extent we have made our lives our own, or failed to do so. Accordingly, Cavell's reception of Austin and Wittgenstein highlights, as other readings of these figures do not, the uncanny nature of the ordinary, the extent to which we ordinarily fail to mean what we say and be who we are. Becoming Who We Are charts Cavell's debts to Heidegger and Thompson Clarke, even as it allows for a deeper appreciation of the extent to which Cavell's Emersonian Perfectionism is a rewriting of Rousseau's and Kant's theories of autonomy. This in turn opens up a way of understanding citizenship and political discourse that develops points made more elliptically in the work of Hannah Arendt, and that contrasts in important ways with the positions of liberal thinkers like John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas on the one hand, and radical democrats like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe on the other.

Recenzje

Andrew Norris is an ideal reader of Cavell—a philosopher for whom reading texts, art, and people, and being read, in turn, by them are central concerns. Cavell's philosophy aims to recover the human voice, most especially one's own voice, from its "skeptical" denial in traditional skepticism and constructive metaphysics. Norris's originality lies in his sense of the intimacy of the connection between self-denial and self-recovery and in being alert to the ethical and political implications of the idea that Cavell traces in the writings of Wittgenstein, Emerson and Thoreau, namely, that in order to find ourselves we must first lose ourselves.

O autorze

Andrew Norris teaches political philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the editor of Truth and Democracy (University of Pennsylvania, 2012), The Claim to Community: Essays on Stanley Cavell and Political Philosophy (Stanford, 2006), and Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer (Duke, 2005), and the author of over thirty peer-reviewed articles on authors such as Wittgenstein, Hegel, Hannah Arendt, and Michael Oakeshott.