ABSTRACT
This is a book about the philosophy of Stanley Cavell; the role gender plays in his work; and the significance of a renewed religious imagination for the task of overcoming the life of skepticism.1 By addressing the issues of skepticism, gender,
and religion, and by doing so in the context of Cavell’s work, the following pages inevitably provoke the issue of what are the outlines and characteristics of philosophy. Cavell’s work raises this question again and again; with its halting and excruciatingly complex sentences; its turn to literature, opera, film, and lately dance; and with the celebration of the ‘feminine’ voice as therapy for the skeptical worry. How can this be philosophy? 2 Or, in contrast, how could philosophy be itself without these turns? And, finally, where could we find thinking – in Cavell’s emersonian understanding – if not on the borders of modern philosophy – including its border to religious imagination? These fundamental questions arise for Cavell out of a meticulous reading of Wittgenstein and Austin in his own analysis of modern skepticism. Likewise, the questions of gender and religion, which – as I will argue – Cavell’s work provokes, are intrinsically linked to his understanding of language and of our roles as speakers. Before we begin however tracing the Cavellian vision of language with a discussion of Wittgensteinian and Austinian criteria in this chapter, let me describe the somewhat broader philosophical context in which I read Cavell’s work.
