ABSTRACT
This chapter supplements the ‘Snubs’ chapter in On the Beginning of Social Inquiry (OBSI) by pursuing a similar episode, documented by LeBaron and Jones (2002), where a snub does not happen and, instead, a chance encounter leads to a reunion between former acquaintances. Unsurprisingly, the question of each party’s standing toward the other does not have a simple answer in the reunion. How they stand in relation toward one another brings with it the remembering and reconsideration of their former relationship and their former characters. The reunion, at a hairdressers’ salon, with third parties witnessing it, calls upon each party’s senses of discretion over what of their or the other’s intimate details they will reveal. Finally, the chapter underlines the ambiguity of the reunion as an event where each party is caught between proximity and distance, between acknowledging or avoiding the other.
failure to have singled you out appropriately in passionate utterance characteristically puts the future of our relationship, as part of my sense of my identity, or of my existence, more radically at stake. One can say: The ‘you’ singled out comes into play in relation to the declaration of the ‘I’ who thereby takes upon itself a definition of itself, in, as it may prove, a casual or a fateful form. A performative utterance is an offer of participation in the order of law. And perhaps we can say: A passionate utterance is an invitation to improvisation in the disorders of desire.
(Cavell, 2005: 194)