Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory - Rilegato

Cavell, Stanley

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 080477014X ISBN 13: 9780804770149

Casa editrice: Stanford Univ Pr, 2010

Riassunto

An autobiography in the form of a philosophical diary, Little Did I Know's underlying motive is to describe the events of a life that produced the kind of writing associated with Stanley Cavell's name. Cavell recounts his journey from early childhood in Atlanta, Georgia, through musical studies at UC Berkeley and Julliard, his subsequent veering off into philosophy at UCLA, his Ph.D. studies at Harvard, and his half century of teaching. Influential people from various fields figure prominently or in passing over the course of this memoir. J.L. Austin, Ernest Bloch, Roger Sessions, Thomas Kuhn, Robert Lowell, Rogers Albritton, Seymour Shifrin, John Rawls, Bernard Williams, W. V. O. Quine, and Jacques Derrida are no longer with us; but Cavell also pays homage to the living: Michael Fried, John Harbison, Rose Mary Harbison, Kurt Fischer, Milton Babbitt, Thompson Clarke, John Hollander, Hilary Putnam, Sandra Laugier, Belle Randall, and Terrence Malick. The drift of his narrative also registers the decisiveness of the relatively unknown and the purely accidental. Cavell's life has produced a trail of some eighteen published books that range from treatments of individual writers like Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, Thoreau, Heidegger, Shakespeare, and Beckett to studies in aesthetics, epistemology, moral and political philosophy, cinema, opera, and religion.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Stanley Cavell is Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Emeritus, at Harvard University.

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LITTLE DID I KNOW

Excerpts from MemoryBy Stanley Cavell

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7014-9

Contents

Part 1 (July 2 through July 17, 2003).............................1Part 2 (July 20 through July 28, 2003)............................54Part 3 (July 29 through August 15, 2003)..........................96Part 4 (August 16 through September 3, 2003)......................146Part 5 (September 4 through December 8, 2003).....................177Part 6 (April 8 through April 16, 2004)...........................206Part 7 (April 17 through April 25, 2004)..........................239Part 9 (May 25 through June 3, 2004)..............................333Part 10 (June 4 through June 15, 2004)............................382Part 11 (June 16 through June 25, 2004)...........................421Part 12 (June 26 through August 1, 2004)..........................459Part 13 (August 9 through August 18, 2004)........................488Part 14 (August 19 through September 1, 2004).....................518Index of Names....................................................549Acknowledgments...................................................558

Chapter One

Part 1

July 2, 2003

The catheterization of my heart will no longer be postponed. My cardiologist announces that he has lost confidence in his understanding of my condition so far based on reports of what I surmise as symptoms of angina and of the noninvasive monitoring allowed by X-rays and by the angiograms produced in stress tests. We must actually look at what is going on inside the heart.

Even if I had not eight years ago officially retired from teaching, summer months for teachers are not ones in which routine obligations can serve to shape the days in which life is suspended until the hospital date for the procedure is settled and the time comes to pack a bag for an overnight stay. Apart from learning of the risks in the procedure's actual performance, there are the frightening statistics (frightening even when reasonably favorable) that doctors are obliged to convey to you, not alone of problems incurred in or by the procedure itself, but those of its possible outcomes. In the instance of catheterization the possible outcomes are mainly three: one, that no further surgical intervention is necessary, so that either a change of diagnosis or of medication is in order; two, that instruments roughly of the sort involved in catheterization can be (re)inserted to open and to repair where necessary arterial blockage; three, that the blockage is severe enough, or located in such a way, that bypass surgery is required. (The possibility that nothing can be done was not voiced.) In a previous such period of awaiting surgery, a dozen years ago, I controlled or harnessed my anxiety by reading. I had found that I resisted the efforts of a novel to attract me from my world; I needed the absorption of labor rather than that of narrative. I discovered that reading a book by Vladimir Jankelevitch on the music of Debussy that I had discovered in Paris and brought back a few months earlier, meaning to read it at once (I was planning a set of three lectures, in the last of which the Debussy-Maeterlinck Pellas and Mlisande would play a pivotal role), effectively concentrated my attention, partly because of the beauty of the musical illustrations along with the very effort it required for my rusty musicianship to imagine the sounds of the illustrations unfamiliar to me that Jankelevitch includes in his text, partly because of the specificity and fascination of his words, and partly also because I was kept busy consulting a French dictionary for the evidently endless words in French that name, for example, the effects of sunlight and of clouds on moving water.

This time I am not inclined to house my anxiety as a secondary gain of reading, but rather by a departure in my writing, to begin learning whether I can write my way into and through the anxiety by telling the story of my life. (Or is it the other way around-that I am using the mortal threat of the procedure, and of what it may reveal, to justify my right to tell my story, in the way in which I wish to tell it? What could this mean-my story is surely mine to tell or not to tell according to my desire? But of course the story is not mine alone but eventually includes the lives of all who have been incorporated in mine.) I have formed such an intention many times in recent years, and there have been autobiographical moments in my writing from the beginning of the first essays I still use, and from the time of the book I called A Pitch of Philosophy I have sought explicitly to consider why philosophy, of a certain ambition, tends perpetually to intersect the autobiographical.

But I have until now been unwilling, or uninterested, to tell a story that begins with my birth on the south side of Atlanta, Georgia-where most of the Jews in the city lived who derived from the Eastern European migrations at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century (I believe I never learned where the German Jewish immigrants assumed the aristocrats of the Jewish population had recollected themselves in Atlanta, having brought with them to these shores on the whole some wealth and more in the way of secular educations than their Eastern European counterparts and, critically, having arrived in America and apparently made themselves at home a couple of generations earlier)-three years before the stock market crash that began the Great Depression; the only child of a mother who was next to the oldest of six children, all but one of them musicians, two of them professional, and of a father, a decade older than my mother, among the youngest of seven children, so that when I was born my father's oldest sibling was over fifty years old and that sibling's second-oldest child was the same age as my mother. The artistic temperament of my mother's family, the Segals, left them on the whole, with the exception of my mother and her baby brother, Mendel, doubtfully suited to an orderly, successful existence in the new world; the orthodox, religious sensibility of my father's family, the Goldsteins, produced a second generation-some twenty-two first cousins of mine-whose solidarity and severity of expectation produced successful dentists, lawyers, and doctors, pillars of the Jewish community, and almost without exception attaining local, some of them national, some even a certain international, prominence. The house I lived in for my first seven years was also home, in addition to my mother and father, to my mother's invalid mother, and to two of my mother's brothers. When my minimal family of three moved away to the north side of the city, a feeling of bereftness and bewilderment came over me that lasted for the better, or the worst, part of the ensuing ten years, which involved moving between Atlanta and Sacramento, California, a total of five times across the country, as my father's efforts to maintain small shops, starting with jewelry stores, successively failed. We were in California at the last of those transcontinental train rides (the first, in 1935, when I was nine years old, whose memory dwarfs the later ones, took what was described as four days and three nights, on seats covered in green velour that did not recline, stretching out [as it were] on which to sleep at night meant looking up through my window toward a sky where the moon would repeatedly and unpredictably vanish and reappear; soon realizing that the effect was due to the train's [that is, to my] trajectory did not negate its magic) when in January 1943 I graduated high school and a year later entered the University of California at Berkeley, where studying music and writing music for the student theater and the companionship of fellow students and teachers devoted to the life of the mind and of the arts, even if sometimes incoherently, showed me possibilities I seemed always to have known existed but had not had continuously attested for me since the days of music at that first house in Atlanta. By the end of college I had come to realize that music was not my life. How that crisis eventually produced the conviction that a life of study and writing growing out of philosophy was for me to discover, and how that was affected by being rejected for military service in the Second World War because of an ear damaged when at age six I was struck by an automobile (a trauma inextricable from the trauma of leaving music), and how that rejection was an essential element in my motivation to spend two weeks of the Freedom Summer of 1964 lecturing at Tougaloo College, a black school outside Jackson, Mississippi, and why I changed my name in the months before I left for Berkeley, having just turned seventeen years old, and what it meant to me finally to leave teaching at Berkeley to teach at Harvard, and to have encountered the work and presence of such figures as Ernest Bloch and J. L. Austin, and to have known deeply gifted friends, some renowned, and eminent colleagues who modified my life, and to have worked over decades on doctoral dissertations with students of the most superb promise, some about to be, or who deserve to be, famous, others still struggling to write as well as they think and as they imagine, and from the beginning of my professional life having lived with children whose inescapable, if not always convenient, expectations of me were an essential protection of me against less loving expectations that might have destroyed my hopes, are registers of the rest of the story.

Such a narrative strikes me as leading fairly directly to death, without clearly enough implying the singularity of this life, in distinction from the singularity of all others, all headed in that direction. So the sound of such a narrative would I believe amount to too little help, to me or others. What interests me is to see how what Freud calls the detours on the human path to death-accidents avoided or embraced, strangers taken to heart or neglected, talents imposed or transfigured, malice insufficiently rebuked, love inadequately acknowledged-mark out for me recognizable efforts to achieve my own death. That, then, is what I have wanted authorization to speak of, which includes the right to assume that something has been achieved on the paths I have taken, obscure to me as that achievement, as I begin this story, may be.

I seem now to glimpse a possible cause of my impulse in invoking so early in the story the work of Jankelevitch. It was not alone because he is one of the rare figures for whom writing about music has been a significant part of a significant philosophical body of work, but because of learning that with the ascendancy of Hitler, Jankelevitch forswore forever reading and mentioning German philosophy and listening to German music. My recurrent, never really avid, interest in this experiment has been not so much in fathoming its hatred but in trying to imagine the practice of the renunciation. It might seem like imagining Faulkner's three-legged racehorse. (The effort occasionally reminded me of times, surely familiar to others, in my childhood when, safely indoors, I would see how long I could keep my eyes closed and move through familiar rooms, perhaps change my shirt or my socks, or find and eat a piece of bread, in order to imagine what it would be like to be blind.) And surely an interest lingers in attempting to grasp why for so long philosophy seemed to be taught to me as a process of renunciation, and lingers past that in the thought that to refuse some balance between forgetting and remembering the suffering of injustice, the monstrousness of tyranny, is to court monstrousness.

July 4, 2003

Trying to fall asleep last night I realized that if I had wished to construct an autobiography in which to disperse the bulk of the terrible things I know about myself, and the shameful things I have seen in others, I would have tried writing novels in which to disguise them.-But how about a philosopher's or writer's autobiography, which, like Wordsworth's Prelude (quality aside), tells the writer's story of the life out of which he came to be a (his kind of) writer?-But Wordsworth showed that that story had to be told in poetry-or rather showed that the telling of that story was the making of poetry (Emerson calls something of the sort a meter-making argument), keeping the promise of poetry. To do something analogous to that work I would have to show that telling the accidental, anonymous, in a sense posthumous, days of my life is the making of philosophy, however minor or marginal or impure, which means to show that those days can be written, in some sense are called to be written, philosophically. Something this means is that, like poetry, philosophy as I care about it most, exists only in its acceptance, in taking it out of the writer's hands, becoming translated one can say, finding a further life. Acceptance does not mean that it is agreed with, only that disagreement with it must claim for itself the standing of philosophy.

I might say that I am halfway there already, since Wittgenstein, more to my mind than any other philosopher of the century just past, has shown that, or shown how it happens that, a certain strain of philosophy inescapably takes on autobiography, or perhaps I should say an abstraction of autobiography, and this is how I have understood Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and J. L. Austin's procedures, in their appeals to the language of everyday, or ordinary language, namely, that I speak philosophically for others when they recognize what I say as what they would say, recognize that their language is mine, or put otherwise, that language is ours, that we are speakers. Here is why Wittgenstein emphasizes-something habitually thought false on the face of it-that he does not advance theses in philosophy. What he says is obvious (come to think about it) or it is useless. (Then what is its use?) As in Emerson, and in Thoreau, this turns out to mean that the philosopher entrusts himself or herself to write, however limitedly, the autobiography of a species; if not of humanity as a whole, then representative of anyone who finds himself or herself in it. Philosophy for such spirits is written, as Nietzsche put the matter in the subtitle of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "for everyone and no one." (Nietzsche would, I surmise, have picked that up from Emerson's sense of speaking to "all and sundry," or failing to.)

A trouble with this idea from the beginning is not that it is pretentious. It is a specific attitude one takes to what happens to the soul, no more pretentious than sitting on a horse, or sitting at the piano, properly, although there might be reasons for modifying or contesting propriety. A trouble is that I am not sure that those who write out of a sense of a history of oppression would be glad to adopt this posture. I believe that certain women I know who write philosophically would not at all be glad to adopt this posture, or feel spoken for by one who does. Nor do I know that men or women who sense philosophical roots beyond American culture will be moved to test my representativeness. So I might say that testing it is all I am doing. As a Jew I am bound from time to time to wonder in what sense the anti-Semitism punctuating European philosophical thought speaks for me, while I do not know what it would mean for me to claim that I speak for Jews, or essentially for Jews.-Such reflections are not said looking over my shoulder. I mean to be speaking not by assuming cultural identities or purities, but from the posture in which I may discern the identities compacted in my existence, a matter of attaching significance to insignificance, and insignificance to significance.

Freud is our most famous exemplar in this form of discrimination. But Emerson and Thoreau and Nietzsche and Marx and Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are good at it, most of them famously so. Better than Jane Austen or George Eliot or Anna Akhmatova or Willa Cather, or than several women early in my life, not alone my mother, that few beyond their circle of friends have heard of? Who is asking? From what posture? (A note on posture. When my mother would pass by the piano as I was practicing she might say: "You're playing from the fingers. The strength has to come all the way from the thing you're sitting on; and you are slumping.")

But won't these scruples about identity be interfered with by my sense that I am writing as an emissary from another time? What time would that be? If what I have in mind is the time in which I grew up with, and with stories of, immigrants preserving their lives in the stark freedom of America, of persisting fears and of savage ambitions and of forced marriages, and of desperately preserved or rejected or rediscovered observances, how do I know but that what I say will better, more helpfully, be received by a young Cuban poet teaching Spanish in a community center in Buckhead, or a middle-aged Vietnamese high school teacher, with a taste for philosophy, keeping the books for her older brother's restaurant in Allston, than by a native, distracted Harvard sophomore from a broken Jewish home in Fresno for whom, for example, black-and-white films are still, as a group, old movies. Do I need to know?

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Stanford Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2010
• ISBN 10: 080477014X
• ISBN 13: 9780804770149
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 557
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile