The book traces the many lines of skepticism occurring in Cavell's work and shows how they amount to a rich and subtle picture of human subjectivity. Hammer explores Cavell's passionate engagement with Austin and Wittgenstein's visions of language, and his uncovering of conceptions of the ordinary in Emerson and Thoreau. Central sections of the book are devoted to the tragic and the comic as these modes of existence come into play in Shakespeare and Hollywood cinematic drama. In elaborating Cavell's responses to thinkers such as Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, the author situates Cavell's writing within the wider context of contemporary continental philosophy.
Hammer clearly reveals the existential dimensions of Cavell's thought. He argues that his variant of ordinary language philosophy is a vital stimulus to self-transformation in cognitive, aesthetic, ethical, and political domains, contributing significantly to a rethinking of issues such as responsibility and autonomy, and the relationship between philosophy and literature.
A critical introduction to the thought of an inordinately complex writer, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, literary theory, cultural theory, comparative literature, and media and cultural studies.
* Exam copies only available to lecturers for whom the book may be suitable as a course text.
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`Epsen Hammer's lucid and engaging account of Cavell's inheritance of Austin and Wittgenstein is particularly successful in showing how it might make possible genuinely productive encounters between the "analytic" and the "Continental" philosophical traditions.' -- Stephen Mulhall, New College, University of Oxford
Abbreviations.
Preface.
Chapter 1 Ordinary Language Philosophy.
Chapter 2 Skepticism: Criteria and the External World.
Chapter 3 The Other.
Chapter 4 Art and Aesthetics.
Chapter 5 Ethics and Politics.
Chapter 6 Between Philosophy and Literature: Deconstruction and Romanticism.
Epilogue.
Notes.
Bibliography.
Index
