Introduction

Ends of Life: Forms of Life as the “Ruins of an Enduring Fable”?

“…Both kinds of accounts overlap to the extent that they advocate for "decentering of the human" ( [11] p. xv) or, analogously, that all modern inheritances of post-Kantian thinking must be cast aside due to the failure of a modern project of "freedom" ( [16] pp. [31][32][33][34][35], a failure that poisons the historical well of transcendental argumentation, which I have shown Wittgenstein to have employed, albeit quite differently from Kant. "Decentering" is intended to lead towards a dissolution of what might be called a humanistic protagonism, a tendency for setting the human as a privileged agent against a backdrop of a non-human, non-agential, and essentially unchanging environment, as a framework for self-understanding.…”

“…Cavell characterizes Wittgenstein's philosophy as providing a radical vision of the human being as conflicted, precisely because of this amphibious being, engendering a "distrust of language" or ways of living that have been "distorted or waylaid by illusion" ( [23] pp. 33,34), and also one that is committed to finding "the antidote to illusion in the particular and repeated humility of remembering and tracking the uses of humble words, looking philosophically . .…”

“…The root of the daily recurring problem (which might also be named the problem of repetitive recurrence, especially within a changing planetary climate) is equally the means for resolving it, the recognition that human beings are linguistic creatures, so it is not a matter of "correcting" epistemology or broadly inculcating a sense of reverence for ecosystems or even the planet, if these are isolated from the ongoing task of discov-ering one's language within Lebensformen. This is not to posit conditions of Lebensformen as uniquely human or as timeless; it posits bodies (human and inhuman) and worldly conditions of life (and its passing) as given, and it does not require positing an ur-relation of mastery over hollowed-out material beings 30 [33][34][35][36].…”

“…There are grounds for developing a robust critique of Cavell that intersects with the de facto absence of feminist or Global South voices in texts of his concerned with the restoration of voice; on this point, see [36]. See also [33]. 31 All references to Spengler are apud [23] p. 65.…”

The Genius of Feminism: Cavellian Moral Perfectionism and Feminist Political Theory

“…Naori Saito (2018) makes a version of this argument as well 4. Many of these feminist readings of Cavell grew out of a reading group at Duke, which published some of its conversations in a special issue of New Literary History in 2015 (Bauer et al, 2015). See also, for care ethics: Laugier, 2015 and 2018; for relational selfhood: Beckwith, 2013; for judgement, see Crary, 2007, Zerilli, 2016 Hammer (2002), whose overview of Cavell's politics is admirably succinct.…”