![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
This paper addresses two key themes in selected writings of Stanley Cavell: turning and returning, movements that are presented as essential to the processes of philosophising and interpretation, and looking again, which is variously constructed as a Nietzschean perspectival shift or a Wittgensteinian change of aspect. These themes inform Cavell's readings of filmic and philosophical texts and this paper will focus on two: The Awful Truth (McCarey 1937) and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. This is coupled with an analysis of the meta-critical role played by both themes in Cavell's theoretical accounts of interpreting and doing philosophy. I demonstrate that Cavell ultimately overlooks and neglects the perspectival and argue that Nietzsche's model is the most effective one for mapping clashes of interpretation. This involves examining the limited role allocated to the object of desire/interpretation. The paper ends by showing how The Awful Truth reworks elements of Nietzschean perspectivalism, reconfiguring it as a paradigm for the productive inter-relation of philosophical and film texts.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Andrew Klevan whose paper at the ‘Film-Philosophy’ conference in Bristol 2008 really started off this whole line of thought. Andrew Klevan's paper has since been revised and published as ‘Notes on Stanley Cavell and Philosophical Film Criticism', in New Takes in Film-Philosophy, ed. H. Carel and G. Tuck, 48-64 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). I must also acknowledge the good friends and colleagues who have been kind enough to spend time discussing Wittgenstein with me, particularly Dawn Phillips, Kurt Brandhorst and Rachel Jones, as well as those whose generosity and advice enabled me to undertake the work on Cavell and The Awful Truth – Edward Gallafent, Victor Perkins and James Zborowski.