Modern Theology 29:1 January 2013

ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

POSSESSION AND DISPOSSESSION:

WITTGENSTEIN, CAVELL, AND
GREGORY OF NYSSA ON LIFE
AMIDST SKEPTICISM1
NATALIE CARNES
But how could I deny that I possess these hands . . .? Let us suppose, then, that
we are dreaming, and that all these particulars . . . are merely illusions; and even
that we really possess neither an entire body nor hands such as we see.
Descartes, Meditations2
She is dreaming. Laboring with her first child, Emmelia pauses in her pain,
whelmed by a tide of sleep that carries her to a vision of her enwombed child.
Yet the dream-child is not in her womb but in her hands. Someone more
radiant than a human (she hesitates to name the visionary visitor an angel)
instructs her to name the child Thecla. Is it easy to believe a mysterious visitor
who wants your child to be named after a famous virgin martyr? The visitor
repeats the message three times before leaving, granting a parting gift of easy
labor. Emmelia wakes and the child is placed in her hands, her dream
realized. She names her daughter Macrina.
The cycles of life and death turn. Now Macrina is dying. Her brother
Gregory does not yet know that she is dying; he knows only that their older
brother has died and that he longs for the comfort of his sister. Journeying to
Natalie Carnes
Baylor University, Religion Department, One Bear Place #97284, Waco, TX 76798-7284, USA
Email: Natalie_Carnes@baylor.edu
1
I would like to thank Matthew Whelan, Stanley Hauerwas, Paul Griffiths, Brian Goldstone,
Jonathan Tran, Ben Dillon, and Sean Larsen for their specific feedback on this article and for their
conversations on Wittgenstein and Cavell. My thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for
Modern Theology.
2
Ren Descartes, Second Meditation, in John Veitch (trans.), The Method, Meditations, and
Philosophy of Descartes (Washington, DC: M. Walter Dunne Publisher, 1901), p. 220.
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see her, he, too, has a vision in his sleep. In his dream, Gregory carries in his
hands the relics of martyrs. They are blindingly bright. Three times the vision
returns. How do you know how to go on from such a dream? Unclear in his
understanding and troubled in his soul, Gregory hastens to his sisters side.3
The thrice-repeated vision, the radiating light, the mystery received in
hand: The dream-hands of Emmelia and Gregory receive Macrina just before
her birth and death. These are the only two dreams Gregory of Nyssa records
in the hagiography of his sister, the Life of Macrina, but they are not the only
two references to hands, which labor throughout the Life, appearing over
twenty-five times in that short text. I want these diligently working hands to
continue their labors by meeting two other pairs of hands: those of G. E.
Moore, returned to again and again by Ludwig Wittgenstein, and those that
Stanley Cavell hopes will enable philosophy to accept Shakespeares Othello
and Desdemona back. I want, in other words, these hands to help me think
about skepticism: the threat it poses and the truth it presents. I want them to
lead us to a place where we know how to go on with skepticism, how to
make peace in a world where it lingers.
The premise implicit in this article is that Wittgenstein and Cavell did not
themselves lead us to a place of peacebut that their philosophical journeys
may yet help us find our way to one. They help us because they teach us to
pass beyond the skepticism/anti-skepticism dilemma, because they work
toward a place I want to call epistemic dispossession.4 It is a place where
knowledge is received and certainty authorized without subjection to an
epistemic anchor.
3
I was not able to interpret its meaning clearly, but I foresaw some grief for my soul and I
was waiting for the outcome to clarify the dream. Virginia Woods Callahan and Roy Joseph
Deferrari (eds and trans), The Life of Saint Macrina in Saint Gregory of Nyssa Ascetical Works,
Fathers of the Church vol. 58 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1999), p. 174.
4
I gratefully lift this term, slightly modified, from Brian Goldstone and Stanley Hauerwas,
who in turn claim to draw epistemological dispossession from Daniel Barber and Rowan
Williams. (Brian Goldstone and Stanley Hauerwas, Disciplined Seeing: Forms of Christianity
and Forms of Life, South Atlantic Quarterly Vol. 109 no. 4 [2010], pp. 765790.) The term gathers
together disparate insights and wisdoms I had been struggling to integrate. I invoke it, not to
suggest that we have no knowledge, but to suggest that we do not possess knowledge in the way
the skeptic and anti-skeptic seek. Epistemic dispossession is, on the one hand, shorthand for
the dispossession of epistemically-anchored certainty, and, on the other hand, a description of
the posture by which we do hold knowledge: as received, not owned.
It is important to note also that the way I will invoke possession in this article is sometimes
at odds with the way Cavell invokes it in a text of his I will return to often: Part IV of The Claim
of Reason. There he advocates, for example, possessing ones existence by declaring it. Possession
functions throughout that text as a summons to responsibility. (Stanley Cavell, The Claim of
Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy [New York: Oxford University Press, 1979],
p. 462.) I am in sympathy with this call to possession. But the possession I explore here has
more in common with the moment in his memoir in which he writes, I would have been glad
to be able to ignore whatever I have so far done, that is, to feel that I can simply assume its
existence. No doubt in part I resent being confronted with my vanity. But there is something
more. If I am ever right about a philosophical idea it is precisely because the idea is not in my
possession. The goal of philosophy, as I care about it most, is the obvious, the undeniable . . .

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My purpose here is not to produce a commentary on Wittgenstein, Cavell,
or Gregory of Nyssa; it is to be led by them on this journey of epistemically
dispossessing. I disciple myself particularly to the voices that speak from
three of their most resonant texts: On Certainty, The Claim of Reason, and the
Life of Macrina. Yet even as I follow Wittgenstein and Cavell, I identify two
sources of un-peace in their projects.5 One is an un-confessed (or illconfessed) threat that looms over their work, and the other is the inhuman
difficulty of resisting the skeptical temptations of isolation and domination
after this threat is named. It is the threat of death, which becomes, under the
skeptics anxiety, the threat of murder. For in the skeptics denial of finitude,
he refuses to come to terms with the way that death attends life. Such refusal
introduces as a skeptical temptation the further threat of murder. The difficulty of resisting isolation and domination rides on the incompleteness of
(merely) epistemic dispossession, which will always undo itself unless deepened by more radical forms of dispossession. Such forms of dispossession are
suggested by Cavell, and, as I will argue, they are given life in a perfected
form by Gregory in his interpretation of his sister Macrina. Macrina illumines
epistemic dispossession as a form of love that refuses certain relationships to
property and so becomes radiantly, relentlessly peaceful. The peace I seek
with these thinkers, then, is neither complacent nor passive. It is freedom
from the grip of tyrannical requirements and self-defeating temptations. It is
the peace of being able to go on.
The path I want to trace with Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Gregory begins in
the first section by identifying two ways we may wander off our trail, two
epistemological sirens that may tempt us from our path of epistemic dispossession. These are skepticism and anti-skepticism, elaborated by Wittgenstein
and Cavell as joined in their enthronement of epistemologically anchored
certainty. In section two, I follow Cavell into the forms of life and death that
sustain and are sustained by skepticism to identify the potential murderousness of skepticism. Such exhuming of the skeptical life continues in section
three, where I describe the anthropology not only of skepticism, but also of
Wittgenstein and Cavell, who identify an alternative to murderousnessan
alternative that entails forms of dispossession. Yielding a vision for how
dispossession might meet the threat of murderousness, Gregory of Nyssa
will, in the fourth section, deepen such dispossession in his descriptions of

(Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2010], p. 515.) That instance of possession, cousin to passages in Disowning Knowledge I will
engage later, resonates with the epistemic dispossession I will elaborate.
5
In a book derived from his class on moral perfectionism, Cavell himself writes of Wittgenstein, Wittgensteins disappointment with knowledge is not that it fails to be better than it is (for
example, immune to skeptical doubt), but rather that it fails to make us better than we are, or
provide us with peace. Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral
Life (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 5.
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Macrina, whose life interprets the relationships of property, love, and death
that Cavell at times alludes to and that complete epistemic dispossession.
Epistemological Temptations: The Hands of G. E. Moore
I take us first to survey territory that has become familiar to readers of Cavell
in order to remind us of the strangeness of the journey to which Wittgenstein
and Cavell call us. Wittgenstein begins his posthumously-published work On
Certainty by signaling the conversation he wishes to join: If you do know
that here is one hand, well grant you all the rest.6 The you he responds to
here is G. E. Moore. In a famous essay, Moore had begun by linguistically
holding up his right hand and remarking, Here is a hand, before doing the
same with his leftand then congratulating himself on proving the existence
of an external world. Thus Moore turns to common sense to refute the
skeptics question of how one can know the existence of an external world,
a sister-question to how one can know the existence of other minds.
Wittgenstein opens On Certainty by questioning Moores first premise.
Does Moore know that here is one hand? What does (how could) such an
assertion mean? Wittgensteins purpose is not to side with the skeptic over
against Moore but to demonstrate the senselessness of their debate. How
could a person doubt the existence of a hand right in front of her? And what
could it mean to try to secure knowledge of it?7
One can imagine particular cases in which one might doubt (and therefore
sensibly assert) that a hand is here.8 Perhaps a doctor wants to reassure her
patient who just lost his hand of the cosmetic indistinguishability of a prosthetic hand. She lines several prosthetic hands on a tableunder which a
nurse is hiding to poke his hand out of a small hole, thus placing it in a line
with the prosthetic handsand encourages her patient to guess the human
hand. Here is a hand, the patient says. (Uncertainly? Cynically? Dismissively?) But in such a case, here is a hand neither yields nor threatens
epistemic certainty. It neither unhinges nor secures ones relationship to the
external world. It simply expresses the speakers attempt to name a particular
object with which his relationship is less than secure. It is a particular piece of
knowledge that is at stake, not an epistemic anchor of knowledge.
While Wittgenstein does not discuss determined (if theatrical) doctors, he
does this same kind of work in On Certainty: he offers an anthropological
sketchbook of the varieties of certainty, tracing different occasions for claiming to know, to believe, and to doubt, he works to loosen the philosophers
grip around epistemically-anchored certainty by gesturing towards the many
versions of certainty we successfully invoke in everyday lifekinds of cer6
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (eds), Denis
Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (trans) (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), section 1.
7
Ibid., sections 2, 23.
8
Ibid., section 32.

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tainty that are not epistemically anchored. And it is not just the anti-skeptic
but the skeptic, too, who is beholden to this anchored certainty, though the
latter disguises his attachment. Wittgenstein continues: If you tried to doubt
everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of
doubting itself presupposes certainty.9 Or as he again puts it, Doubt comes
after belief.10
There are at least two different ways to elaborate how certainty and belief
precede doubt in the skeptical picture. First, certainty is prior to doubt in
importance. The one who doubts holds objects of potential knowledge to a
standard of certainty that they may either meet or fail to meet. Doubt, then, is
lionized only as a failure of certainty, which retains primacy as the goal of
investigation. That is, certainty, not doubt, authorizes knowledge. This suggests the second priority of certainty, which is chronological. To be able to
doubt one must first possess a standard of certainty by which that doubt may
be satisfied. The skeptics doubt is even produced by the search for the
crystalline purity of epistemically-anchored certitude. Often this certainty is
founded on the doubter himself (or perhaps only on his mind). It is only once
this island of certainty has been identified (explicitly or not) that the skeptic
can begin to articulate that which fails the test of certainty (principally, that
which is not the self or mind: others, the world, and the body). In other
words, Wittgenstein shows us that it is only when we demand to possess
knowledge in a certain way that we mourn ourselves as bereft of it.
The work Wittgenstein does in On Certainty continues lines of thought
from the Philosophical Investigations, including his discussion of criteria
and paina discussion that becomes central to Cavells own explorations
of skepticism. Wittgenstein remarks late in the Investigations, An inner
process stands in need of outward criteria.11 In the case of pain, such criteria
include behavior such as groaning, grimacing, and wincing, and the need
pain has of them is expressibility (and thus intelligibility). Without painbehavior, Wittgenstein claims, a child could not learn the word toothache, and
even if he invented a word for the sensation of toothache, he could not make
himself understood by it.12 Perhaps a later remark by Wittgenstein could be
paraphrased as: The best picture of pain is pain-behavior.13 Or: Pain is not a
9

Ibid., section 115.

Ibid., section 160.
11
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, fourth ed., G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S.
Hacker and Joachim Shulte (trans) (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), section 580.
12
Ibid., section 257.
13
What Wittgenstein does write is this: It is, one would like to say, not merely the picture of
the behaviour that belongs to the language-game with the words he is in pain, but also the
picture of the pain. Or, not merely the paradigm of the behaviour, but also that of the pain.It
is a misunderstanding to say The picture of pain enters into the language-game with the word
pain . Pain in the imagination is not a picture, and it is not replaceable in the language-game
by anything that wed call a picture.Imagined pain certainly enters into the language-game in
a sense; only not as a picture. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 300.
10

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picture separated from pain-behavior. Or, as Cavell puts it, highlighting the
implausibility of the claim that pain could be pictured apart from painbehavior: As though a picture of suffering, say Grnewalds Crucifixion, is a
perfect picture of a man and of a cross but (necessarily) an imperfect or
indirect picture of suffering. (It is a sort of picture of a picture of suffering.)14
Cavell wants to say that the picture of suffering is the picture of the man on
the cross.
Cavell interprets Wittgenstein on pain and criteria by parting ways with
Norman Malcolm and Roger Albritton, who understand Wittgensteinian
criteria as solidifying certainty over and against skeptical doubt. Painbehavior like wincing, in the Malcolm-Albritton interpretation, is the criterion that establishes the necessary existence of painunder certain
circumstances. In the case of Albritton, under the right conditions, a persons
particular pain-behavior almost certainly (where did the almost come
from?) entails a toothache.15 Yet there are some circumstancesmalingering,
playing a joke, rehearsing a playin which the criteria only seem to be
satisfied and certainty cannot therefore be established. Malcolm dwells on
this seeming satisfaction of criteria to claim that when they are satisfied,
criteria always establish certainty, but one must be careful to rule out those
situations in which they cannot be satisfied.
For Cavell, Malcolm-Albrittons seeming presence of criteria bears no
weight, for the criteria themselves may be simulated. He returns criteria to
Wittgensteins concerns with language about pain to argue that criteria refer
to how we make ourselves known as speakers about pain, and in speaking
about pain the speaker considers circumstances like play rehearsals, hypnosis, and joking around. A competent speaker does not pronounce a person in
pain when she is merely performing Desdemona (though Desdemona may
be in pain). Criteria do not establish that the groaning person is not malingering, but that to claim the groaning person is in pain is to claim he is not
malingering.16 Cavell insists, that is, that criteria function grammatically, in
the sphere of human convention, not in the realm of ontological ordering. In
describing the way we make ourselves known to one another, criteria suggest
the contingencies rather than the necessities of human agreement. In this way,
criteria point to the depth of human attunement, the breadth of our agreement with one another about what pain looks like and how it may be identified and spoken about.17
As human convention, criteria name the possibility of fallibility. The
speaker may be wrong precisely for the reason that what is simulated in
14

Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 339.

Ibid., p. 39. Cavell quotes Albritton and emphasizes the near certainty as a concession of
Albritton.
16
Ibid., p. 43.
17
Cavell treats Malcolm and Albrittons readings of Wittgensteins criteria in chapter two of
The Claim of Reason: Criteria and Skepticism, pp. 3748.
15

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feigning pain is the satisfaction of criteria. Malcolm cannot, then, deliver the
certainty he promises criteria yield. Cavell thus reintroduces the skeptical
possibility to show that Malcolm has not defeated it. Criteria can only express
our attunement because they also indicate our separateness; a note cannot be
harmonized with itself. Drawing his interpretations of Wittgenstein together
with his interpretations of Emerson in a later work, Cavell images our
unhandsome condition: objects are evanescent and lubricant such that
when we clutch hardest at them, they slip through our fingers. How do we
open our impotently clutching hands?18

Forms of Life and Death: Hands to Accept Othello and Desdemona Back
In the wake of what he regards as Malcolm and Albrittons failuretheir
reading Wittgenstein as trying to defeat skepticism, to supply the certainty
skepticism mournsCavell insists on the irrefutability of skepticism.19 The
attempt of such as Malcolm, Albritton, and Moore to defeat skepticism by
epistemologically anchoring certainty characterizes anti-skepticism, a stance
often expressed in readings of Wittgenstein that claim he rules out certain
ways of speaking and questioning as outside the language-game.20 What is
lost for Cavell when anti-skepticism supplants skepticism is the separateness
of humans, the way we are responsible for our relationships with one
another. When he tries to anchor certainty about another human beings pain
in her pain-behavior, Malcolm denies the separateness of the other person,
thus mirroring the skeptics mistake of construing her relationship to the
other as one of knowledge. Cavell wants to point us back to people and forms
of life that produce, maintain, and apply knowledge. It is through these forms
of life that we receive the world and the minds of others. We might understand Malcolm as using criteria to try to defeat the received character of our
relationship to the world and neighbor. I want to display Cavells situation of
skepticism in forms of life and death that also try to defeat the received
character of our relationship to the world by turning to two moments in the
fourth part of the Claim of Reason: the parable of the perfected automaton
(a rehearsal of skepticism) and the reading of Othello (an unmasking of it).
18
Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America (Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch
Press, 1989), p. 86.
19
Whether Wittgenstein in fact endorses such a view is a question over which famed philosophers and Wittgensteinian interpreters from Saul Kripke to Stephen Mulhall have spilled
much ink. For an excellent discussion of how Wittgensteinian theologians have diverged in their
responses to the skeptical threat, see Peter Dulas chapter, Wittgenstein Among the Theologians in Unsettling Arguments: A Festschrift on the Occasion of Stanley Hauerwass 70th Birthday,
eds. Charles R. Pinches, Kelly S. Johnson, Charles M. Collier (Eugene, OR: Cascade Book, 2010).
I am myself sympathetic to Dulas concern that Wittgenstein himself did not close off the threat
of skepticism, as many of his (theological) interpreters are wont to do.
20
See, for example, those theological readers Dula criticizes in Wittgenstein Among the
Theologians.

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In his rather bizarre parable of the perfected automaton, Cavell tells a story
about a craftsman who eventually succeeds in perfecting his automaton (he
calls him the friend) to look and behave exactly like a human. The craftsman shows off his work by threatening his friend with a knife. The friend
responds to the threat humanly indeed: defending himself, grappling with
the craftsman, grunting, yelling as he does, No more. It hurts. It hurts too
much. Im sick of being a human guinea pig. I mean a guinea pig human.21
The craftsman is pleased with the plausibility of the pain-response. He has
performed his task well. But there is a third character in the story: the I who
introduces the question of how I should respond to the friend who displays such convincing pain-behavior. Do I protect (protect?) the friend? Do
I secure his (its) status as non-human? How would I do thatlook inside
him? Suppose even his insides are perfectly simulated human insides? As
Cavell presses the difficulty of what it might mean to secure knowledge of
human pain, he gives the story a final twist: after I perform sympathy for the
friend, the craftsman tears off my shirt and snaps off my chest to reveal (I
glance down) some elegant clockwork.22
Cavells parable extends the truth of skepticism that I cannot master
knowledge of the other to include my inability to master knowledge of
myself.23 It is not just that the friend might be a robot exhibiting pain-behavior
rather than a human being in pain, but that, in fact, I might be a robot.24 We
have no way of securing knowledge of our or anothers humanness against
the doubts of the skeptic. But what has happened to the skeptics island of
certainty? If skepticism destroys my certainty about myself (my mind), does
it also destroy the possibility of skepticism? What territory has Cavell led us
to where skepticism struggles to bear its own weight? If there is no island of

21

Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 405.

Ibid., p. 408.
23
Here, then, I would nuance Graham Wards claim in the July 2011 Modern Theology symposium on Cavell: Cavell has demonstrated analytically the difficulties involved in the criteria
that I have arrived at for knowing something: that the criteria only go so far in allowing me to
know that the other is in pain since it is I who have provided the criteria and the other may be
feigning the behaviour, acting out the empirical signs of pain. I have no access to the pain itself,
and its possible realityonly its mediation and communication. In direct absence of the experience of pain (to me), I cannot therefore call it pain, even though I understand the word which
I associate with the behaviour of the other. Graham Ward, Philosophy as Tragedy or What
Words Wont Give, Modern Theology Vol. 27 no. 3 (July 2011), p. 479. Not only is it inaccurate to
claim the criteria come from meas if the criteria were not already evidence of our agreementsbut it is equally inaccurate that I have access to my own pain in itself. Even my own
pain eludes the grasp of epistemically-anchored certainty.
24
The parable is multivalent. I interpret only one strand in it, but there are darker valences one
could uncover. For example, the parable also suggests skepticisms inhumanity: as the craftsman
perfects the pain-response of the automaton, he continually tests the accuracy of the response by
stabbing the automaton and discerning whether the automaton responds in the way a stabbed
human would respond. Perhaps here we see that the search for real pain proliferates and calls for
indifference to that which merely appears to be pain.
22

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epistemically-anchored certainty, are we simply awash in a sea of
uncertainty?
The problem with conceiving of us as lost in a sea of uncertainty is that it
accepts the skeptics epistemology, his terms for what constitutes knowledge.
And Cavell does not think the problem is that we lack knowledge; it is that
we do not know what to do with the knowledge we have. Or perhaps we do
know what to do with such knowledge but we nevertheless refuse it. Cavell
wants to cast the skeptics problem of knowledge as a problem of acknowledgment. What acknowledgment makes plain, for Cavell, is, first, the kind of
claim knowledge makes on us and, second, the community that makes that
claim intelligible. The problem of knowing whether a person is in pain
becomes the problem of acknowledging a person in pain. What kind of claim
does a pained person make on us? Under what conditions and in what voice
does she make that claim? These are questions raised by the automaton
parable.
As we move to Cavells reading of Othello, we take from the automaton the
suggestion that acknowledgment of the self is bound up with acknowledgment of another. That suggestion is drawn again in Cavells Othello, this time
by displaying the way, not just the anti-skeptic, but the skeptic, too, denies the
separateness of the other person. Separateness, in the sense that Cavell
explores here, does not suggest that we are separated (by something)25but
means something very like finitudea condition the skeptic denies by
demanding infinite security. Othello demonstrates the tragedy of this
demand.
Cavell describes the way Othellos tormented suspicion of Desdemonas
unfaithfulness capitulates the skeptics conversion of the human condition
(metaphysical finitude) into an intellectual difficulty.26 Othello is tortured,
not by the philosophers question of whether Desdemona exists, but by her
separateness from him and the way his love for her reveals to him his own
incompleteness, his dependence, his finitude. Othellos rage for proof and
for satisfaction leads him to demand the ocular availability of Desdemonas innocencean availability, it turns out, that comes only when her death
assures him that she is a mortal, not a devil. Cavell attends to a final vision of
the two, dead on their bridal sheets.
A statue, a stone is something whose existence is fundamentally open to
the ocular proof. A human being is not. The two bodies lying together
form an emblem of this fact, the truth of skepticism. What this man lacked
was not certainty. He knew everything, but he could not yield to what he
knew, be commanded by it. He found out too much for his mind, not too
25
The truth here is that we are separate, but not necessarily separated (by something); that we
are, each of us, bodies, i.e., embodied; each is this one and not that, each here and not there, each
now and not then. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 369.
26
Ibid., p. 493.

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little. Their differences from one anotherthe one everything the other is
notform an emblem of human separation, which can be accepted, and
granted, or not. Like the separation from God; everything we are not.27
In Cavells telling, Othellos rage for ocular proof masks his refusal of the
surfeit of knowledge he finds unbearable. Cavell situates the truth of skepticism ambiguously: is the truth of skepticism here that skepticism illustrates the truth that we are separate from one another? Or is it a truth about
skepticismperhaps that it casts this separation as a lack of knowledge
rather than a piece of it? Or the truth that the knowledge skepticism seeks of
a human can only be gained of a corpse (a statue)the truth, then, that
skepticism harbors murderousness?
Here Cavell comes close to naming the threat of death that motivates the
skeptical cover. But he narrates Othello as fleeing, not his death exactly, but
his finitude. Death is present, not as a threat, but as a consequence of a refusal
of knowledge or of a quest for ocular proof. The relationship Cavell highlights between skeptical rage and the threat of death is the way the first
precipitates the second; I want to consider the reverse relationship. For what
Cavell does not narrate, and what I want to return to, is the way Desdemonas
trust renders her vulnerable to murder.
For now, though, back to Othello: Othellos lack of ocular proof of Desdemonas faithfulness becomes itself the proof of her faithlessness, much like
the skeptics inability to secure the existence of an external world becomes an
occasion for mourning himself as bereft of that world. These are absences
misconstrued; in turn they support a misconstrual of the world. Othello, like
the skeptic, tries to secure (or displace) his relationship with the other by
knowledge, thus casting humans as community without commitments or
claims. But here the skeptic, in a different way than Malcolm and Albritton,
misses what is important about criteria: not that they fail to secure knowledge
but that they express our deep attunement to one another, our shared
judgments.
Instead of living with the knowledge of human separateness and the
responsibility for discovering our likenesses by maintaining our shared judgments present in criteria, Othello opts out of this fragile situation. He succumbs to the twin threats (it sounds strange to call them temptations) of
isolation and domination. These are the two ways a person can shore herself
up against knowledge of her own mortality, can try to perform a secured
infinitude. They are not unrelated: Othello, in succumbing to the temptation
to dominate Desdemonas person, to deny her separateness, cannot then bear
the isolation to which he dooms himself. Othellos consuming desire for a
secured infinitude, the eros we are calling a skeptical desire, is expressed as
murderous rage. To deny his own death, he kills his beloved. Having killed
27

Ibid., p. 496.

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Desdemona, who funded his own self in ways he could not control and
wanted to deny, Othello can no longer bear his own existence. And so Cavell
asks: [C]an philosophy accept [Othello and Desdemona] back at the hands
of poetry?28 If they died in the mad logic of skepticism, through what
language and by whose hands could these tortured lovers live? Are there
hands to affirm human separateness without succumbing to the temptations
to dominate others or isolate oneself?
The totalizing impulse to eradicate insecurityof knowledge or of ones
existenceis ultimately a self-mutilating effort. This is another way of
expressing the interweaving of the acknowledgment of self and other.
Writing about tragedy, Cavell expresses the insight this way: [T]he recognition of the other takes the form of an acknowledgment of oneself, ones own
identity.29 Cavell claims that in the case of King Lear, for Lear to acknowledge Cordelia as his unjustly banished daughter is to acknowledge himself as
the unjustly banishing father.30 But surely a separateness that is bridged (just
as it is found) only by human convention must require something more
(prior, even) from Lear. For Lear to recognize himself as the unjustly banishing father is for Lear to present himself to Cordelia for her acknowledgment,
to accept her judgment (her mercy) on himself, thus learning to receive her as
a subject who forms her own judgments and a subject, therefore, to whom he
may be attuned. It was in this way that Othello could not accept Desdemonas
separateness. He could not acknowledge her because he could not present
himself to her for her acknowledgment, could not, as it were, put himself in
her hands. This is another way of naming his inability to yield to what he
knew, be commanded by it.31 In refusing to yield to his own death, Othello
causes hers.
Cavells question echoes. What hands can accept Othello and Desdemona
back?

Anthropologies at Hand: The Hidden, the Revealed, and the Crucified

What hands, indeed? What founds the certainty the skeptic seeks is a picture
of what kind of being demands it. If an anthropology grounds skepticism,
defusing skepticism entails excavating and querying the anthropology that
gives it force. In the skeptics anthropological picture, the body is that which
intervenes between souls, rendering them imperceptible to one another. The
inner is distinct from and withheld by the outer. The skeptical questions
especially the question about other mindsare nourished by a body-soul
dualism in which the soul names the I and the body that which masks the
28

Ibid., p. 496.
Ibid., p. 389.
30
Ibid., p. 429.
31
Ibid., p. 496.
29

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I. Hands, for the skeptic, conceal the I of which they are an instrument. These
are hands that can be wielded, disowned, and reclaimed.
Wittgenstein wants to resist this picture as definitive of the human condition. It is Wittgenstein who inspires Cavells automaton example when he
links professing belief in the suffering of a friend and declaring that friend
not to be an automaton. His meditations come in the fourth fragment of the
Philosophy of Psychology, where, in the penultimate remark there, he turns
explicitly to anthropology, writing: The human body is the best picture of
the human soul.32 The statement is of a piece with a trajectory running
throughout the Philosophical Investigations in which Wittgenstein tries to coax
us away from searching for that which is within, beneath, or behindfor
example, meaning, pain, essenceto attend instead to what is right in front
of our eyes (so to speak)for example, saying, grimacing, resemblance. Thus
he wants to reframe the body, not as veiling the soul, but as expressing it.
Hands, then, are revelatory: what they do discloses the soul. These hands are
the I from which the soul is not separate.33
Cavell, too, wants to resist the displacement of outer by inner. He
extends Wittgensteins anthropological descriptions to critique those of the
skeptic, who scoops mind out of behavior, thus rendering the body inexpressive, inanimate (corpse-like).34 He explores Wittgensteins statement of
the soul-picturing body as replacing a mythology of metaphysical hiddennessfor example, the soul as a garden that cannot be entered or the body as
a veil or blindwith a different description of our blocked vision.35 While
Wittgenstein displaces hiddenness with revealedness, Cavell accepts his
picture and then relocates hiddenness within it. Agreeing that the body does
not conceal the soul, Cavell describes the soul as hidden by the bodys
essential revealing of it. It is our own mind that hides the others mind by
refusing, or not knowing how, to receive the other. The other is hidden from
us in our failure to acknowledge her. Sixty pages later he elaborates this
conviction by rewriting Wittgensteins body-soul aphorism and proffering a
new mythology of hiddenness: The crucified human body is our best
picture of the unacknowledged human soul.36 This, I take it, is a way of
describing both the body as expressing the soul and the soul as hidden by a
refusal to acknowledge it. The nailed hands of Cavells unacknowledged

32
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophy of PsychologyA Fragment in Philosophical Investigations, Fourth Edition, G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (trans) (Malden,
MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), (iv) p. 24.
33
It is important to note, then, that Wittgenstein offers an alternative to the anthropological
dualism of the skeptic without requiring one to give up a metaphysical dualism. To the extent
that he uses the language of soul, he seems to endorse it.
34
I found this helpful formulation in Michael Fischer, Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 74.
35
Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 370.
36
Ibid., p. 430.

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human soul perfectly express that unacknowledgment, perfectly reveal
humanity denied, which is to say, these hands reveal the way we force each
other to remain hidden.
How can we help but think here of Desdemona, who will make her
entrance later in Cavells essay? How can we not think of her corpse and of
her husband, who could not acknowledge her because he could not acknowledge himself as dependent, fleshly, finite, mortal? Earlier we read Cavells
valuation of separateness to mean that I must present myself for acknowledgement in order to acknowledge the other. But it is only here that
Cavell makes plain the risk such a presentation (present-making, gift-giving)
entails. The risk is murder. Cavell passes rather quickly over the moment,
re-narrating the threat of death more abstractly as the problem of finitude.
But the threat he utters returns in the figure of Desdemona. She entrusts
herself to Othello, yet in acknowledging him with the gift of herself, she risks
her unacknowledgment, which takes the form of her murder at Othellos
hands. Here is the ill-confessed threat in Cavells statement that the crucified
human body is our best picture of the unacknowledged human soul: to
acknowledge another is to risk my crucifixion by her. The more neighbors
one acknowledges, the more imminent the threat becomes. God save the one
who so acknowledges the world.
Othellos murder of Desdemona, the crucifixion of the unacknowledged
human soulthese horrors of skepticism urgently press the question of
resisting skeptical temptations. Yet Cavell suggests the difficulty of resistance
when he describes skepticism as internal to the human condition. It is the
central secular place where the human wish to deny the condition of
human existence is expressed and is therefore an argument internal to the
individual, or separate, human creature, as it were an argument of the self
with the self (over its finitude).37 Interpreting this passage, Espen Dahl
writes, Cavells understanding of our finitude articulates a strange and dark
dynamic of our self-relation: namely, that it is human to deny our humanity.38 Resisting the skeptical temptations is quite literally an inhuman difficulty. In Dahls Cavell, tragedy is not just an interpretation of skepticism, but
the genre toward which human life tends. Is there a way out of the seeming
inevitability of tragedy?
There must be. Tragedy, for Cavell, is not the only genre toward which
human life may tend. Two years after publishing a meditation on the tragic
ends of Othello and Desdemona, Cavell meditates on happier possibilities for
husbands and wives in Pursuits of Happiness, a collection of essays treating

37
Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 5.
38
Espen Dahl, Finitude and Original Sin: Cavells Contribution to Theology, Modern Theology Vol. 27 no. 3 (July 2011), p. 503.

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Hollywood comedies of remarriage.39 As criteria are the conditions of both
igniting and defusing skepticism, finitude is the condition of both denying
and acknowledging humanity. Here skepticism is not denied, but neither
does it generate tragedy. As Peter Dula suggests, these remarriage comedies
offer an interpretation of the ordinary as a mode of attention in which
skepticism can end in marriagethat is, human communityrather than
murder.40
It is not that these remarriages offer a wholly peaceable vision of human
community. Cavell writes of the violence humans do in denying one another
in reflections on It Happened One Night. Describing the way a sheet becomes
a wall between the two main characters, Cavell notes how skepticism
separates humans bodies from their souls, (making monsters of them) a
violence we enact because we feel that others are doing this violence to us.41
Nor are these characters free from Othello-like suspicions of unfaithfulness.
The divorce that renders necessary a re-marriage in The Awful Truth is occasioned by such suspicions, which the movie never wholly resolves. Yet they
find ways out of cycles of vengeance and suspicion by finding a way to
acknowledgment, a reciprocity that does not wait for the perfected community to be presented even though in matters of the heart, to make things
happen, you must let them happen.42 The letting happen Cavell describes
involves forsaking attempts to shore oneself up against lifes exigencies; it
means suffering little deaths (sometimes later reversedthese are comedies,
after all) of status, reputation, wealth, and pride. These characters lean into a
dispossession that witnesses to the possibilities of love for meeting skepticism without isolating oneself or dominating the other. We might say that in
these remarriage comedies, we witness a re-conditioning of the human to
accept rather than deny the human, which is to say, her finitude.
What Cavell sees in his alternative to tragedy, is that a new way is made, not
by the reception of a new piece of knowledge, but by the characters new
reception of [their] own experience.43 It is a receptivity that is narrated
elsewhere as a search for a self other than the given self, elaborated by Cavell
through invoking Emersons becoming. For Emerson, becoming turns all
riches to poverty, all reputation to shame and so it shoves Jesus and Judas
equally aside.44 Cavell enlists Emersonian becoming to frame the moral perfectionism that involves finding the journeys end in every step of the road

39
He treats many of these same movies again, explicitly paired with philosophers and other
thinkers, in his meditations on moral perfectionism in Cities of Words.
40
Peter Dula, Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology (New York, NY: Oxford University
Press, 2011), p. 20.
41
Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 109.
42
Ibid., p. 109.
43
Ibid., p. 240.
44
Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, p. 10. Quoting Ralph Waldo Emersons SelfReliance.

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(a description at once of the good way of life and of thinkingphilosophy as
journey).45 We have a vision of a self meeting skepticism, a self that newly
receives its experiences as a way of pursuing a new self and so continually
becoming. It is the catechesis into a human condition in which the temptation
to deny the human is not inevitable.
Re-marriage as becoming, receiving, pursuing, dispossessing, acknowledging: it is a promising start. But Cavells essays also raise questions about
how far we have come. Can the marriage relationship open to include other
forms of community, the absence of which Cavell notes several times?46 Can
these (re-)marriages resist (re-)succumbing to the temptations of isolation
and domination once the skepticism they face is murderous rather than
deforming? Can they resist the Iagos that would make them all Othellos? I
think they can. The ways of acknowledgment that must be learned will be
more difficult and the forms of dispossession more radical, precisely because
the self is under a more imminent threat. This takes us to Macrina.
If the remarriage comedies extend the possibility of human becoming and
acknowledgment, of meeting the skeptical threat with marriage rather than
murder, Macrina displays that the possibilities for such becoming are
endless, and that they are possible under the imminence of death. Even as
death draws near, Macrina pursues a self that is ever-new and everbecoming. And if the becoming Macrina witnesses to is more radical than that
of the remarriage comedies, so is the dispossession she exemplifies.
Hands for Macrina: Possessing, Dispossessing, Receiving
We live by the hands of others. Yet it is by the labor of our own hands that we
often learn how to live deeply into this dependence.47 In The Life of Macrina,
Gregory gestures towards the complex networks of hands by which we live.
In addition to the two dreams, hands appear to connect the manual and
liturgical laboring throughout the Life, to describe the way Macrina was
nursed by her mothers hands, the way a painters hands could not capture
Macrinas beauty, the way Macrina rebukes her older brother by taking him
in hand and turning him toward philosophy and toil by hand rather than
fame, to describe blessings given and received, to note anointing for religious
duty, to mark the great skill of various siblings, to emphasize the care for the
poor, to lament the exile of Gregory at the hand of Emperor Valens.
The hands laboring through Macrinas Life signal forms of life and labor in
which one might live and know in ways that are epistemically dispossessed.
45

Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, p. 1011.

See, for example, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 239.
47
Andrew Dinan discusses the manual laboring in the Life of Macrina in the context of the life
of her brother Basil, who wrote about manual laboring as important precisely because it teaches
one dependence on neighbor, land, and God. Andrew Dinan, Manual Labor in the Life and
Thought of St. Basil the Great, in Logos Vol. 12, no. 4 (Fall 2009), pp. 133157.
46

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Macrina makes plain the way that knowledge can never be separated from
patterns of living and the way epistemic dispossession is perfected in the
dispossession of wealth, status, and pride. In her particular hands and forms
of life, Macrina offers an interpretation of epistemic dispossession both near
and far from Cavell. It is near in the way labor surfaces in relationship to
possession and knowledge, as in the introduction to Cavells suggestively
titled collection on Shakespeare, Disowning Knowledge. There he considers
Othello as exemplifying the violence in masculine knowing that seems to
interpret the ambition of knowledge as that of exclusive possession, call it
private property. And the attempt to convert knowledge into property joins
together two problematics:
This linking of the desire of knowledge for possession, for, let us say,
intimacy, links this epistemological problematic as a whole with that of
the problematic of property, of ownership as the owning or ratifying of
ones identity. As though the likes of Locke and Marx, in relating the
individual to the world through the concept of laboring, and relating the
distortion of that relation to the alienation or appropriation of labor, were
preparing a conceptual field that epistemology has yet to follow out.48
An epistemology that would follow out the way labor links and communicates distortions between individual and world would find new ways for
addressing skepticism. For, as attempts to establish epistemically-anchored
certainty betray affinities with the skeptics anxiety about the insecurity of
knowledge, so does the wish to become undispossessable express an effort
to overcome ones anxiety about possessions, what Cavell calls a skepticism
with respect to belonging and to belongings.49 We might say that possessions and belongings, including knowledge, are ways we can shore ourselves
up against the treacheries of creaturely living. Knowledge is always in danger
of becoming a possession to secure our status, a stake to claim our standing.
(Academics should recognize the temptation more than anyone.) Unless
accompanied by dispossession, the philos of sophe desiccates into desire
absent love.
But Macrina does not just forsake the wish to become undispossessable.
She actively dispossesses herself such that her life and lack of property
witness to the dispossessed soul. She gives her inheritance into the hand of a
priest so that she can fulfill her ascetic commitments. She has no possessions
and will be covered, in the end, with a cloak of her mothers. She spends her
last conversation comforting and exhorting her younger brother, and with
her breath nearly spent, she reserves her final words for prayer, making
48
Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare (New York, NY: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), p. 10.
49
Ibid., p. 10.

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supplication with her hand and then whispering in a low voice. It is a prayer
of thanksgiving, an offering or dispossessing of her words. She praises God
for fashioning Gods creatures with Gods own hands, asks forgiveness for
her sins, and commends her soul to Gods hands once again. In naming Gods
hands as creating her and accepting her after death, Macrina describes Gods
hands as bookending her life. Her mother and her brother are the human
bookends, receiving by their dreams Macrina at her birth and death. As her
tongue runs dry, Macrinas hands continue to pray when her mouth cannot,
and as she signs the close of her prayer, her life expires. Her self is taken from
her as she acknowledges her giftedness and offers herself as gift.
The Life does not end with Macrinas death. Macrinas corpse radiating
light, her religious sisters tell Gregory of two miracles in Macrinas life. The
first occurs when Macrina invited her mother to heal her cancerous breast by
making the sign of the cross over it, touching it with her own hands. The
second happens when Macrina healed the young daughter of a soldier,
whose wife connects the miracle with the blind recovering sight from the
hands of God. Macrinas hands, and the hands of those in her community,
perform the work of the hands of the God from whom they receive themselves and to whom they offer themselves. To live into her identity as
received is to cultivate her gift into a greater gift; to refuse possession of her
hands is to receive her hands as the hands of God.50
We have here Gregorys twist on Cavells anthropology, a twist that transfigures Macrinas dispossession. First, Cavells anthropology: near the end of
Pursuits of Happiness, when Cavell is discussing the new reception of ones
experience as ones own, he invokes Kierkegaard to ponder the end of
Christianity and suggest what is to succeed Christianity is a redemptive
politics or a redemptive psychology that will require a new burden of faith
in the authority of ones everyday experience, ones experience of the everyday, of earth not of heaven . . .51 Everyday experience rather than what? The
implied alternative is made explicit in the opposition that succeeds it: earth
not heaven. Cavells heaven competes with the everyday, devaluing it and
distracting us from attending to what is right in front of our eyes. Such
explicit critique of religion (Christianity) as proposing a transcendence that
crushes immanent concerns is but a slender thread in his corpus, yet it
reaches the level of substantive concern to the extent that it is encoded in his
anthropology of humans as finite. When Cavell elaborates what finitude
entails, he describes the way it names our separateness and our inability to get
behind language. But applied to humanity, finitude suggests not just a spatial

50
There has been a famous discussion of gifts and gift-giving among John Milbank, Jean-Luc
Marion, and Jacques Derrida. But more than any of these positions, the portrait of reception,
becoming, and presenting that I briefly sketch shares themes with Kaja Silvermans Flesh of My
Flesh (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
51
Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 240.

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dimension but a temporal one as well. Finitude names the end of a human,
her death. This temporal dimension is made obvious in the case of Othello,
whose separateness from the woman he loves makes clear to him his mortality. He denies his mortality by denying Desdemona, giving her death that
he might not confront his own. For Othello, to refuse finitude is to refuse both
separateness and death. When Cavell claims the human is finite, he claims
that the human ends at death, that death names the end of becoming, that her
dispossession and love are similarly finite. Yet in Macrina we see a way of
embracing heaven without forsaking earth, of displaying the way sacrifices
required for acknowledgement perfect rather than compromise ones
humanity, and the way the dispossessed journey of divinization consummates rather than denies ones humanity. Macrina displays the possibilities
for living into a God whose transcendence does not compete with immanence by displaying a becoming radicalized beyond Cavells comedies of
remarriage.
Here is Gregorys twist: Macrina interprets human creaturehood for us as
expressing finitude even while witnessing to the infinite. Her creaturehood
expresses finitude by affirming that we cannot find a way around or beneath
our language, that we cannot secure our own existence, that we are separate
from one another, even that we are subject to death. Yet it also witnesses to
finitudes reaching beyond itself, its openness to the infinite. And Gregorys
infinite is not the skeptics infinite. It names neither infinite security nor the
denial of others. It names the possibility of an endless creaturely becoming. It
is an infinite toward which the skeptics desire may be recatechized, where
the human condition may complete its conversion. The difference between
skeptical and Nyssenian (Macrinian) desire is significant: in its desire to leave
finitude behind, the desire of modern skepticism lacks trust in that it tries to
secure its own foundations against the exigencies of creaturely becoming and
human communities. And it is a desire that likewise lacks patience in that it
insists on possessing the infinite at once rather than growing into and receiving it over time. Yet Macrinas desire is filled out through such trust and
patience. We might call this trust faith and this patience hope and so find
another way to claim that lacking faith and hope, eros ossifies into desire
absent love.
If skepticism is desire mis-catechized, if it is desire that lacks faith and hope
and is therefore no longer a form of love, then is it easy to re-catechetize it?
Is it easy to believe visionary visitors who want our children to be named for
martyrs? It is terribly difficult. Cultivating patience to receive amidst the
contingencies of life is never easyespecially when we recognize crucifixion
(martyrdom) as a standing threat.
Yet Macrinas Life is a meditation on her death, raising the possibility of
martyrdom in the first few pages. Framing the stories of Macrinas life, the
unity of the Life of Macrina is given in the story of the death of Macrina, the
last hours on her deathbed. The Life focuses on the way she faces her death,
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deflected by her mother and brother in the dreams her life taught them to
receive. The difficulty, we learn to see, of Emmelias vision is not that it
reveals too little but that it reveals so much. It reveals that her daughters life
will follow the footsteps of a martyr, that her then-infant will love and desire
and grow in such a way that she will risk crucifixion. Who can receive such
knowledge? The vision imparted knowledge to which Emmelia learns to
yield over a lifetime that adequated her to receive its surplus. In the meantime, Emmelia names her daughter after the girls grandmother and calls her
Thecla only in secret. It is only after Macrina has founded a community of
virgins and radiated light from her corpse, only after Gregory has himself
dreamed about holy relics just before Macrinas death and been prompted to
write her Life through discussing her holiness with a friend, that Gregory can
venture this tentative interpretation of the dream: [I]t seems to me that the
one who appeared was . . . foretelling the life of the child and intimating that
she would choose a life similar to that of her namesake.52 Gregorys hagiography takes up the subtle, important task of describing how his sister, who
lived a long life and died of natural causes, bore the mantle of her martyr
namesake.
We see in Gregorys descriptions of Macrina the way love requires one to
suffer death and suffering death well requires hope; the way receiving herself
means becoming Christ and becoming Christ means dispossessing herself.
Macrinas dispossessiondeeply connected with a sense of her own giftedness, which is itself an acknowledgment of her own creaturelinessbecomes
both the way that she is able to face death without illusion and the way she is
able to continue receiving life, the way she is able to move into a creaturely
infinitude. Against our epigraphic Descartes, who wants to secure knowledge (that he can nevertheless not deny) that he possesses these hands,
Macrina receives herself as gift originating from the hands of God. Unconcerned to possess her hands, she receives her hands as she receives herselfas gift from God. In accepting herself as gift, Macrina can both receive
others as gift and re-present herself as gift to others. By her hands that tend
to others, that dispossess of wealth, that pray to God, Macrina dwells in Love
in such a way as to face death and receive her self as love that can see Love.
She receives, not the knowledge of God but the knowledge of Godnot seeing
as God sees but seeing God. Her self, opened by love to face death, receives
a vision of the Bridegroom, Love Itself, as she crosses the threshold toward
death. This is a measure of just how far Macrinas dispossession is from
Cavells: it is a dispossession lived in a community where criteria are not only
human-made and -maintained, but angels may drop in for conversation. It is
a dispossession that can face death and murder because its demands are more
radical and its promises more wondrous. These are shifts made possible by

52

Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Saint Macrina, p. 164.

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the location of separation, not primarily in finitude, but in creaturehood,
which is broken open toward infinity without ever leaving such separation
behind.
The epistemic dispossession Gregory illustrates names our inability fully to
grasp our origins and the difficulty of discerning the origins of our dreams
and visions. But it also names our epistemic surfeit. We are not yet adequate
to the radiance we have received, which means we must become adequate to
our gift, to prepare ourselves to receive it. Such preparation, itself possible
only as a gift, requires cultivating a humility that allows us to relinquish
laurels and release ideas that are merely comforting.53 To accept ourselves as
receivedas createdis to prepare ourselves to receive better, more fully,
that we may continue to go on.
But receiving can be difficult, threatening even. Othello could not bear to
receive the knowledge of his own dependence on Desdemona. He could not
bear the fleshly finitude his love made clear to him in the way he received his
self from Desdemona, the way her presence displayed his inability to secure
his own life. Othello refuses both knowledge and epistemic dispossession,
for he insists on an anchored certitude by denying knowledge of his finitude.
To receive the knowledge that Desdemona could give Othelloto acknowledge herwould require him to see the way death attends our life, the way
our life cannot be secured from death. It would require further that he
present himself for acknowledgment, which is to expose himself to the risk of
crucifixion. Yet who can voluntarily face the threat of crucifixion? Only the
one dispossessed of his very life. Only the one who has learned the love that
cannot be practiced apart from faith and hope.
I have been trying to describe what this dispossession means, how it is we
journey more deeply into epistemic dispossession. I have been describing
what it means to dispossess oneself of ones very life as living more deeply
into ones identity as receiving life from beyond herselfan identity of
creaturehood. I might also say that to live dispossessed is for me to abandon
the attempt to save my life, that I may instead find it in losing it.

53
Gregory of Nyssas commitment to a divine transcendence that does not contrast with a
divine immanenceand therefore a divine agency which does not compete with human
agencymeans that his theology can find ways to accommodate Cavells emphasis on human
achievement without the anxiety that such achievement leaves gift behind. For an interesting
theological engagement with Cavell that nevertheless does so worry, see Judith E. Tonning,
Acknowledging a Hidden God: A Theological Critique of Stanley Cavell on Scepticism, Heythrop Journal Vol. 48 no. 3 (2007), pp. 384405.

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