Stanley Cavell's Shakespeare

Author(s): Gerald L. Bruns

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Spring, 1990), pp. 612-632
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Stanley Cavell's Shakespeare

Gerald L. Bruns

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have

made that we exist.
-RALPH

WALDOEMERSON,"Experience"

Stanley Cavell, one of the most distinguished of contemporary American philosophers, has published a volume of writings on Shakespeare
that not many will recognize as either philosophy or literary criticism.'
Is this an example, or consequence, of what Jiirgen Habermas calls
"Levelingthe GenreDistinction betweenPhilosophyand Literature".?2 Or is it,
on the contrary, a reopening of the quarrel between philosophy and
poetry that Socrates already regards as ancient? At the end of this paper
I will try to say briefly why this second is the question that applies in the
case of Cavell, who, alone perhaps with Martin Heidegger, has a sense
of what is at stake in this quarrel.
The earliest of Cavell's Shakespeare studies, "The Avoidance of
Love: A Reading of King Lear," dates from 1966-67 and first appeared
as the final essay in Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), a book of essays
in which Cavell tried to open a path beyond, or through, the ordinary
1. See Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge In Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge,
1987); hereafter abbreviated DK.
2. Jiirgen Habermas, "Excursuson Leveling the Genre Distinction betweenPhilosophy
and Literature," The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick
Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), pp. 185-210.

Critical Inquiry 16 (Spring 1990)

? 1990 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/90/1603-0003501.00.

All rights reserved.

612

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Critical Inquiry

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613

language philosophy of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin.3

This is a project that both the left and right wings of contemporary
Anglo-American analytical philosophy (Richard Rorty, for example,
and Michael Dummett) have tried to shrug off as quixotic, but Cavell
has not backed off. Like Heidegger, and somewhat with the help of
Heidegger's WhatIs Called Thinking?Cavell has come to hold that thinking-what philosophy ought to be doing-only really goes on when it is
called down many paths, none of them likely to produce followers
because when one is responsive rather than assertive one can't imagine
where one will end up.4 Thinking, as Heidegger says, may be much the
same as wandering. One of Cavell's paths has been American movies, as
in The World Viewed (1971) and Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood
Comedy of Remarriage (1981); another path has led to Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the British romantic poets. Both
of these paths have Cavell going, as he says, "in quest of the ordinary,"
as if ordinariness, the everyday-what Emerson calls "the common, the
near, and the low"-or what professional philosophy normally puts in
brackets-had something in it that we were missing.5
"The Avoidance of Love" is Cavell's magic looking glass onto
Shakespeare, where the idea of missing something, not getting what is
obvious, is, on Cavell's reading, very close to a philosophical obsession.
Lear-Othello, Coriolanus, Hamlet,
Shakespeare here means-besides
The Winter's Tale, and Antony and Cleopatra, and what Cavell finds in
these plays is an attempt to think through what elsewhere, in the formation of the modern philosophical tradition, was getting formulated as
the problem of skepticism, or not being able to know that we know (not
being able to be certain). It is not easy to say what this means. As if
executing a skeptical decorum, Cavell's writing does not try for transparency, nor does it always coincide with itself, and anyhow Shakespeare
is not so much an object as a region of Cavell's thinking, so everyday
(nonphilosophical) readers are apt to find themselves a bit at sea with
him. Without claiming to match Cavell's views point for point, I would
3. See Cavell's account of his philosophical
project in "Politics as Opposed to
What?" in ThePolitics oflnterpretation, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell
(Chicago, 1983), pp. 181-202.
4. See especially part four of Cavell's The Claim Reason:
of
Wittgenstein,Skepticism,
Morality,and Tragedy(New York, 1979); hereafter abbreviated CR.
5. See Cavell, The Senses of Walden (San Francisco, 1981), which includes
"Thinking
of Emerson" and "An Emerson Mood," and In
Quest of the Ordinary:Lines of Skepticismand
Romanticism(Chicago, 1988).

Gerald L. Bruns is William and Hazel White Professor of

English
and Comparative Literature at the University of Notre Dame. His most
recent book is Heidegger's Estrangements:Language, Truth, and
Poetry in
theLater Writings(1989).

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614

Gerald L. Bruns

Cavell's Shakespeare

like to give something like a para-Cavellian commentary that tries to say

what his thinking, with respect to Shakespeare, seems to be getting at,
and also where it leaves us.

TheMoral of Skepticism
Some sense of how Cavell thinks can be got from the speculation
that there is an internal coherence between Rene Descartes's doubt and
Othello's.6 The difference between them is perhaps that Descartes's
doubt is comic. It is a methodical skepticism that emancipates him, or
part of him, from the burden of learning, that is, from the weight, or
blockage, of paternity-the
patrimony of Aristotle, for example, or
indeed the whole Western philosophical tradition, with its endless,
tormented school-rehearsals and ecclesiastical controversies. Whereas
Othello's doubt is, philosophically, something else, something closer to,
made of the stuff of, skepticism itself. What Othello wants to possess,
and can never have (cannot in the nature of the case, because he is
human) is Desdemona's own self-certainty of her fidelity, that is, her
own self-experience of her love for him-a self-certainty or self-experience that has at least the philosophical force or foundational strength
of the cogito. Remember that Descartes could doubt the existence, or
validity, of everything, even his own body, but not his doubt. His very
(to
experience of doubting-which,
oddly, he called thinking-was
he
indubitable.
With
it
could
him)
prove the existence of the world, or
anyhow of God; proving the existence of the human proved to be a
separate problem that did not get clearly formulated until Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and E. T. A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman."7 We can
imagine that Desdemona has no doubt, call it a Cartesian certainty, of
her faithfulness to Othello. This is the knowledge that Othello desires,
what he is jealous of: he wants to not-doubt Desdemona as she notdoubts herself, as Descartes could not-doubt his own existence. I mean
that we must imagine Othello wanting to possess Desdemona's selfexperience as his own; nothing short of this experience could confirm
for him, beyond doubt, her fidelity. So jealousy, on this line of thinking,
becomes the condition of skepticism, of not having the world present to
us in the way of knowing, where knowing occurs in the intimacy of selfexperience. What Othello and Descartes have in common is that, in
order to overcome, or destroy, their doubt-in order to refute skepticism and to experience knowing (for sure)-they are willing to give up
6. Cavell's discussion of Othello comes at the close of CR (pp. 481-96) and is
reprinted in DK as "Othello and the Stake of the Other," pp. 125-42.
7. See Cavell, "The Uncanniness of the Ordinary," In Questof the Ordinary, pp. 15378.

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Critical Inquiry

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615

(in Othello's case, kill) the world, call it the other, or the body, or the
human. Think of Macbeth (which is never far from Cavell's thoughts)
where the desire to possess the world, to know it as one knows oneself,
means refusing, or killing, the human in oneself. What is it to find one's
humanness, one's ordinariness, one's nakedness, one's own self-intimacy, unendurable? Shakespeare's tragic heroes know.
Literary people have an anxious, even hostile attitude toward skepticism. They don't want to get caught thinking about it-because,
historically, there has always been a link between poetry and skepticism
that poetry cannot live down, at least not without turning into something else (something allegorical). It is a link that is foundational for the
quarrel between philosophy and poetry. When Socrates says, let the
lovers of poetry come (in plain, transparent prose) to her defense, he
was, in so many words, formulating the challenge, or the desire, that
has always motivated philosophy: the need to refute skepticism, that is,
the need to overcome, once for all, and beyond any possibility of doubting, the questionability, not just of human knowledge, but of human
would say, the existence of the human. Lovers of
existence-Cavell
poetry have taken up this task as a need to overcome the questionableness of poetry itself, but it is not clear that this questionableness has
ever been adequately understood. It certainly does not just consist, for
example, in the possibility, or fact, that poetry's representations might
be false, might not be justifiable (certainly it cannot be this that distinguishes poetry from other sorts of discourse, including philosophy).
Rather, the questionableness of poetry is that it exposes us to reality in
a way that puts knowledge, truth, and quite possibly the existence of the
human out of the question. This was the later Heidegger's idea: poetry
as Dichten (not Poesie or Dichtung) puts everything out of the question,
except thinking, which now becomes something one can't be sure ofcan't always bring oneself to get into. For Heidegger, thinking no
longer starts with questioning (doubting); it starts with, goes on as,
listening.8
Exposure to reality is what happens in Hamlet, although it occurs
nowhere (anywhere, in any literature) so powerfully as in Lear, where it
is what Lear fears more than anything, what he will do anything to
avoid (so also, in his way, Othello, whose fear of exposure to Desdemona's sexuality is something Cavell calls special attention to). Plato
knew that it is this sort of exposure, say to the wrong sort of desire, that
the philosopher has to be sealed off from if philosophy, or knowledge
-for example, seeing Justice, among other things, face to face-is to
8. See Martin Heidegger, "The Nature of Language," On the Way to Language,
trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York, 1971), pp. 71-72. I try to give an account of Heidegger's understanding of the relation of poetry and thinking in Heidegger's Estrangements:
Language, Truth, and Poetry in the Later Writings (New Haven, Conn., 1989), esp. chap. 4,
"The Poetic Experience with Language," pp. 99-122.

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Gerald L. Bruns

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be possible. It is part of Hamlet's philosophical and also tragic misfortune that his encounter with Justice occurs as his exposure to its
fragmentation and withdrawal, its pseudos and its other. Of course it is
almost impossible to number the terrible consequences of Hamlet's
desire for certainty (which is continuous with his desire not to expose
himself to the world around him), but at least one lesson of Hamlet is,
certainly, that our relationship to Justice is not one of knowing, much
less having; and this, in Cavell's language, is also the lesson of skepticism-he calls it "the moral of skepticism, namely, that the human
creature's basis in the world as a whole, its relation to the world as such,
is not that of knowing, anyway not what we think of as knowing" (CR, p.
241).
But if not knowing, what? We might want to say, as Hamlet (prematurely) seems to assume, that we connect up with things by way of
action, not thought (not acceptance)-say in the form of dumb shows
that will compel how things are to expose themselves, lay themselves
open to view, make us sure of them, justify us before the world; but
Hamlet discovers straightaway that this is no answer, one still can't be
sure enough, dumb shows and all; there is no making the world present
to oneself, it always exceeds one's grasp. (It is no trouble to think of
Hamlet's play-within-a-play, or indeed his whole effort of revenge, as a
burlesque of Baconian method, since Hamlet experiences, without
quite realizing it, the inevitable shortfall of strategic thinking with
respect to the world.) Cavell answers that we have got to "live our
skepticism" (CR, p. 440) in order to get the sense or point of it, that is,
in order to get a sense of what our relation to the world comes to. This
sense, if I understand, could be sketched out this way: The truth of
skepticism, as Cavell thinks of it, does not occur at the level of the
concept or proposition, which is why the idea that skeptics are selfrefuting won't work against them. The point is rather that the skeptic's
desire for certainty with respect to the world drives him (if "him" is the
word: there is some doubt on this point, but Cavell suspects that skepticism is male [see DK, p. 10])-drives him to strip away illusion after
illusion, account after metaphysical account, until he reaches, not
bedrock, as Descartes thought, and certainly not the world, which, like
Justice, or Heidegger's earth, steadily withdraws itself before the
would-be knower's grasp, but the limits, and therefore the demands, of
the human. Whatever gave us the idea that these limits, these demands,
could be explicated as a problem of knowledge? Whatever it is, it is,
Cavell says, "the cause of skepticism-the
attempt to convert the
human condition, the condition of humanity, into an intellectual difficulty, a riddle" (CR, p. 493). Cavell's insight, his tragic sense, is that, as
with Lear, it is more than most of us can bear to acknowledge these

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Critical Inquiry

Spring 1990

617

limits. And this is because these limits bring us up against the otherness
of the human, that is, the resistance of the human to the grip of, among
other things, philosophy, or wanting to know that one knows.

From Text to Character

All of this must sound a little strange to current workers in the
field of Shakespearean studies; it sounds like a step back from such
modern advances as the new historicism, with its erstwhile (if offhand)
Cartesian assertion of "methodological self-awareness" that is meant to
carry it beyond whatever has preceded it. Cavell is not afraid to go back
to an older, romantic way of reading Shakespeare, before absorption in
character gave way to the unpacking of textual and contextual systems.
"The Avoidance of Love" is quite straightforward about this return:
"What has discouraged attention," Cavell wants to know, "from investigations of character?" (DK, p. 40). Cavell is quick to say that he does not
want to institute a new, or restore an old, critical method, call it putting
"words back into the characters speaking them" (DK, p. 41). His question is rather what, in shifting attention from character to language or
text or context, are we (ourselves, as readers) turning away from, or
trying to avoid? Whatever it is, it is something very close to what ordinary language philosophy was trying to get back to by turning away
from questions of propositional structure or logical form to questions
of what people say in this or that situation (what people say when). So in
fact it is not simply to Samuel Taylor Coleridge or A. C. Bradley that
Cavell returns, but to Austin, for "the issue," Cavell says, "is one of placing the words and experiences with which philosophers have always
begun in alignment with human beings in particular circumstances who
can be imagined to be having those experiences and saying and meaning those words. This is all that 'ordinary' in the phrase 'ordinary
language philosophy' means, or ought to mean" (DK, p. 42). So the idea
is to read Shakespeare by confronting his characters.
One of the regulating questions of "The Avoidance of Love" is why
we are no good at this sort of reading, why we shy away from it in favor
of purely formalist or historicist or other sorts of "approaches" that one
might teach in school. The reasons, Cavell thinks, are not methodological; or, if they are, method is being used (as usual) to repress the moral,
or the human. Part of his purpose in his reading of King Lear is to cure
us of this repression, call it the neurosis of method, by getting us to live
through the dramatic action of the play, as if (all this while) we had
been missing, avoiding-refusing-its
point. So what Cavell proposes is
to think through, once more, some of the oldest and most wearisome

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Gerald L. Bruns

Cavell's Shakespeare

questions about King Lear, principally the question of what motivates

Lear in the first place-what, in other words, motivates the action of
the play, including our own involvement with it.
The starting point is the question of seeing-what Paul Alpers, in a
famous essay, called the "sight pattern," that is, the whole theory of the
eyes in Lear.9 Our intellectual custom is to think of seeing in terms of
perception or empirical adequacy. Cavell gets us out from under our
empiricism by reminding us that, in Lear as elsewhere, eyes are as much
for weeping as for seeing, and also as much for recognizing other
people as for perceiving material objects (this last being what most
people think of when they think of themselves as seeing: the cat is on
the mat). The portion of the sight pattern that interests Cavell has to do
with the length to which people will go to avoid being seen. "The isolation and avoidance of eyes," he says, "is what the obsessive sight
imagery of the play underlines" (DK, p. 46). What is it to avoid another's eyes? Under what conditions, and by what stratagems, will one do
such a thing? In King Lear one avoids another's eyes most famously by
putting them out, but also, in various ways, by not looking back-by
not recognizing, or answering (that is, by refusing) the appeal of another's look, or presence, or existence. The subplot of Gloucester's
relation to his sons, mirroring, obviously, Lear's relation to his daughters, is a dialectic of avoidance: Gloucester will not recognize Edmund
as his son; Edgar will not disclose himself to (will not allow himself to be
recognized by) his father. Edgar's refusal to reveal himself, his delay on
this score, however puzzling by itself, is a key to the play because the
whole business of avoiding the eyes (the recognition) of another is the
expression of a fear of exposure, or say the expression of a sort of
foundational shame-a shame that cannot be accounted for by causal
explanation (the way, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre tried to account for
it by reminding us what it feels like when someone catches us looking
through a keyhole): hence the enigma, but also the obviousness, of the
opening scene of Lear, in which Lear's behavior defies explanation, but
is not implausible for all of that (we do, after all, follow his behavior,
watch what comes of it). Foundational shame is, on Cavell's reading,
what Lear feels; it is what sets the tragedy going.
"My hypothesis," Cavell says, "will be that Lear's behavior in this
[the opening] scene is explained by . . . the attempt to avoid recognition, the shame of exposure, the threat of self-revelation" (DK, pp. 5758). The opening scene is a ritual of avoidance that Cordelia explodes
with her directness. (Cavell stages this scene by imagining an oratorical
performance, or competition, in which Lear, Goneril, and Regan
9. See Paul J. Alpers, "King Lear and the Theory of the 'Sight Pattern,'" in In
Defense of Reading: A Reader's Approach to Literary Criticism, ed. Reuben A. Brower and
Richard Poirier (New York, 1962), pp. 133-52.

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Critical Inquiry

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619

address the assembled court rather than one another; whereas Cordelia, when she answers Lear so famously--"Nothing, my lord"-speaks
directly to him, conceivably looks him squarely in the eye, means to say
something to him, yet is still unintelligible in his terms.) Lear turns on
Cordelia because he knows, or fears, from her directness, possibly from
her look, anyhow from her refusal to play the game, that she can't feign
feigning but genuinely loves him: and it is this love (Cavell thinks) Lear
cannot bear. "For some spirits," says Cavell, "to be loved knowing you
cannot return that love is the most radical of psychic tortures" (DK, p.
61): a torture specially fitted to fathers, dispensers (so we seem) of children. The torture is that love, or the world, is not to be dispensed with:
it always constitutes itself as a claim on our self-possession-a claim that
disrupts our self-possession by forcing us out of the mode of knowing
into that of answering, out of the mode of just seeing what is there
before us, taking it in, into the mode of having to respond, of going out
and owning up: what Cavell calls, crucially, acknowledgment. On the
difference, and internal connection, between knowledge and acknowledgment, Cavell stakes himself as a philosopher.'
The question of what sort of philosopher Cavell is has been
confused by efforts to link him up with Jacques Derrida. The similarion the relation of philosophy and
ties between them-superficially
literature, more urgently on how they read Heidegger (they are, in
their different ways, Heidegger's best readers)-seem worth trying to
sort out, but neither Cavell nor Derrida is up to this task: they are
concerned mainly with their own histories and find one another's writings opaque." Much more to the point is the way Cavell's thinking
coheres with the work of Emmanuel Levinas, principally in the
phenomenology of the Other that Levinas develops in Totalityand Infinity.12Whereas Cavell concentrates on the eyes, Levinas works out the
question of the Other in terms of our encounter with the face. The face
for Levinas is the privileged mode in which the Other presents itself.
The face cannot be objectified, can never just be seen (unless we spy on
it from behind a curtain or a mirror), because the moment I look at it I
am transformed, that is, the moment I see it turned toward me, or
10. See Cavell, "Knowing and Acknowledging," Must We Mean What We
Say?A Book
of Essays (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 238-66. Cavell stresses in several places in his work that
he does not "propose the idea of acknowledging as an alternative to
knowing but rather
as an interpretation of it" (In Quest of the Ordinary, p. 8). So that in
forgoing knowing one
is not giving up reason, good sense, or even, on a certain view, philosophy. One is rather
simply resituating oneself with respect to the world, or to other people, in a new, or
perhaps just ordinary, way.
11. See Cavell, "Skepticism and a Word Concerning Deconstruction," In
Quest of the
Ordinary, pp. 130-36. In "Politics as Opposed to What?" (pp. 191-98) Cavell comments
on the deconstructionists' misreading ofJ. L. Austin.
12. See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans.
Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, 1969); hereafter abbreviated TI.

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620

Cavell's Shakespeare

possibly even not as yet regarding me, I am under a claim that puts
cognition out of account: a claim, that is, that cannot be made intelligible by cognition, is incompatible with it. The face is irreducible,
"refractory to categories" (TI, p. 40); it is, Levinas says, "present in its
refusal to be contained" (TI, p. 194)-Cordelia's sort of refusal. "The
face resists possession, resists my powers .... The expression the face
introduces into the world does not defy the feebleness of my powers,
but my ability for power" (TI, pp. 197-98). In Cavell's language, the
face situates us in the condition of the skeptic. Our relation to the face,
to the Other, is not one of knowing (see DK, p. 95); on the contrary, the
face, like the world (as the world) requires me to forgo knowing-but
all this means is that I can no longer maintain myself, except at a cost
(loss of the world, of intimacy with the world), in the condition of the
sealed-off subject of epistemology (the detached observer, the transcendental spectator, the maker of stratagems and player of parts, the
wearing of antic dispositions): as a consciousness I am, in Levinas's
phrase, turned inside out "'like a cloak.'""' It is this exposure that
Cavell sees played out in the life of skepticism, and in Shakespeare's
tragedies.

The Step Back

Played out, interestingly, in such a way that we who watch, or read,
cannot keep our critical distance except by shutting our eyes to what
happens, remaining, as if concealing ourselves, in the dark. "What,"
Cavell wants to know, "is the medium of this drama, how does it do its
work upon us?" Cavell answers with a highly condensed hermeneutical
essay on reading (not watching) King Lear:
My reading of King Lear will'have fully served its purpose if it
provides data from which an unprejudicial description of its
"work" can be composed. One such description would be this: The
medium is one which keeps all significance continuously before our
senses, so that when it comes over us that we have missed it, this
discovery will reveal our ignorance to have been willful, complicitous, a refusal to see. This is a fact of my experience in reading the
play (it is not a fact of my experience in seeing the play, which may
say something either about its performability or about the performances I have seen of it, or about the nature of performances
generally). It is different from the experience of comprehending
meanings in a complex poem or the experience of finding the sense
of a lyric. These are associated with the thrill of recognition, an
13. Levinas, Otherwisethan Being or BeyondEssence, trans. Lingis (The Hague, 1981),
p. 48.

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Critical Inquiry

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621

access of intimacy, not with a particular sense of exposure. The

progress from ignorance to exposure, I mean the treatment of an
ignorance which is not to be cured by information (because it is not
caused by a lack of information), outlines one motive to philosophy; this is a reason for calling Shakespeare's theater one of
philosophical drama. [DK, p. 85]
Not much of this will make sense from the analytic standpoint of most
forms of modern criticism, where the play is a play of signifiers, a text,
not a play of characters, of people more or less like those we run up
against in ordinary forms of life. Cavell's hermeneutics is a species of
romantic hermeneutics, where understanding means understanding
other people, not texts or meanings or even intentions, that is, understanding the other as other."4 What is romantic about romantic
hermeneutics is that, like skepticism, it is an allegory of frustrated
desire, call it (in Friedrich Schleiermacher's formula) understanding
the other first as well as, then even better than, she understands herself,
a task that requires that we seal ourselves off from what we would
know, whence we obtain our definition of objectivity. This, as I have
is the first romantic as Cavell,
mentioned, is Othello's desire-Othello
is
on a certain view, is the last: else how it that he understands the Moor
so well? What Cavell understands, of course, are just those hermeneutical limits that Othello doesn't see, refuses to be bound by: limits
imposed by the otherness of Desdemona and the claim this carries. In
Cavell's reading this claim is mediated sharply by Desdemona's sexuality, which fills Othello with fear and loathing masked as jealous rage
because it is something (she is something) beyond his control; she
exposes him to the part of himself he cannot conquer. As Cavell says,
"He cannot forgive Desdemona for existing, for being separate from
him, outside, beyond command, commanding, her captain's captain"
(DK, p. 136). (Othello, on this reading, is an allegory of the philosopher
and his body. One recalls Descartes's great line in the Discourse: "I then
examined closely what I was, and saw that I could imagine that I had no
body."15This is, in a sense, our modernist version of philosophical asceticism: basic body-denial.)
The idea, if I understand, is roughly this: Skepticism affirms, in
Cavell's motto, "unknowableness from outside" (DK, p. 29), which
pretty much puts paid to any spectator-theory of knowing. But we could
interpret knowing more intimately, not as if knowing another from the
14. See Bruns, "The Interpretation of Character in Jane Austen," Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in LiteraryHistory (New Haven, Conn., 1982), pp. 11124, and "Wordsworth at the Limits of Romantic Hermeneutics," The Centennial Review
(forthcoming).
15. Ren6 Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations, trans. Laurence J. Lafleur
(Indianapolis, 1960), p. 25.

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Gerald L. Bruns

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inside out, knowing secrets-this

was still romanticism's desire, and
Freud's: to turn the Other inside out, exposing all that is hidden, laying
the human being bare all the way down-but as if turning ourselves
inside out, which is what the idea of acknowledgment comes to, rather
the way Heidegger's listening and Hans-Georg Gadamer's openness
and Levinas's "non-allergic" ethical relation imply a turning of the
subject inside out, exposing it, giving up the will to explain and desire
for absolute self-possession, dropping the Enlightenment project of
conceptual control and technological production (whereby we try to
shake down the threat of skepticism with theories of worldmaking).
Cavell does not so much throw in with this Heideggerian critique of
modernism as appropriate it in behalf of EmersonWith his 'jealousy," Othello's violence studies the human use of
knowledge under the consequence of skepticism. This violence in
human knowing is, I gather, what comes out of Heidegger's
perception that philosophy has, from the beginning, but ... with
increasing velocity in the age of technology, conceived knowledge
under the aegis of dominion, of the concept of a concept as a
matter, say, of grasping a thing. In Kant this concept of the
concept is pictured as that of synthesizing things, putting together
appearances, yoking them, to yield objects of knowledge: Knowledge itself is explicitly, as opposed to the reception of sensuous
intuition, an active thing-Kant says spontaneous; intuitions alone
occur to us passively .... I have claimed elsewhere ["Thinking of
Emerson"] that Emerson contests Kant on this fundamental
ground of the Critiqueof Pure Reason. Or if Kant himself is ambivalent about this matter, then Emerson may be seen to contest the
ambivalence, putting his weight on the side of receptiveness, of,
say, intelligible intuition. [DK, p. 9]
The key word is "receptiveness," which might well serve as a partial
translation of Heidegger's Gelassenheit, nonviolent thinking, letting-be
or (as I prefer) letting-go, which comes out as "abandonment" in
Cavell's reading of Emerson:'6 abandonment, not as of children or tasks
but rather as a giving up of oneself before these things (children, tasks,
condition
lovers, language, the world as made of other people)-a
wild
abanfrom
could
would
for
not,
not,
Plato,
example,
distinguish
if
as
calls
what
into,
don,
away from
thinking
poetry (Dichten)
consummate
Unitarian
with
and
which
Emerson,
dignity,
philosophy,
summarizes in his word "Whim" ("we cannot spend the day in
explanation"). 17
16. Cavell, The Senses of Walden, p. 136.
17. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," Essays:First Series, vol. 2 of The Collected
Worksof Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson, Joseph Slater, and Jean Ferguson
Carr (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 30.

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Critical Inquiry

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623

For literary criticism as we know and practice it, this would mean
taking a "step back" (in Heidegger's metaphor) from the analytical attitude, or say the sort of methodological self-consciousness that asserts
itself (Descartes-like, against all that has preceded it) in terms of
"strategies" and "approaches" to a textual object or contextual or
pantextual systems containing every conceivable network or region of
discourse. In contrast to criticism as something strategic and instrumental, where even "reader-response criticism" is thought of as a technique,
Cavell proposes that we confront the characters whom we see on the
stage (see DK, p. 102). What this confrontation amounts to, whether it
is anything that can be made intelligible in the languages of current
critical theory, is something that needs to be worked out. Evidently, if I
understand Cavell, we need to imagine putting ourselves, in some
sense, in the presence of the characters we are reading about or watching, exposing ourselves to them as to something other than textual
functions, occupying their present (see DK, pp. 104-5). This is something else besides psychological projection, but it is hard to know what
it could mean, if it does not mean, in some very familiar sense,
identifying with these characters, finding some internal connection with them,
taking them as, in some sense, irreducible to mere representations-in
other words, taking them as not really intelligible as (just) fictions. Not
wanting to take characters as fictions, as mere products of imaginative
projection, is what Cavell has learned from Othello's horrifying example of what his (Othello's) imagination did to Desdemona. It is what
makes psychoanalysis interesting to Cavell as a critical language-a
language, however, that he turns inside out, as if to place the Shakespearean text in the analyst's chair and ourselves on the couch. As if it
were the task of tragedy to cure us of something, say of philosophy, or
of literary criticism.
This would be Martha Nussbaum's view, for example, or her
version of Aristotle's view, that what tragedy cures us of is exactly the
sort of desire for self-sufficiency that someone like Socrates tries to
arouse in us.18We recognize this desire in the very idea of "First Philosophy," in Descartes's Meditations, in Immanuel Kant's "What Is
Enlightenment?" and Edmund Husserl's dream of a rigorous, self-justifying philosophy that watches over, criticizes, but finally claims to be
outside of the human lifeworld. Literary critics don't quite see this
desire at work in their methodological self-assertions, but not seeing
this desire is just the neurotic symptom Cavell is trying to understand.
Cavell recognizes this desire in each of the plays he studies, each of
them being readable as a version of philosophy's quarrel with itself--its
18. See Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness:Luck and Ethics in GreekTragedy and Philosophy(Cambridge, 1986), esp. pp. 378-94. I try to situate Nussbaum's work
in a context formed by Heidegger and Cavell in "Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy," forthcoming in Soundings.

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quarrel over, for example, how much different it wants to be, can
afford to be, needs to be, from literature: Does it, for example, really
want to seal itself off from whimsical, gay, uncontrollable language,
repressing memorable stories and outrageous puns in favor of what
Habermas calls "the propositional style of philosophic discourse"?

Philosophyand Aestheticism
Cavell sees in the character of Coriolanus the philosopher who, like
Socrates, cannot imagine sharing existence with ordinary human beings
-cannot imagine abiding, seriously, with people who (as philosophers
delight to say) "just talk" (see DK, p. 143). Coriolanus is a figure, or
instance, of the philosopher as rigorous male who desires self-grounding, that is, who finds himself loathsome just to the extent that he has to
accept himself as fathered by someone else, someone not himself,
fathered, one might say, in the ordinary way, between the sheets, and
so belonging to the world no differently from the rest of us. Cavell's
essay on Coriolanus (titled "Coriolanus and Interpretations of Politics")
tries out various sorts of critical questioning, including the question of
what it is to understand, or even be, a Shakespearean play, and also the
question of how to make intelligible the political impact of such a play,
but what Cavell most of all wants to get at is, romantically, the motivation of the character, Coriolanus. And, as if in digression from the main
issue, he hits squarely upon it: "The mother relation is so overwhelmingly present in this play that we may not avoid wondering, at least
wondering whether we are to wonder, what happened to the father"
(DK, p. 156). Cavell lays out a number of speculations on this score ("in
decreasing order of obviousness" [DK, p. 156]), saving the best for last:
Third, and so little obvious as to be attributable to my powers of
hallucination, Coriolanus's effort at mythological identification as
he sits enthroned and entranced before Rome is an effort-if one
accepts one stratum of description I shall presently give of him-to
come unto the Father. (I shall not go into the possibilities here, or
fantasies, that a patrician matron is simultaneously father-mother,
or that, in replacing his father, he becomes his own father.) [DK, p.
157]
But isn't this last possibility, becoming one's own father, the whole
point? Isn't it, for example, the prime motivation of modern philosophy, not to say of modernism itself (with its foundational quarrel
against the ancients duplicating or echoing philosophy's ancient quarrel
with poetry)? What is the cogito if not a moment, or seeming experience, of self-fathering? What was the point of all that doubting?

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It is worth a moment's reflection that the literary equivalent of the

example, Stephen Dedalus,
rigorous philosopher is the aesthete-for
whose name is allegorical of his desire for "mythological identification,"
and who seeks in art a sacrament of transubstantiation that will redeem
ordinary flesh and blood, transfigure it into something, call it a "human
it is
form divine," worthy of contemplation. It is no accident-indeed,
of
whole
scheme
aesthetic
Stephen
modernity-that
requisite to the
constructs, among other fantasies, a theory of Shakespeare in which (in
Buck Mulligan's wonderful phrase) "he proves by algebra that Hamlet's
grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost
of his own father. -What? Haines said, beginning to point at Stephen.
He himself?"'9 In the Scylla and Charybdis or library episode of Ulysses,
the exposition of this theory gets a little garbled because Stephen,
Simon D.'s son, and an ordinary Dubliner after all, is drunk, but
enough of it gets through for us to pick out its deep structure:
"Fatherhood," Stephen says, "in the sense of conscious begetting, is
unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from
only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the
madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of
Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because
founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon
incertitude, upon unlikelihood" (U, p. 170). Cavell has Coriolanus desiring, Christ-like, to "come unto the Father," sit at His right hand,
transcendent to all beginnings (DK, p. 157). The only society Stephen,
Coriolanus-like, can imagine for himself, the only order in which he can
see himself really existing, is the Trinity, where he would fit in roughly
where God the Son does, that is, as someone who is not fathered in any
only begotten Son of the Father,
ordinary way but only begotten-the
who is Himself unbegotten, hence the uncaused cause, but only in
virtue of his self-identity, his divine oneness, with the Son and the Holy
Ghost. What clicks in Stephen's mind is that only begotten and "onlie
begetter" are of the same nature, consubstantial, present to one
another from all eternity, belonging (in other words) to the same absolute present, enjoying the same absolute priority with respect to what is
merely generated, the ground of all generations: "He Who Himself
begot middler the Holy Ghost and Himself sent Himself, Agenbuyer,
between Himself and others, Who, put upon by His fiends, stripped and
whipped, was nailed like a bat to the barndoor, starved on crosstree,
Who let Him bury, stood up, harrowed hell, fared into heaven and
there these nineteen hundred years sitteth on the right hand of His
Own Self" (U, p. 162). Students of the Jesuits will warmly appreciate
Stephen's emphasis that he is embracing esoteric heresy here19. JamesJoyce, Ulysses(1934; New York, 1986), p. 15; hereafter abbreviated U.

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"Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the field,
held that the Father was Himself His Own Son" (U, p. 171)-but the
main point concerns the philosophical myth of Letztbegrulndungthat this
heresy so vividly clarifies. As Stephen says, Rome (read: Philosophy, or
Modernity) represses-in a way, interestingly, that Judaism does notthe whole concrete fact of maternity, that is, ordinary nonmiraculous
sexual generation, in favor of a self-grounding, self-contained, selfsufficient, patriarchal Being (uncontaminated by the sexuality of the
Other). If you ask, Wherever did we get the idea of becoming philosophers? here you begin to get your answer. The idea of self-sufficiency
could not, on a certain view, not have occurred to us.
Historically, Stephen's Shakespeare-theory, like Cavell's, belongs
to the same hermeneutical milieu as Bradley's and Freud's, where character is all in all, and where understanding, therefore, means understanding Shakespeare's characters as we understand ourselves, and vice
versa. Stephen's theory is a proto- or parapsychoanalytic theory to the
extent that it depends on our seeing in Shakespeare's tragedies the
deep structure of a family romance, where fathers and sons, wives and
lovers, brothers and sisters, mothers and daughters, torment, betray,
and destroy one another within intricate, unstable networks of shifting,
multiple identities. This deep structure binds us to these tragedies,
implicates us in them as we are implicated, tangled, in our own lives.
We can only remain detached observers by sealing ourselves off in
analytic space, that is, in a purely technical, Cartesian self-consciousness,
or else in the sort of aesthetic consciousness that Stephen aspires to,
and within which he wants to remake the world, thereby ridding
himself of it and of his own ordinariness in the bargain.
Stephen helps us to see the subtle but important difference
between confronting a character, in Cavell's sense, and projecting
oneself onto a character, appropriating him, reducing his otherness to
one's own self-identity, situating him in one's own present. For Stephen
is, in his way, not a detached reader of Hamlet, in whose hero he encounters his own disappointment with life and his own desire, amounting to
a sense of mission, to revenge himself upon it, set it right, be, therefore,
his (true, consubstantial) father's son. There are two sets of equations in
Stephen's Hamlet-theory, one transcendentalGod the Father Daedalus ("oldfather artificer") Shakespeare(as the Ghost)
Hamlet
God the Son
Stephen("TheDaedalus")
-and

one ordinary:
Claudius
Hamlet

Simon
Stephen

Gertrude
Stephen'sMother

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627

What links the two planes is just the story of Hamlet, that is, a story of
usurpation, infidelity, and sexual debasement in which ordinary life is
finally exposed for what it is, a prison house (a Dublin) in which mythological identity is displaced by an ironic naturalism. Whence there is
nothing for it but to hang on to oneself as best one can:
We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old
men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and
wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the
lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call
dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and
butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages,
glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.
-Eureka! Buck Mulligan cried. Eureka! [U, p. 175]
So, in the Joycean economy, Stephen's dream of self-sufficiency-of
encountering in the real world the unsubstantial image of himself that
his soul constantly beholds-finds
its fulfillment, or anyhow one of its
in
Buck
expressions,
Mulligan's parody of a Shakespearean tragedy,
EverymanHis Own Wife
or
A Honeymoonin the Hand
(a national immoralityin threeorgasms)

by

BallockyMulligan
[U, p. 178]
Exactly where the coherence of philosophy and aestheticism takes
place is pinpointed by Cavell in his reading of Coriolanus, which turns,
he says, on "an interpretation that takes skepticism as a form of narcissism," where narcissism, as the dream, or desire, of self-sufficiency,
expresses itself as "a kind of denial of an existence shared with others,"
hence a denial of the political, which means principally (for Cavell) a
denial of the human (DK, p. 143).20 This comes out also in Cavell's reading of The Winter's Tale, another family romance of jealousy and
revenge, where the skeptical dilemma takes the form of not knowing,
not being self-certain, that your son is your own: a dilemma that is the
expression of a frustrated desire to be one's own son. (What criteria are
there for determining that this person before me is my son? This ques20. Not surprisingly, Molly Bloom associates Stephen with Bloom's statue of
Narcissus ("theres real beauty and poetry for you" [U, p. 638]).

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tion is a version of the question about criteria that animates the first
part of The Claim of Reason, which is about our inevitable disappointment with criteria, a disappointment played out in The Winter's Tale
when Leontes examines the face of his son and fails to find any recognizable features there; so, not seeing himself, Narcissus-like, mirrored
in that face-missing, in other words, the obvious moral to be drawn,
that sonship requires acknowledgment in order to exist, not vice versa
-he refuses recognition, rouses himself instead to jealousy, and sets
the whole tragedy, or near-tragedy, in motion, according to a familiar
economy: "Taking the jealousy as derivative of the sense of revenge
upon life, upon its issuing, or separating, or replicating, I am taking it
as, so to speak, the solution of a problem in computation or economy,
one that at a stroke solves a chain of equations, in which sons and brothers are lovers, and lovers are fathers and sons, and wives and mothers
become one another" [DK, p. 213].)

Cavell's PhilosophicalHermeneutics
Cavell's intuition is that there is some internal connection between
the condition of Shakespeare's tragic heroes, their narcissism, for
example, and our relation to these plays, which we seek to make
answerable to our methods. What's the point of our analytical desire to
keep these plays, or perhaps these heroes, under our readerly control?
We can't let them break out, Brecht-like, of the frame in which they are
intelligible to us the way, for example, that lago is intelligible as a character out of the morality play tradition, or as a Machiavel, or as something in some way intertextual. But why not? What are we afraid of?
Why must we keep our distance? How can these characters hurt us?
What's at stake in reading Shakespeare, where reading is no longer one
of the methodological operations of an interpretive community? What
is it to read Shakespeare (or any literary text) out of school?
Cavell points toward part of an answer when he asks about understanding "what a Shakespearean play is" (DK, p. 156). It is not like
knowing an object but is rather like the encounter with an Other. This
implies something very close to the dialogical notion of reading that
Gadamer develops in his philosophical hermeneutics. By dialogue
a situaGadamer means not just a certain kind of speech-situation-not
tion of intersubjectivity-but rather the critical condition in which, for
example, characters in Plato's dialogues find themselves when they run
up against Socrates, who puts them (and not just their answers to his
questions) in question. This condition is one of openness, which is not
the open-mindedness of liberal pluralism but exposure in a sense very
like the one that Cavell gives this term: exposure to the Other, in which

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Critical Inquiry

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our self-possession, or say our existence, is at stake.2' This is not much

different from the notion of exposure that turns up in the tradition of
satire. There is a sense in which every literary text is satirical with
respect to its readers. In Gadamer's hermeneutics this means that the
text resists the conceptual framework in which we try to enclose it in
order to make sense of it, that is, it resists our understanding and interpretation in just such a way as to bring into the foreground (expose) the
historicality, the situatedness or conditioned character-the limits-of
our hermeneutical situation. Gadamer speaks of this historicality in
terms of prejudices, but what he has in mind is not just the subjective
attitude of prejudgment and expectation but also the cultural formations, the social, political, and intellectual constructions, within which
our encounter with the text occurs, and which the text always unsettles,
always puts at risk, though we may miss it. Reading in this sense always
resembles the working out, as if against the will of the reading subject,
of a critique of consciousness. It is this critique that methodological
reading-programs of the sort one finds in literary criticism, including
(paradoxically perhaps) the formal techniques of critique that one finds
in various Marxisms and in Habermas, tend to repress.
Cavell formulates this idea according to a psychoanalytic analogy in
which the text unfolds a narrative of our repression, or say a dumb
show of our darkest secrets and deepest fears, as in the case of Hamlet:
And we already know that the urgency for Hamlet in proving the
Ghost's veracity is not alone to convince himself (at least) of Claudius's guilt but to avoid the only other conclusion-that
his
"imaginations are as foul / as Vulcan's smithy" (III, ii, 83-84). It
seems to me that our eagerness to believe the Ghost is fortified by a
similar concern over the potentially foul condition of our own
imaginations. Moreover, since Hamlet tortures and guides himself
to put the Ghost's veracity to the proof, any unwillingness on this
matter on our part suggests a claim to superiority over Hamlet's
intellect that strains belief, I should say that I simply assume that by
his "imaginations" Hamlet is referring not alone to Claudius as a
murderer but to the vivid pictures he paints of Claudius as his
mother's lover. [DK, p. 183]
It's important to emphasize that Cavell is not practicing psychoanalytic
criticism here, that is, not proposing a psychoanalytic reading or interpretation of the play, but is, on the contrary, trying to say what it is for
us, as readers, to confront(or not) Shakespeare's characters, be exposed
to them-caught,
as if in a space in front of the text, with everyone
21. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer
and Donald Marshall (New York, 1989), pp. 341-79.

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suddenly watching us. The point would not be, obviously, to read
Shakespeare in order to produce this exposure, supposing that we knew
what this would mean in every instance of reading, but to recognize the
extent to which our exposure is what occurs in the nature of the case, as
if one could not exclude such an event from the act of reading (reading
is not spying, or if it is, think of it as, Polonius-style, risky). Cavell likes
to phrase this by saying that there is no reading that is not also a beingread. (What is it to be seen by a play? Perhaps Claudius knows, if he was
watching.)
Cavell has tried to suggest what this might mean in his essay on the
politics of interpretation, "Politics as Opposed to What?" where he says
that what is political about interpretation is precisely its dialogical character, where the idea is that we cannot claim to have read a text,
understood and interpreted it, unless we can say how it has read us, that
is, unpacked us, laid us bare, opened us to critical scrutiny, that is, to a
questioning to which we cannot adequately respond without being
altered in some fundamental way. Gadamer calls this having a
"hermeneutical experience," in which the encounter with the text
subjects us to a dialectical reversal, a radical restructuring of our selfunderstanding that "always involves an escape from something that had
deceived us and held us captive."22 Like Gadamer, Cavell wants to
understand this condition of being read as redemptive or therapeutic,
that is, emancipatory, releasing us from some species of mental bondage. "For most of us, I believe," Cavell says, "the idea of redemption or
redemptive reading and interpretation will not be credible apart from a
plausible model or picture of how a text can be therapeutic, that is,
apart from an idea of the redemptive as psychological."23 Our relation
to the text in this event would not take the form of a projection but
rather of a transference in which the text maps itself onto our own situation and gives it, so to say, a language in which it will out, like murder.
Some such transference is what takes place in our reading of Hamlet,
says Cavell, when it comes over us that "Hamlet's actions, not just his
dreams, are our dreams" (DK, p. 190).
All reading starts out from our sense of alienation from the text.
This is an old hermeneutical commonplace. But, like Gadamer, Cavell
understands that this alienation is not a barrier to be overcome but a
limit to be acknowledged. The idea is not to accommodate the text to
our way of thinking but to recognize its alienness, its otherness, as a
22. Ibid., p. 356. See Bruns, "On the Tragedy of Hermeneutical Experience,"
Research in Phenomenology 18 (1988): 191-201. It is important to emphasize, since the
point is frequently missed even by careful readers of Gadamer ("fit though few"), that
what gets restructured is not simply one's subjectivity, one's private self-relation, but also,
in the nature of the case, the world that one inhabits. From a hermeneutical standpoint at
any rate, tragedy is never simply an event in the tragic hero's subjective situation.
23. Cavell, "Politics as Opposed to What?" p. 199.

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question put to us, such that understanding the text will mean understanding this question, what it asks of us.24 Cavell calls this, in his
Coriolanus essay, allowing the text its autonomy, seeing it in its own
terms (DK, p. 144), but this is not the same as objectifying the text and
regarding it as an aesthetic object that is to be understood only in relation to itself (autotelic); rather it means something like understanding
the resistance of the text, its refusal ("Nothing, my lord"). In "Politics as
Opposed to What?" this otherness is characterized in terms of the
textualityof the text, its implacable silence, its resistance to interpretation. How is it, Cavell wonders, that "the stillness of the text the
achievement of which perhaps constitutes textuality, or a text's selfcontainedness, should be interpretable politically as a rebuke and
confrontation and be interpretable epistemologically as the withholding of assertion, on which I have found the defeat of skepticism, and of
whatever metaphysics is designed to overcome skepticism, to dependas if the withholding of assertion, the containing of the voice, amounts
to the forgoing of domination"?25 This stillness, this self-refusal, this
nonassertive reserve is exactly what Gadamer identifies as the Socratic
dimension of every text that comes down to us in tradition, as if it were
in the power of the text to reduce us to a state of aporia or bewilderment; as if the text, in the nature of the case, occupied the site that we
normally reserve for philosophy understood as a species of radical questioning.26 So it is not as if Cavell were levelling the "genre difference
between philosophy and literature"; rather it is as if literature and
philosophy were changing places.
At the end of his essay on Othello (which is also the last line of The
Claim of Reason), Cavell asks whether philosophy can become literature
"and still know itself?." (DK, p. 142). The answer to this question
24. Elsewhere I describe this as a difference between allegory and satire. See Bruns,
"What Is Tradition?" New LiteraryHistory(forthcoming).
25. Cavell, "Politics as Opposed to What?" p. 199.
26. See Gadamer, "Text and Interpretation," in Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy, ed. Brice Wachterhauser (Albany, N.Y., 1987):
The mere presence of the other before whom we stand helps us to break
up our
own bias and narrowness even before he opens his mouth to make a
reply. What
becomes a dialogical experience for us here is not restricted to the
sphere of arguments and counterarguments the exchange and unifications of which
may be the
end meaning of every confrontation. Rather, as the experiences that have been
described above indicate, there is something else in this experience,
namely, a
potentiality for otherness [Andersseins]that lies beyond every coming to agreement
about what is common. [Pp. 383-84]
The text inscribes this "something else" in the form of its own resistance to clarification.
This resistance is not simply a problem to be solved. The text is not
simply a philological
it makes its appearance in the form of a resistance that
object; phenomenologically,
brings our ability to understand and interpret up short. With respect to the text we are
always in a state of crisis between alienation and appropriation, translation and conversion. The temptation to revise the text runs up against the need to revise ourselves.

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appears to depend on what we think literature is, something on which

Cavell himself has remained silent, pointing, at most, to Shakespeare
and Walden ("I mean that over there"), obviously not wanting to get
hoist with his own petar. However, if we think of philosophy as something that can only begin in a response to an assertion, we can see the
sort of difficulty poetry poses for philosophy, insofar as poetry retains
its ancient character as the dark saying or ainigma, that which withholds
its saying, refuses itself, resists exegesis, forces us into the allegorical
posture of speaking in its behalf. This notion of poetry as the dark
saying is one that Heidegger recuperates in his conception of poetry as
Dichten, or that which thickens, darkens, grows dense or earthly (Die
Dichtung dichtet).2' The problem with poetry is not so much that its
representations are false as that its textuality or reserve, its self-refusal,
situates philosophy on the site of the skeptical dilemma and threatens to
prevent it from beginning. It plays, so to speak, Cordelia to philosophy's Lear. And so it must be banished.

27. See Bruns, Heidegger'sEstrangements,pp. 116-49.

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