C14 CFP: The Perfected Cavell

Guest Editor: Rex Butler (Monash University)
Please email abstracts as an MS Word attachment to rex.butler@monash.edu

Deadline for abstracts (max. 300 words): September 1st, 2026
Notification of acceptance: December 1st, 2026
Deadline for articles: June 1st, 2027
Planned publication date: December, 2027

It is easy to see Cavell as a modest incrementalist, whose “perfectionism” means that we forever approach, without ever actually attaining, democracy, self-understanding and appropriate relations with others. It would be something like that “long arc of the moral universe” spoken of by the Emerson-influenced Transcendentalist minister Theodore Parker and subsequently repeated by Barack Obama. But what if Cavell were not like this? In fact, if we read him closely, he is a totalizing philosopher and sees philosophy as totalizing. And it is only through or as this totalization that we can see the limits to philosophy and what is left out by it.

Take just two statements from Cavell’s Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (1991). In the first, he makes the point that “perfectionism” is not some endless or incomplete aspiration. Rather, the self is at every moment attained, and it is only through or because of this that we can think what has been left out or excluded: “Perfectionism does not imply perfectibility… Each state of the self is, so to speak, final: each state constitutes a world (a circle, Emerson says) and it is one each one desires … On such a picture of the self one could say both that significance is always deferred and equally that it is never deferred”.

In the second, Cavell similarly makes the point that philosophy is not some gesturing to what has been left out or excluded, but rather a critical reflection upon why things are as they are, an attempt to think the transcendental conditions of possibility that just are the things they make possible: “A further implication, hinted at a moment ago in passing, is that our position is always (already) that of an attained self; we are from the beginning, that is from the time we can be described as having a self, a next, knotted… Unless you manage the reliance of the attained on the unattained/attainable, you are left in precisely the negation of the position [Emerson] calls for, left in conformity”.

It is exactly in this way that we would say Cavell is Nietzschean. What he gets from Emerson through Nietzsche is the thinking of that “shortest shadow” at noon: what is left out so that nothing is left out, that “imperfection” that means everything is perfect. It is in this sense that we would argue that Cavell, for all of his caution towards him and attempts to distance himself from him in such texts as Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome and A Pitch of Philosophy (1994), is like Derrida. Cavell’s imperfectionism or self-splitting perfectionism is equivalent to Derrida’s différance. It is not any kind of a simple absence, but a “lack” or “absence” that means there is only presence. In this regard, Cavell’s true philosophical lineage is not those “modernist” perfectionists like Kant, Mills and Emerson but the French post-modernists of his own generation of the 1960s to 1980s.

Cavell’s “scepticism”, like Derrida’s différance, Deleuze’s deterritorialization and Baudrillard’s simulation, is a kind of “doubling” that comes out of nowhere and splits the world into two, between it and its “transcendental” condition. It is not an actual “doubt”, but the thinking of what allows certainty. Indeed, we might say that in Cavell there is only doubt and there is no overcoming of this doubt, but it is just the thinking of this that is its overcoming. This “scepticism”, therefore, is an “event” in just the same sense that Cavell speaks of the “Wittgensteinian event”, in that it brings about both doubt and certainty when before there was nothing. Indeed, if Cavell’s work constitutes a proper philosophy, it precisely does not come out of history; it is not a matter of any “influence”. Rather, it comes out of nothing and retrospectively creates its own world. It is not a looking forward, as in the usual conception of perfectionism, but a looking back at its own after-effects. And it is exactly in this incomparability that we would compare Cavell’s work to those others.

Papers are invited in response to this newly “perfect” not “perfectionist” Cavell. How might we read his work not in terms of some forever deferred perfectibility but as an incessant reflection of what has been excluded to allow its perfection? As its own shadow at noon? It is perhaps to open up a different tone in reading Cavell’s work: not as accessible, approachable, popular or even populist, but as that of a “genius”. It would be a “genius”, however, as Cavell says of Emerson, who “must proceed without the option of forgoing this world for another place”. And what would be the proper response to Cavell when our task, like Cavell’s, like that of all proper philosophers, is to think the limits of his perfection, to “double” him in thinking of another reason for his work? It is to be “sceptical” towards him at the very moment he explains everything, is entirely correct and the world can only be seen through his eyes.