Thinking (America) After Cavell

On Learning and Becoming Different

Abstract

I read Stanley Cavell’s This New Yet Unapproachable America for the first time over a two-day bus ride from Montreal to Chicago. This happened a little bit more than a year ago, in March 2018, when I came back to the US, where I grew up undocumented.

The following essay tries to respond to that reading from both a deep attachment to Cavell’s writing and a wish to learn how to think after his picture of American thinking. Alternatively, I can also say that this essay is an attempt at sitting with an irresolvable pull between the unapproachability of things, and the need of confronting the world with itself along the lines in which it meets in a series of topics and a place.