“Hello, Stranger”

Acknowledgment and Self-Knowledge

Abstract

Cavell’s main ideas form an interconnected whole. Hence, it is no surprise that perfectionism pervades virtually everything he wrote on, from his studies on Emerson all the way through his publications on Film, including his groundbreaking reading of Wittgenstein.

In this paper, I will explore the Cavellian themes of skepticism and avoidance as they appear in Part IV of The Claim of Reason through the lens of perfectionism by examining three short passages from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Proust’s novel is mentioned in Cavell’s list of perfectionist works, and for good reason: it is all about how people change over time, in particular as it concerns the main story arc, in which the protagonist reaches a hard-won perspective on life and art only at the very end.

But the subject matter of perfectionism appears here and there in the novel in different forms as well. The passages studied in this contribution are about the Princesse Sherbatoff, a character who struggles to connect with others and, I will argue, who also struggles to be in touch with her own self. The Princesse avoids others but also her “best” self, and this is a tragedy in a Cavellian sense. Her resistance to get to know, and to connect with, a better version of herself – one that she tends to avoid – allows us to see Cavell’s perfectionism under the perspective of skepticism.

Thus, I hope to highlight mainly two things: First, how the issues of skepticism and avoidance in Cavell’s The Claim of Reason translate naturally into the issue of knowing oneself, and second, how these skeptical considerations relate to another theme dear to Cavell, namely perfectionism.