Me, Myself, and Us

Autobiography and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell

Abstract

With the publication of Stanley Cavell’s autobiography, it has become possible to think about the role of autobiography in Cavell’s work as a whole. Some readers regard this book as recording Cavell’s achievement of his challenge to philosophy, as contained in the closing question of The Claim of Reason: Can philosophy become literature and still know itself? This question clearly resonates with the question of autobiography. And yet when we look at the work where Cavell begins to insist on the issue of autobiography and the first person pronoun, he first connections he draws are not from philosophy to literature but rather from the philosopher’s writing to philosophical method or, indeed we might say, to the authority of philosophy.