Stanley Cavell
         Ugly Duckling, Funny Butterfly: Bette Davis and Now,_Voyager
         One quality of remarriage comedies is that, for all their
            ingratiating manners, and for all the ways in which they are among
            the most beloved of Hollywood films, a moral cloud remains at the
            end of each of them. And that moral cloud has to do with what is
            best about them. What is best are the conversations that go on in
            them, where conversation means of course talk, but means also an
            entire life of intimate exchange between the principal pair. We are
            bound to remember from these films, even years after viewing them,
            something of their sound: of conversation between Cary Grant and
            Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth,or between Grant and Rosalind
            Russell in His Girl Friday,or Grant and Katharine in Bringing up
            Baby,or those two together with James Stewart in The Philadelphia
            Story,or between Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Adam's Rib.We
            feel that these people know one another, and they know how to play
            together (know and accept, you may say, the role of theater in
            their mutuality) in a way to make one happy and hope for the best.
            But the moral cloud has to do with what that conversation is meant
            to do, and what I say about those films is that the conversation is
            in service of the woman's sense of herself as in need of an
            education. Importantly for that reason, I call her a descendent of
            Nora in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House,who in one of the
            most celebrated moments in modern theater, ends a play by closing a
            door behind her. She leaves the dollhouse saying to her husband
            that she requires an education and that he is not the man who can
            provide it for her. The implication is that since he is not this
            man, he cannot (in logic) be her husband. And implying the contrary
            as well: if he were, then he would be, and their relationship would
            accordingly "miracle of
            miracles" constitute a marriage.
             
            Stanley Cavell is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and
            the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. His most recent
            works include In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and
            Romanticism (1989), This New Yet Unapproachable America (1989), and
            Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (forthcoming).
Stanley Cavell
         Postscript (1989): To Whom It May Concern
         Coming away from a first reading of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's
            "The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual
            Panic," my sense of its pertinence to what I have written on
            film melodrama is so urgent that I find myself unwilling to make
            public the foregoing latest installment of my thoughts on the
            subject without including some initial responses, however hurried
            and improvisatory they must be now, to the material she has so
            remarkably brought together. Her work, among other matters,
            proposes an understanding of James's "The Beast in the
            Jungle" that to my mind cannot sensibly be passed by in
            thinking further about James's achievement. Since in
            readdressing James's text in my preceding remarks about Now,
            Voyager,and specifying my reason in having adduced it at the end of
            my earlier account Letter from an Unknown Woman by describing that
            film's philosophical design relating the melodrama of
            the unknown woman to the woman's assignment (by whom?) to
            prove the man's existence, or preservation, to him, or for
            him, hence impossibly attempting to perform his cogito, the taking
            on of his subjectivity, overcoming his skepticism by accepting that
            subjectivity as undeniable I am understandably interested, to
            begin with, in tracing out the connection between things Sedgwick
            says about John Marcher's "two secrets" and
            things I have said about secrecy as a cover for the idea of
            "privacy" in Ludwig Wittgenstein's (skeptical)
            fantasy of a private language.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy
         The Nazi Myth
         What interests us and claims our attention in Nazism is,
            essentially, its ideology,in the definition Hannah Arendt has given
            of this term in her book on The Origins of Totalitarianism.In this
            work, ideology is defined as the totally self-fulfilling (and
            willfully self-fulfilling) logic of an idea, an idea "by
            which the movement of history is explained as one consistent
            process." "The movement of history and the logical
            process of this notion," Arendt continues, "are
            supposed to correspond to each other, so that whatever happens,
            happens according to the logic of one &lsquo;idea.'"2
            Ideology, in other words, interests us and claims our attention
            insofar as, on the one hand, it always proposes itself as a
            political explanation of the world, that is, as an explanation of
            history (or still further, if you wish, as an explanation of
            Weltgeschichte:not the "history of the world" but
            rather the "world-as-history," a world consisting only
            of a process, and the necessity of that process) on the basis of a
            single concept the concept of race, for example, or the
            concept of class and insofar as, on the other hand, this
            ideological explanation or conception of the world(Weltanschauung:
            vision, intuition, comprehensive grasp of the world a
            philosophical term of which National Socialism, as you will see,
            made great use) seeks to be a total explanation or conception. This
            totality signifies that the explanation is indisputable, leaving
            neither gaps nor remainders unlike philosophical thought,
            from which ideology shamelessly draws the greater part of its
            resources but which is characterized by a risky, problematic style,
            what Arendt calls the "insecurity" of philosophical
            questioning (OT,p. 470). (It follows, then, that philosophy is also
            rejected by the ideology that solicits it, and consigned to the
            incertitude and the timorous hesitations of
            "intellectuality.")
             
            2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; New York,
            1962), p. 469; hereafter abbreviated OT.
             
            Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy teach at the University
            of Human Sciences of Strasbourg, France, and are also visiting
            professors at the University of California, Berkeley. They are
            coauthors of The Literary Absolute (1988) and, related to the topic
            of politics, "The Jewish People Don't Dream"
            (Stanford Literary Review,Fall 1989). Lacoue-Labarthe is also the
            author of Typography (1989) and La Fiction du politique (1987;
            forthcoming in English). Nancy has written "Sharing
            Voices" in Transforming Hermeneutics (1989) and La Communauté
            désoeuvrée (1986; forthcoming in English). Brian Holmes is a
            doctoral candidate in romance languages and literatures at the
            University of California, Berkeley, and editor of the journal Qui
            Parle.He is currently at work on the parody of authorial identity
            in Cervantes and Flaubert.
Philip Fisher
         Jasper Johns: Strategies for Making and Effacing Art
         Within the strategy that we call avant-garde there are two sets of
            tactics, one immediate, the other long term. One set could be
            called a tactics of short-term attention, and it is this set that
            has been most often noticed. Shock, surprise, self-promotion, the
            baiting of middle-class solemnity, outrage, a subversive
            playfulness, a deliberate frustration of habitual expectations, an
            apparent difficult or refusal of communication, a banality where
            profundity and seriousness were earlier the norm: these are a few
            of the tactics that again and again appeared as part of the
            competitive marketplace strategy for advertising the new.
            To be a notorious artist was always halfway to becoming a famous
            one, and many were willing to take the chance that once conditions
            were right the slight move from notoriety to fame could be
            accomplished. These tactics made it clear that the problem for an
            artist within the modern period was first of all to stand out
            within a crowd, within a surplus of candidates for the few places
            available nationally or internationally. The rivalry for initial
            attention under modern conditions set every artist the question of
            how his own work might have clear identity and felt importance.
            This was, in an age of products and advertising, the problem of how
            to turn a style into a brand.
             
            Philip Fisher is professor of English at Harvard University and the
            author of Hard Facts (1985). The essay published here forms part of
            his forthcoming book Making and Effacing Art.He is currently at
            work on a book on the philosophical and literary history of the
            Passions.
Thomas McCarthy
         Private Irony and Public Decency: Richard Rorty's New_Pragmatism
         The hegemony of logical positivism was already on the wane in the
            1960s as a result of penetrating criticisms by thinkers both inside
            and outside the movement. But its legacy continued to exert a
            formative influence on the less doctrinaire and more diverse
            varieties of "analytic philosophy" that succeeded it.
            For one thing, occasional disclaimers to the contrary
            notwithstanding, the physical and formal sciences have continued to
            exercise a stranglehold on philosophical imagination. This has not
            excluded the development of more or less intimate relations with
            linguistics, especially formal linguistics, or a current love
            affair with cognitive science and artificial intelligence. But it
            has choked off any deep influence from the arts and humanities, as
            it has from history and the social sciences. And just because these
            latter domains have continued to be of central importance for
            Continental philosophy, we are left with the spectacle of
            "two philosophies" analytic and
            Continental mirroring the infamous split between the
            "two cultures." As part of the same syndrome, analytic
            philosophy has become increasingly professional and technical and,
            consequently, largely invisible to the wider culture; whereas
            Continental philosophy, largely invisible to the wider culture;
            whereas Continental philosophy, while far from popular, has
            nevertheless maintained its ties to culture and society at large.
            The public roles of Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault in France,
            or of Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas in Germany, have had no
            equivalent in American philosophy since the death of Dewey.
            Philosophers here think of themselves as scientists rather than as
            public intellectuals.
             
            Thomas McCarthy is professor of philosophy at Northwestern
            University. He is the author of The Critical Theory of Jürgen
            Habermas (1978). This essay is part of a work-in-progress on
            philosophy and critical theory.
Michael Ann Holly
         Past Looking
         The rest of this essay will contribute to the subversion of that
            distinction in the history of art, with the awareness that this
            would no longer be a timely issue in any other historical
            discipline. I engage in this task because of my sense that critical
            attention to the formal or rhetorical resonances between objects
            and the histories of art that inscribe them might provide an answer
            for the kind of historiographic experimentation that Burke and
            White have obliquely urged upon the historical profession in
            general.
            To be fair, the history of art is not exclusively what it once was:
            the conservator of elite objects and the preserver of a certain
            canon of values. A variety of critical challenges to this
            traditional role have animated the discipline during the last two
            decades, from the revisionism of feminist and Marxist readings to
            the interpretive paradigms of semiotics and psychoanalysis, and yet
            one certainly needs to acknowledge that, for the most part, these
            challenges have originated outside the confines of art history
            proper.
            The metahistorical task of discovering some theme or issue shared
            by this plurality of re-visions need not necessarily prove
            unilluminating. The concentration on the gaze as an interpretive
            principle cuts across a wide sampling of recent theoretical
            perspectives. Paintings are, after all, meant to be looked at, so
            it should come as no surprise that the investigation of who or what
            is presumed to be doing the looking is now viewed as a critically
            unsettling issue in post-structuralist writings on art.
             
            Michael Ann Holly is associate professor and chair of the
            department of art and art history at the University of Rochester.
            She is the author of Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History
            (1984) and co-editor, with Norman Bryson and Keith Moxey, of Visual
            Theory (1989).
Daniel Brudney
         Knowledge and Silence: The Golden Bowl and Moral_Philosophy
         When literary texts are included in a course on moral philosophy
            they tend to be classical tragedies or existentialist novels: texts
            filled with major moral transgressions and agonized debates over
            rights, wrongs, and relativism. Recently, however, the focus of
            much discussion on literature and moral philosophy has been Henry
            James's last novel, The Golden Bowl.This ought to seem
            surprising. For The Golden Bowl is a quintessential Jamesian novel.
            Almost nothing happens.In the course of more than five hundred
            pages there are two marriages, one affair, and a single act of
            violence, the smashing of the golden bowl. The rest is reflection,
            nuance, detail: the creation and preservation of a
            "&lsquo;brilliant, perfect surface,'" one
            "scarcely more meant to be breathed upon, it would seem, than
            the cheek of royalty."1 There are no extreme actions or high-
            flown speculations. The moral issues among the four central
            characters either go unspoken or are raised expressly to be
            suppressed, banished from articulation. And what counts as the
            expression of the moral maturity and insight of the heroine, Maggie
            Verver, is her extraordinary ability to keep the truth silen00to
            put it precisely, to lie. If even there was a novel in which the
            protagonists shied away from moral debate,it is The Golden Bowl.
            The challenge for the philosophical critic, it seems to me, is to
            argue that it is just this stress on surface and silence that makes
            this novel of interest to moral philosophers, that makes it
            exemplary for how literature can do something philosophically
            important that philosophy cannot.
             
            1. Henry James, The Golden Bowl (Harmondsworth, 1966), pp. 445,
            172; hereafter cited by page number.
             
            Daniel Brudneyis an assistant professor of philosophy at the
            University of Chicago.
Jerome Christensen
         From Rhetoric to Corporate Populism: A Romantic Critique_of_the
            Academy in an Age of High Gossip
         If you are anything like me, you may feel yourself unsure of what,
            as a critic these days, you ought to be talking about whether
            literature qua literature, literature as rhetoric, literature as
            politics or as history, whether about the persistence of
            romanticism or the waxing of postmodernism, the decline of Yale or
            the rise of Duke. If, like me, you are puzzled by what we now ought
            to be about, you may also be like Paul de Man, who bespoke a
            similar concern: "In a manner that is more acute for
            theoreticians of literature than for theoreticians of the natural
            or the social world, it can be said that they do not quite know
            what it is they are talking about, … that, whenever one is supposed
            to speak of literature, one speaks of anything under the sun
            (including, of course, oneself) except literature. The need for
            determination," de Man concludes, "thus becomes all the
            stronger as a way to safeguard a discipline which constantly
            threatens to degenerate into gossip, trivia or self-
            obsession,"1
            De Man's wishes are rarely fulfilled, and this instance is no
            exception. Despite the critic's determinations, theory, it
            turns out, is the story of the failure of safeguards to do the job
            for which they are designed. There is no better instance of that
            ironic truth than the career of Paul de Man. No critic has fallen
            farther despite his determination; from a paragon of analytical
            rigor, he has become the most gossiped about critic of the late
            1980s
             
            1. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis, 1986), p.
            29; hereafter abbreviated RT.
             
            Jerome Christensen teaches English at The Johns Hopkins University.
            He is the author of Coleridge's Blessed Machine of language
            (1981) and Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a
            Literary Career (1987). This essay is part of a work in progress
            entitled Prefigurations: Romantic Theory and Romantic Practice.
