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Breaking Up (and Making Up) With Stanley Cavell | The New Republic

Cavell’s prose can be impossibly irritating. Given that his writing on philosophy often aims to perform that which it theorizes, things can quickly turn dizzyingly recursive. On some days, I find the introduction to Pursuits of Happiness a bit of a drag—so much throat clearing, so much talking around the texts—though on others, I find these same writerly impulses to be almost endearingly earnest. He’ll just say anything, I marvel. What felt like gratuitous free association one day might appear, on another, like a spiritual exercise in trailing someone else’s mind. And in my most receptive moods, I encounter Cavell’s tangents, deferrals, and lateral proliferation less as tedious than as a relatable symptom of writerly anxiety—of a palpable desire not to be misunderstood.