Rupture, Suture, Nietzsche: Impossible Intersubjectivity in Alien

The concept of suture has long been an important and controversial concept in investigations of the relationships between narrative, diegesis, character, and spectator. The dominant understanding of suture has paid more attention to its Lacanian derivation – and to the account given by Daniel Dayan – than to the work of Jean-Pierre Oudart which first introduced suture into Film Studies. This article, however, follows the recent work of George Butte, who argues that the way Oudart understands suture is very illuminating for the study of the complex forms of intersubjectivity that cinema so readily, and so richly, dramatises – famously (but by no means exclusively) by means of shot/reverse shot figures. It argues that certain key moments in Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) activate ideas of corporeality, desire, and intersubjectivity in ways that contribute to a wider thematic and figurative nexus at work in the film directed at the exploration of impossible intersubjectivities. The article also proposes that, via this nexus, the film offers an intriguing instantiation of Nietzsche's notion of the “human, all too human”, thereby demonstrating that there is much more in Nietzsche of relevance to Alien than the xenomorph's superhuman “will-to-power”. The android Ash's admiration for the alien's lack both of conscience and consciousness ironically indicates his own all-too-human recognition of the superfluity but inescapability of his own consciousness. The article concludes by drawing briefly on the work of Stanley Cavell on acknowledgment, proposing that much of the horror of Alien lies not only in how bodies are ruptured but in the fact that some subjectivities cannot even be sutured.

“I Saw a Different Life. I Can't Stop Seeing It”: Perfectionist Visions in Revolutionary Road

In this article, I claim that Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road (2008) is a recent version of the film genre that Stanley Cavell calls the “melodrama of the unknown woman”. Accordingly, my discussion focuses on two key elements of that identification: the film's overriding dramatic and thematic emphasis on conversation, and the central characters’ relation to the wider social and political concerns of America.

The Ascetic Ideal

This book develops a reading of Nietzsche’s concept of ‘the ascetic ideal’, through which he tracks the evolution, mutation, and expansion of the system of slave moral values that he associates primarily with Judaeo-Christian religious belief through diverse fields of Western European culture—not just religion and morality, but aesthetics, science, and philosophy. The work of Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried, and its impact in the philosophy of film and literature, is central here, as is J. M.Coetzee’s on the philosophy of autobiography; Martin Heidegger’s critique of science and technology is also addressed. In so doing it also offers an interpretation of his genealogical method that aims to rebut standard criticisms of its nature, and to emphasize its potential for enhancing philosophical understanding more generally. The focus throughout is on developments in those fields which occurred after the end of Nietzsche’s intellectual career, and in particular on influential modes of thought and practice that have a contemporary significance. However, the goal is not simply to argue that Nietzsche’s diagnosis and critique retain considerable merit. It is also to show that Nietzsche is himself significantly indebted to the ideals he criticizes; and that this opens up a possibility of synthesizing elements of his approach with those drawn from its target. Hence, the book also tracks various ways in which the object of Nietzsche’s criticism has further mutated (just as his genealogical method would suggest), and in doing so has generated ways of pursuing the values central to asceticism that avoid Nietzsche’s criticisms.

Endgame and the Life to Come

This paper revisits the interpretations of Endgame by Theodor Adorno and Stanley Cavell via an unusual route: Samuel Scheffler’s afterlife conjecture. Scheffler’s thought experiment—based on a doomsday scenario that Beckett’s characters already appear to inhabit—seeks the achievement of the ordinary in an age of climate change by disclosing our evaluative dependence on future generations. I suggest that the paradigm shift to a global subject lies not in the dystopian fiction Scheffler looks to, however, but the “shudder” of the ‘I’ in aesthetic experience, the model for which is Beckett’s Endgame.

Hardy’s Trees

Maxwell Sater, “Hardy's Trees: Ecology and the Question of Knowledge in The Woodlanders” (pp. 92–115) This essay attends to one of the stranger episodes in Thomas Hardy’s fiction: the inexplicably linked deaths of John South and the elm tree outside his house. I argue that this subplot is of central importance to The Woodlanders (1887) and to Hardy’s ecological thinking more generally. Hardy posits an episode that resists narrative accommodation: simply, it does not make sense. Its senselessness, I contend, indexes a broader discomfort with, and rejection of, what Stanley Cavell would call relations of knowing as the foundation of ecology. By reading The Woodlanders alongside Cavell, I suggest that Hardy develops an ecological mode of relation dependent neither on knowledge of nor on continuity with nonhuman worlds but, rather, on a negotiation of the epistemological and ontological limits inhering between, in this instance, humans and trees. For Hardy, humane ecological relations are possible in spite of those limits; in fact, seeking to transcend them, as the elm tree plot parodically demonstrates, can be counterproductive.

George Herbert’s “The Flower” and the Problem of Praise

This essay dwells on George Herbert’s “The Flower” and on how its speaker can love and praise God. Writing of praise and doubt, Stanley Cavell remarks that the problem of skepticism is partly a problem of finding an object that one can praise, a search that certainly occurs in “The Flower.” While Herbert’s speaker seeks God as that object, his own memory impedes him, making him question God’s goodness and forcing him not only to abandon forms of remembering that Herbert’s sources—from psalmists to theologians—employ so as to rise to praise, but also to use form in order to forget. The essay’s conclusion compares Herbert’s poem with another strange praise poem, Paul Celan’s “Psalm.” The essay claims that if Cavell sees praise as signaling a triumph over doubt, “The Flower” shows, as only verse can, how praise and doubt accompany each other, using doubt to keep praise at a distance from both psalmic theology and skeptical philosophy.

O filósofo dentro e fora do ordinário: Hume, Stanley Cavell e a instabilidade das conclusões céticas

O objetivo deste artigo é discutir o que representa a instabilidade das reflexões filosóficas, segundo a leitura que dela faz a filosofia de Stanley Cavell, em diálogo com Hume, filósofo que teria abordado esse problema em sua maior amplitude. Nesse sentido, em primeiro lugar o texto apresenta as linhas gerais da análise humeana, realizada especialmente no Tratado da Natureza Humana, sobre a alternatividade entre a razão e a imaginação na questão do ceticismo sobre o mundo exterior e concernente à identidade pessoal. Partindo dessa síntese da questão, investiga em que sentido, para Cavell, a instabilidade do ceticismo reflete sua natureza dicotômica face ao ordinário; a naturalidade e a antinaturalidade da filosofia. A intenção é mostrar, com base nesse percurso, que, dado o fato de que as noções filosóficas não são descobertas sobre as crenças comuns e que estas não conseguem evitar por completo as tendências da razão humana, a ideia de uma filosofia imersa no mundo ordinário só pode ser compreendida como uma apropriação subjetiva dos nossos acordos comuns. Palavras-chave: ceticismo; filosofia; crenças naturais; linguagem ordinária.