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Stanley Cavell (1926–2018) was one of the most significant and field-shaping figures in contemporary philosophy. Onward with Stanley Cavell offers the first major investigation of his legacy and nachlass, providing fourteen insightful essays that engage with the posthumous volume, Here and There: Sites of Philosophy (2022), its connections to the rest of his work, and its broader implications for the future of thought.
Gathering an international group of interdisciplinary scholars, this collection explores the vitality of Cavell’s afterlife and the continued urgency of his writing. The chapters are organized into four thematic areas—Futures of Philosophy, The Ordinary Life of Language, A Mood for Psychoanalysis, and Thinking American Thought—reflecting the capacious and enduring nature of Cavell’s work. From his deep engagements with Wittgenstein, Austin, and Emerson to his forays into the philosophy of music, the volume tracks how Cavell’s voice continues to resonate across the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
At once an up-close encounter with the best of Cavellian criticism and an invitation for readers to chart their own new directions in scholarship, it will appeal to specialists and students in media studies, cultural studies, philosophy, and related fields, as well as the general reader interested in the impact of one of the most important modern philosophers.
Mathias Girel is Lecturer in Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris). He also coordinates the Centre Cavaillès team, which is part of the Republic of Knowledge unit at ENS. His research in the philosophy and history of science focuses on the instrumentalization of doubt and the production of ignorance. He published the French edition of Robert Proctor’s Golden Holocaust (2014), co-translated Stanley Cavell’s Cities of Words into French, and is the author of Science et territoires de l’ignorance (Quae, 2017) and L’esprit en acte (Vrin, 2021).
David LaRocca, who studied philosophy, film, rhetoric, and religion at Buffalo, Berkeley, Vanderbilt, and Harvard, is the author or contributing editor of twenty books, including Stanley Cavell’s Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind, Television with Stanley Cavell in Mind (with Sandra Laugier), Music with Stanley Cavell in Mind, The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema, Inheriting Stanley Cavell, and Acknowledging Stanley Cavell (Conversations journal no. 7). Author of Emerson’s English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor, he served as Harvard University’s Sinclair Kennedy Fellow in the United Kingdom and was honored with the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society. A participant in Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School, he is the author most recently of Werner Herzog / Rogue Filmmaker. www.DavidLaRocca.org
Sandra Laugier, a former student at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris) and Harvard University, is Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She has also held a number of visiting professorships, including at Boston University, Johns Hopkins University, the Max Planck Institute, Berlin, La Sapienza Roma and the School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell. She has published extensively on ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Austin, Cavell), moral and political philosophy, the ethics of care, popular film, and TV series, and is the author of over thirty books, including Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy (2013), Politics of the Ordinary: Care, Ethics, and Forms of Life (2020), TV-Philosophy (2023), Wittgenstein: The Senses of Use (2025). She is the main translator of Stanley Cavell’s work into French and a Member of the American Philosophical Society.
Introduction: Further Considerations of Stanley Cavell’s Posthumous Reception Mathias Girel, David LaRocca and Sandra Laugier
I. Futures of Philosophy
Like a Hand: Receptive Thinking and the Heart of Futurity in Stanley Cavell Thomas Carlson
Skepticism for the Future: Reinterpreting Skepticism in the Light of the “Exhaustion of Possibilities” Élise Domenach
The Outsider Within: Cavell, Derrida, and Deconstruction Stephen Mulhall
Meaning It: Music, Cavell, and the Sense of Occasion Paul Standish
II. The Ordinary Life of Language
Tracing Lines of Thought in “The World as Things: Collecting Thoughts on Collecting” Veena Das
Language and the Body Martine de Gaudemar
The Idea of a Here and a There as Sites of Philosophy Jean-Philippe Narboux
III. A Mood for Psychoanalysis
Becoming Passive: Notes Mostly about “Notes Mostly about Empathy” Jeroen Gerrits
Cavell’s Ellipsis Claire Brunet
Expressions of Interest in Phillips and Cavell Emma Williams
IV. Thinking American Thought
“Undiscussable Differences”?: Stanley Cavell on Allan Bloom and Disappointment David LaRocca
Reflections on Wallace Stevens at Mount Holyoke Hugo Clémot
America as Experience: Pragmatism and Perfectionism Mathias Girel and Sandra Laugier
What is American Philosophy? Russell Goodman