Juliet Floyd

Sandra Laugier

Greg Chase

In 1969 Stanley Cavell's Must We Mean What We Say? revolutionized philosophy of ordinary language, aesthetics, ethics, tragedy, literature, music, art criticism, and modernism. This volume of new essays offers a multi-faceted exploration of Cavell's first and most important book, fifty years after its publication. The key subjects which animate Cavell's book are explored in detail: ordinary language, aesthetics, modernism, skepticism, forms of life, philosophy and literature, tragedy and the self, the questions of voice and audience, jazz and sound, Wittgenstein, Austin, Beckett, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare. The essays make Cavell's complex style and sometimes difficult thought accessible to a new generation of students and scholars. They offer a way into Cavell's unique philosophical voice, conveying its seminal importance as an intellectual intervention in American thought and culture, and showing how its philosophical radicality remains of lasting significance for contemporary philosophy, American philosophy, literary studies, and cultural studies.

Cavell's Must We Mean What We Say? at 50

Veena Das

Perig Pitrou

Andrew Brandel

A Matter of Detail inspires new ways of thinking about detail by bringing anthropology, philosophy, art history, and aesthetics into direct conversation. Co-editors Brandel, Das, Laugier, and Pitrou challenge a long-standing assumption that the history of detail begins with European modernity and follows a teleological course from an object of scorn to a sign of the good. In its place, they offer a history of attention to detail that draws on classical and vernacular histories and traditions found in grammar, ritual, and poetics around the world. Emphasizing detail as a method and moving between its usage as a noun (detail) and a verb (detailing) enables them to tell stories about the reassembly of detail across accidents, contingencies, and unintended consequences. From this vantage, the book argues that details are not always small and insignificant. Rather, there is a dynamic relationship between the minute and the grand, detail and surface, which makes the proliferation of details threatening to the idea of an authoritative and integrated imagination of the whole. This expanded context generates ways of conceiving detail as a conceptual and moral mode of self-formation and being toward others, both human and non-human.

Anthropology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics

A Matter of Detail

Estelle Ferrarese

La notion de " formes de vie " a émergé il y a une dizaine d'années et circule dans des domaines variés, de la biologie à la philosophie en passant par la sociologie, la science politique et l'anthropologie. La notion de " formes de vie " a émergé il y a une dizaine d'années et circule dans des domaines variés, de la biologie à la philosophie en passant par la sociologie, la science politique et l'anthropologie. Mais qu'entendre par " formes de vie " ? Un ensemble de pratiques, d'usages de nature variée, qui donnent à la vie commune des caractères propres, pour ainsi dire diffus, explicitement ou implicitement présents dans les croyances, la langue, les institutions, les modes d'action, les valeurs. Une forme de vie est toujours, en ce sens, particulière, c'est pourquoi il existe des formes de vie, plus qu'une forme de vie. De l'étude de ses divers sens chez des auteurs aussi différents qu'Adorno et Wittgenstein à sa portée critique et politique et à ses incidences éthiques, cet ouvrage déploie toutes les dimensions de cette nouvelle approche. En particulier, la porosité entre les sphères privée, sociale, économique et politique, et la nouvelle articulation du social et du biologique.

Sandra Laugier

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