Disowning Knowledge: In Seven Plays of Shakespeare

by Stanley Cavell

Reissued with a new preface and a new essay on Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Coriolanius, Hamlet and The Winter's Tale, this famous collection of essays on Shakespeare's tragedies considers the plays as responses to the crisis of knowledge and the emergence of modern skepticism.

Genres: Philosophy, Shakespeare, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Theory, Criticism, Literature

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Stanley Cavell was an American philosopher. He was the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. He worked in the fields of ethics, aesthetics, and ordinary language philosophy. As an interpreter, he produced influential works on Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, Thoreau, and Heidegger. His work is characterized by its conversational tone and frequent literary references.

Reviews

[Paul JB]

This seems like a good purchase until you realise the seven plays of Shakespeare are sold separately. Disturbed by this new trend among publishers for day one DLC.

If I have understood the fundamental concept of this* then it is very spooky. That skepticism might not provide a viable stance against uncertainty, but rather exacerbate it to the level of a pathological disorder is a bad result for philosophy, which is already having a bad millennium and imho should consider abandoning 4-4-2.

*And I went to a good school so I definitely do and am a smart guy.

[Alessio]

“The cause of tragedy is that we would rather murder the world than permit it to expose us to change.”

I knew that Cavell’s Lear essay was a classic, but I harbored murmuring suspicions of philosophers who descend on aesthetic objects only to extract and extrapolate wildly for their own purposes before they jettison the misappropriated textual carcass. (This is probably why I tend to find the history of art more interesting than the philosophy of art.) That said, this book slaps and Cavell engages the Big Interpretive Questions head-on. His thesis is that tragedy is an epistemological problem: “the result, and the study, of a burden of knowledge, of an attempt to deny the all but undeniable.” What he observes of figures like Lear, Coriolanus, and Othello is their withdrawal from the world and the annihilation that their willful skepticism effects. In the essay on The Winter’s Tale, he further suggests that the skeptic desires this annihilation, that skepticism and fanaticism are two sides of the same anti-rational coin.

Cavell can get a little gnomic at times — perhaps it’s my lack of philosophical training — but he’s really incisive in his close readings. I was very compelled by the Coriolanus essay and its discussion of necessary cannibalism and how its logic of mutual partaking, from which Coriolanus abstains in his “vision of communication as contamination,” constitutes civility and society:

"Our differences from [Coriolanus’s] case are that we demand less of our honor than he of his and that social divisions among us are less, differences that at best speak of our fortune, or belatedness, not of our credit. So I gather that no one is in a position to say what the right expression is of our knowledge that we are strung out on both sides of a belly, that we are human, that the human is relative to the worm, the rat, the horse. Then the issue is whether we have to know this before we can know the partaking that makes a city good, or whether the city, in its poverty of goodness, can provide itself with individuals, or clusters, who know such a thing, and whether it can then stop and take in what they have to say, whether it can tolerate the voice of its own language."

[Francisco Pinto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Apesar das trezentas palavras em cada frase, não deixa este de ser um livro interessante de um ponto de vista da ordem das ideias - sejam elas filosóficas, literárias ou até acerca das paixões humanas. Parece, mais uma vez, que Cavell facilmente agrada a qualquer um que o lê (fantásticas interpretações em causa), ao mm tempo que incentiva ainda a (re)leitura do teatro shakespeareano.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

to be in language is to be in love, which we can’t stand

[Steven]

Very difficult to read; also among the best pieces on WS. Cavell contends that WS arrived at Cartesian skepticism before anyone else; that he tried to find his way around in a godless universe; that he exploded the idea of the self; that he looked at power from very close up and also from a great distance, in society and in the construction of personality...

our moods do not believe in each other

knowledge can sink into presumption and pretended ownership

a person is more like a choice than a thing

[Arthur Drury · Rating 4 out of 5]

A summary quotation: "... the cause of skepticism--the attempt to convert the human condition, the condition of humanity, into an intellectual difficulty, a riddle. (To interpret 'a metaphysical finitude as an intellectual lack.') Tragedy is the place we are not allowed to escape the consequences, or price, of this cover ... ." (page 138)

Or, again: "... questions I have previously asked of Shakespearean tragedy, taking tragedy as an epistemological problem, a refusal to know or be known, an avoidance of acknowledgement, an expression (or imitation) of skepticism." (page 143)

[K.W. · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I assume that any complexity the average mortal finds in a play of Shakespeare’s is something Shakespeare is capable of having placed there. The critical question is: How? By what means? The question of whether an author intends any or all of what happens is a convenient defense against this critical question" (p. 240).

[H]

only read "Avoidance of Love" on Lear.

"There is hope in this play, and it is not in heaven. It lies in the significance of its two most hideous moments: Gloucester's blinding and Cordelia's death. . . ."

[Kevan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this a lot, especially the essay after which this collection is named. One of the most insightful analyses on King Lear I've ever read.

[Frank R · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense and erudite, not a simple read. But a fascinating commentary on the tragedies of Shakespeare, especially Lear and Othello.