Toward an Ordinary Language Psychoanalysis: On Skepticism and Infancy Toward an Ordinary Language Psychoanalysis: On Skepticism and Infancy Chiara Alfano New Literary History, Volume 49, Number 1, Winter 2018, pp. 23-45 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: For additional information about this article [ Access provided at 6 Apr 2021 02:00 GMT from Carnegie Mellon University ] https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2018.0001 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/691216 https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2018.0001 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/691216 New Literary History, 2018, 49: 23–45 Toward an Ordinary Language Psychoanalysis: On Skepticism and Infancy Chiara Alfano Family Resemblances At first glance, psychoanalysis and ordinary language philoso-phy bear little resemblance. The apparent focus of psychoanalysis on the inner self might seem to jar with the appeal to the ordinary. Indeed, since Ludwig Wittgenstein voiced his suspicions about Sigmund Freud, philosophers have largely agreed that the two disciplines are, despite converging in some instances, ultimately incompatible. Stanley Cavell is an exception to this rule. In a 1997 review of Terrors and Experts for the London Review of Books, he picks up on Adam Phillips’s descrip- tion in an earlier book of D. W. Winnicott’s “almost religious commit- ment to an idea of simple and personal truth, to an ordinary-language psychoanalysis.”1 Winnicott’s commitment to “an ordinary-language psychoanalysis” is, Phillips argues, based on the conviction that the how of what we do and do not say, and what we do and do not do, captures better than any psychoanalytic technique each of our simple, personal, and often incommunicable truths (W 25). Cavell shares this commit- ment to the ordinary as something that owes its therapeutic powers to its ability to capture the way we truly are. His attentiveness to this aspect of Winnicott’s work marks, perhaps, nothing more than a brief flash of recognition upon finding his own reflection in Winnicott. I want, however, to make a different argument here, namely that Cavell’s consideration of Phillips’s neologism shows that he is sufficiently taken by the apparent affinities between psychoanalysis and ordinary language philosophy to wonder whether there might be an as yet un- acknowledged kinship between them. In the term “ordinary-language psychoanalysis” he hears an invitation to consider more closely the relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy as it is practiced by Wittgenstein, Austin, and, presumably, Cavell himself.2 This essay takes up this invitation by considering the hitherto unexplored family resem- blances between Cavell’s inheritance of ordinary language philosophy, as demonstrated by his interpretation of skepticism, and of object relations psychoanalysis, particularly the work of Melanie Klein and Winnicott. new literary history24 As the essay will show, in his reinterpretation of skepticism Cavell relies not merely on ordinary language philosophy but also on conceptual re- sources that, although not limited to them, are used most prominently by object relations psychoanalysts to flesh out the infant’s earliest experi- ences. In making this argument, it is not my aim to fashion Cavell as an inheritor of Freud, Klein, and Winnicott rather than as an inheritor of Austin and Wittgenstein. This is partially because the eclectic nature of Cavell’s corpus means that there are more than these two conceptual lineages at play (others include, for instance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William Shakespeare). Most importantly, however, it is because the issue of inheritance or lineage—together with its attendant questions of hierarchy or primacy—is deeply unsym- pathetic to the way the Cavellian project picks up on, harmonizes with, and augments insights from other discourses. Equally, talk of a mere affinity or similarity would not do justice to the depth of shared concern between Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy and object relations psychoanalysis. Instead, Cavell’s work on skepticism points us toward an area of inquiry where thought structures overlap, conceptual resources are shared, and ideas have purchase in ways that are not constricted by disciplinary borders or concerns about conceptual heritage and supe- riority. This approach is not based on an anything-goes-attitude toward intertextuality, but rather hinges on the discovery of a significant and interrelated set of family resemblances. For Wittgenstein, family resemblances describe a relation between two or more things where some features are shared but no one attribute is present in all. Allowing the cohabitation of similarity and dissimilarity, this concept is a reminder that drawing up conceptual alliances and their limits is a complex and delicate undertaking. There are significant similarities between philosophical and psychoanalytical characterizations of skepticism, whether the latter be addressed directly or indirectly, through, for example, the psychoanalyst’s study of the remarkably simi- lar phenomenon of disintegration. More importantly, both philosophy and psychoanalysis link infancy and skepticism to each other, either figuratively or causally. Both in their own way then turn to the figure of the infant—both as a figment of an adult’s deferred fantasies and as the subject of theorizations pertaining to either language acquisition or development in general—when considering the skeptical predicament. This essay will, however, also argue that although they share important traits, the descriptions of infancy (defined, in line with developmental accounts, as the period from birth to about eighteen months) in ordi- nary language philosophy and object relations psychoanalysis are not completely congruent. But an acknowledgment of what separates these 25toward an ordinary language psychoanalysis discourses does not invalidate what they do share. And although what is shared may invite interesting comparisons, Cavell’s interpretation of skepticism owes its originality to his willingness to borrow structures of thought from psychoanalysis that challenge and potentially change some of the ways in which ordinary language philosophy sees itself. In order to explore this significant and interrelated set of family re- semblances, this article describes a series of reading encounters between ordinary language philosophy and object relations psychoanalysis that hinge in one way or another on the intersections between the portray- als of infancy and skepticism. It opens with a brief outline of what sets Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy apart from familiar interpreta- tions of it; this section gives an account of the common ground between Cavell and psychoanalysis and how past work has considered it. The essay then focuses on Wittgenstein’s reading of Augustine’s account of how he learned to speak. This is followed by a consideration of how Cavell’s reading of Klein bears on the ways in which his sense of the child Augustine differs from Wittgenstein’s. The essay then turns to how the psychoanalytic Shakespearean critic Janet Adelman draws on Winnicott and Cavell when offering her startlingly original interpreta- tion of Shakespearean tragedy, thus revealing the kinship between these two thinkers. The final two sections explore the limits of Cavell’s and Winnicott’s shared conceptual horizons by probing their treatment of separateness and aloneness on the one hand, and their hope about whether philosophy can cure itself on the other. A Not So Ordinary Language Philosophy As philosophical “schools” go, ordinary language philosophy is rather soft-spoken. Yet behind its seemingly prim exterior lies an extraordinarily ambitious metaphilosophical project. Ordinary language philosophy looks toward our ordinary, quotidian uses of language to cure philosophy of some of its more debilitating puzzlements, or to use Wittgenstein’s term, bewitchments [Verhexungen].3 For ordinary language philosophy, many of these problems are rooted in the philosopher using language in a way that is markedly different from how he would use it when living ordinarily. In thus misusing language, the philosopher takes on the role of the skeptic. Asking questions he would normally not consider and pretending to inhabit a position toward the world and others that he in truth does not, he finds himself separated from them. Because language is, as Wittgenstein famously suggests, our form of life, the skeptic’s mis- use of language is indicative of a deeper alienation from the world. Yet new literary history26 while one way of using language is, for ordinary language philosophers, neither merely a symptom of skepticism, nor simply its cause, another approach can, if not cure skepticism, allow us to live with it. The appeal to ordinary language in times of philosophical or skeptical bewitchment is effective because, in reminding skeptics of the ordinary use of our words and the ordinary forms of life they mark, it can remind them of their true relation to the world, to others, and to themselves. The suggestion is, of course, that matters are more straightforward than the bewitched skeptics fear. Although it would be wrong to conflate Wittgenstein’s and Austin’s distinct contributions to ordinary language philosophy, their appeals to ordinary language share the more or less overt postulation of something given and shared, a common ground that the skeptic-philosopher’s feet have, despite his protestations, never left. For Wittgenstein, the recounting of ordinary criteria refutes skepticism because these criteria establish certainty about what the skeptic puts in doubt. For Austin, our inherited ordinary language can bring us once again closer to the world and others because in it are encoded the ways in which we humans are together. What both of these accounts have in common is that they, at least according to traditional readings, seek to show that the sense of separation that the skeptic suffers is an illusion belied by the ways in which ordinary language assures our continued togetherness. What sets Cavell apart from other proponents of ordinary language philosophy is that in his reading neither Austin nor Wittgenstein denies the reality of separateness. It is because of this acknowledgment of sep- arateness that in Cavell’s work a discussion of ordinary language often gives way to an examination of voice. For him, ordinary language does not deny our common separateness; indeed as his analysis of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, for example, shows the closely linked concept of voice can highlight, even celebrates it.4 Separation is, of course, an important theme in philosophy. For Cavell, however, there is a crucial distinction between separateness and separation: the fact that we are separate from each other does not mean that we are separated from each other. For Cavell, separateness does not hinder our lives together: separateness must not necessarily separate us. A well-known passage from “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” states that “all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls ‘forms of life,’” in short all “human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than” our ability and willing- ness to agree upon them.5 The literature on Cavell rarely recognizes how radical this assertion is. The claim that our ordinary attunement rests on nothing more and nothing less than our willingness and ability 27toward an ordinary language psychoanalysis to agree with each other implies that there is no undergirding, shared, and common structure that guarantees it. Separateness is affirmed. In the secondary literature on Cavell this acute sense of our separateness is more often than not glossed over by providing more or less overt accounts of precisely the kind of undergirding structure that his work does away with in the first place.6 Espen Hammer is one of the few who acknowledge that this insistence on separateness means for Cavell that skepticism is “neither curable (Kant) or incurable (Hume),” but that separateness is an unavoidable aspect of our language, our forms of life.7 Even Hammer, however, does not explain under what circumstances this separateness—which ordinarily does not pose problems—grows into the skeptic’s sense of separation from the world. Separation, particularly the primary separation of birth, is an impor- tant theme in psychoanalysis. Cavell writes openly about his “intellectual debt” to Freud.8 His path from music to philosophy would indeed pass through psychoanalysis, with Cavell at one point even considering train- ing to become a psychoanalyst.9 Even after he had abandoned any such thought, Freud remained a lasting influence on his work, particularly in his readings of Shakespeare and Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s. Whether Cavell draws on Freudian notions of hysteria in his reading of Bette Davis in Now, Voyager or Freud’s Wolf Man case in his reading of Hamlet, in much of his work relating to literature or film he uses psychoanalytical insights to throw light onto a character’s motivations. Other texts bear testament to Cavell’s more systematic engagement with psychoanalysis; most important is his work on Emerson and Thoreau, where he falls back on Freudian notions of transference and counter- transference to work out a mode of reading that does philosophical work itself—that is, in other words, philosophically operative and significant.10 No less important, though less well studied, is Cavell’s engagement with Jacques Lacan’s reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” in In Quest for the Ordinary. Here Cavell connects Wittgenstein’s sense of “the everyday and its language” as “strange to themselves” to Lacan’s account of the uncanny nature of language and of the unconscious in order to suggest that the ordinary is not already attained but infinitely perfectible.11 His reading of Lacan is thus testament to the extent to which psychoanalytical insights affect even core philosophical notions in Cavell’s project. Freud’s importance for Cavell’s work, especially in relation to the therapeutic powers of the act of reading that he most explicitly tackles in his work on Thoreau and Shakespeare, has been addressed by a number of scholars with varying conclusions. While Timothy Gould, for instance, argues that the mutual receptiveness Cavell observes in new literary history28 Thoreau’s account of reading and writing in Walden is indebted to his engagement with Shakespeare and Freud, he is reluctant to give too much systematic importance to psychoanalysis.12 There are also scholars who have acknowledged the importance of psychoanalysis for Cavell’s philosophy more enthusiastically, including Arnold Davidson, Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, and Stephen Mulhall.13 For them the influence goes beyond a superficial incorporation of psychoanalytic insights. Ziarek and Mulhall in particular recognize a cross-fertilization between philosophy and psychoanalysis, where the recovery of skepticism not merely resembles psychoanalytic therapy, but becomes therapy in a psychoanalytic sense. Ziarek goes so far as to speak, albeit briefly, of a “psychoanalysis of philosophy.” 14 Similarly, Mulhall speaks not merely of a “family resemblance,” but of a “founding psychoanalytic claim.”15 What is striking about previous accounts of the relationship between Cavell’s philosophical project and psychoanalysis, whether sympathetic to the idea of a foundational influence or not, is that they are limited exclusively to Freud.16 Cavell’s invitation to think toward an “ordinary- language psychoanalysis” in the context of Winnicott, however, suggests that ordinary language philosophy and psychoanalysis also intersect at later, post-Freudian junctures. Augustine Throws a Tantrum: Wittgenstein Reads the Confessions Wittgenstein famously begins his Investigations with a reading of Au- gustine’s account of how he learned language. Augustine was not, he writes, taught words “by way of formal instruction, as it was the case soon afterward with reading.”17 He learns by observing his elders, by interpret- ing their body language, for instance, and by using the mind that the grace of God bestowed on him: “No, I taught myself, using the mind you gave me, O my God.”18 It is a peculiar scene not merely because no purposeful teaching is taking place, but also because through all of this Augustine remains at arm’s length from his elders. The majores homines are remarkably animated, but their expressions are neither directed at him nor do they affect him directly in any emo- tional way. It is interesting, too, that Augustine’s elders do not seem to make the same effort to interpret his body language as he does with theirs. It is true that Augustine gets mad, but it is a rage that originates in his inability to make himself understood rather than in the adult’s inability or unwillingness to understand him. When Augustine, the in- fant—from Latin infantus, quite literally one who has no speech—tries 29toward an ordinary language psychoanalysis to make his “wishes known to those who might satisfy them” and fails, “because my desires were inside me, while other people were outside and could by no effort of understanding enter my mind,” he resorts to “toss[ing] about” and “scream[ing]”; when he did not get his way he would “take revenge on them by bursting into tears” and by throwing a “tantrum.”19 Despite his outburst, or perhaps rather because of the calculation behind it (Augustine throws a tantrum not out of frustration but because he wants to take revenge), the infant here appears to be remarkably self-possessed, grounded in and already in control of a self. Put differently, the infant’s experience is centered on an already well- known and fully experienced interiority. For instance, in the passage just quoted, the attempt is not to better project his desires outwardly so as to be better understood; it is to allow the elders access into his mind. As the disjunction between Augustine and his elders suggests, the infant’s sophisticated inner world—full of desires and rage—is established be- fore and independently of any significant interpersonal relationships.20 Augustine’s particular view of language thus also implies an underlying belief about the infant’s relative cognitive and emotional self-reliance. Wittgenstein seems to subscribe to this view of the infant when much later in the Investigations he asks whether we might not be “over-hasty in our assumption that the smile of an unweaned infant is not a pretence?”21 For Mulhall, the subtle shift from child [Kind] to an unweaned infant [Säugling] at this point of the Investigations is motivated by the wish “to invoke a stage of human life so early that it has no room for the existence of certain relatively complex and necessarily intersubjective projects,” in order to make a point about the naturalness of our forms of life, echoing, it seems, Augustine’s description of his mature inner life.22 It is, however, important to see Wittgenstein’s remark about the lying infant in its entirety; the suggestion that lying must be learned like any other language-game runs counter to Augustine’s vision of the infant. Indeed, what Wittgenstein suggests is that if the infant’s smile at the breast were a pretense, then even this most primitive of lies would have to be learned from or with others. Wittgenstein’s critique of Augustine’s picture of language also challenges a particular picture of a supreme and autonomous self. In place of God-given brains, Wittgenstein puts the learning couple: teacher and child. A Condition of Derangement: Cavell Reads Wittgenstein with Klein While, as Mulhall notes, Augustine’s elders were not interested in teaching, the problem with Wittgenstein’s elders is that they do not do new literary history30 anything but teach: “they seem to look upon their child’s suffering solely as an opportunity for education, as if their concern for him extended exclusively to his prospects as a fellow-speaker.”23 Both Wittgenstein and Augustine tend to think of the child very much in terms of a miniature adult. Cavell’s sense of the child is very different. What strikes Cavell most about Augustine’s passage is “how isolated the child appears.”24 He similarly remarks on “the absoluteness in [the child’s] initial incapacity to make itself known,” and “its absolute reliance on its elders’ recognition of its attempts at expression, that is, on their recognition of the grip of its needs as the medium of expression.”25 This interest in the child not merely as a learner but also as someone seeking—and failing—to make a connection with those around him indicates that any consideration of Cavell’s view of language must be preceded, or at least accompanied, by an inquiry into separateness. In his reading of Augustine’s account the child is not self-reliant; his vocalizations are not aimed at wreaking revenge. Rather, by his cries, babbling, and movements the child longs to establish a connection to his elders. If his elders recognized this as an attempt at communication, Cavell’s Augustine does not tell us so. It is the child’s absolute, permanent, and utter isolation that makes Cavell think of it as “mad,” and if “not exactly deranged,” then certainly “in the condition of derangement” (PP 170). “The World as Things” simi- larly speaks of “the child’s world as hedged with madness, negotiating melancholy for paranoia, reparation for destructiveness.”26 No doubt Cavell understands this absolute solitude in terms of “mad- ness” or “derangement” because of “the experience of Melanie Klein’s accounts of the pre-verbal child’s development of experience in terms of paranoia and depression” (PP 170). It is important to note that, as the quirkiness of the phrase “the experience of Melanie Klein’s accounts” implies, Cavell reads Klein—and this will be hardly shocking for those familiar with his work—selectively and idiosyncratically. The unorthodoxy or eccentricity of such a reading does not, however, make the lessons learned from it any less formative. On the contrary, an author’s thought may strike us most profoundly in those places where she may have not taken it herself. Klein’s work on child analysis was revolutionary because it assumed a vivid inner life in infants—phantasies—long before Freud and his daughter Anna thought possible. In Klein’s developmental model, the infant at birth has a very rudimentary, unintegrated ego governed by strong instincts, which are in the first instance directed at the mother’s breast. The infant’s instinctual desires, Klein writes in “Weaning” (1936), translate into “greedy, erotic and destructive phantasies” where the infant imagines “attack[ing]” or “rob[bing]” the breast, which in turn lead to persecutory phantasies in which the infant fears to be punished for these 31toward an ordinary language psychoanalysis attacks.27 Klein’s violent account of the nursing situation is notorious, but for all the apparent crassness of her descriptions of a cannibalistic—and yes, mad—infant, these early occurrences in the infant’s phantasy life play an important role in healthy development. “In phantasy,” Klein writes, “the child sucks the breast into himself, chews it up and swallows it; thus he feels that he has actually got it there, that he possesses the mother’s breast within himself, in both its good and in its bad aspects.”28 In this early or paranoid-schizoid stage, the good breast (or the breast that is felt to quench the infant’s desire) and the bad breast (or the breast that is perceived to be unwilling or unable to do so) also become in phantasy the repositories of any good or bad experience. As Klein suggests in “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946), this binary splitting is an integral part of healthy development, as it helps the infant to integrate enough good experiences to provide an anchor to shore up the self against the onslaught of life’s challenges.29 Indeed, if development proceeds within the bounds of normality and health, these extreme paranoid anxieties and schizoid defenses are given up, and make way for the depressive position, in which the child feels protective of the now-integrated good object and guilty about its previous attacks on it.30 Guided by Klein, Cavell thinks of the experiences of the Confession’s “deranged” child in terms of paranoia and depression. And this is not the only place in his oeuvre where one can detect her influence. Klein’s sense of the dynamics between paranoia and depression, also at play in the nursing situation, reverberates in “The Interminable Shake- spearean Text.” When Cavell discusses Lear’s perception of Cordelia’s “thanklessness” in context with “the idea of aggressiveness causing, and caused by, gratitude for lavishness, or rather of ingratitude for the idea of lavishness withdrawn or delayed,” he is in fact thinking of “Klein’s perception of the pre-oedipal child as caught in a sequence caused by the realization of separateness from the source of plenty, inciting a de- structiveness for which gratitude becomes a gesture of reparation.”31 In “What is the Scandal of Skepticism?” Cavell again draws on Klein’s idea of “original murderousness” to start imagining “a basis for recognizing responsibility towards the other, as a kind of reparation for my having failed to acknowledge the other.”32 In this reading of Klein, the child only begins to recognize the other when “the other, which sustains life with its nourishment, manifests its separateness,” for instance through an “inevitable, however momentary withdrawal or withholding of nourish- ment.”33 Such a withholding causes first “a murderous rage” and then a “persecutory guilt” in the child and thus marks “the first developmental stage Klein calls the paranoid position,” which in time makes way for new literary history32 the “schizophrenic position, in which reparation is offered for the prior aggressiveness. (Now we have two poles of responsibility: the mother’s, which is total but comes to an end; and the child’s, which is derivative but which has no assigned end.)”34 As a matter of fact, Cavell misnames the Kleinian positions here; nevertheless, his transposition of key ideas from his reinterpretation of skepticism—such as acknowledgment and separateness—to a Kleinian landscape is striking. Although the defense mechanisms, which Klein describes in “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” are normal, they can under certain instances—for example “if persecutory fears are very strong”—form “the basis for later schizophrenic illness.”35 While the processes Klein describes are limited to the infant’s phantasy life, “the effect of this phantasy is a very real one, because it leads to feelings and relations (and later on, thought-processes) being in fact cut off from one another.”36 Some shared features of Cavell’s descriptions of skepticism and Klein’s account of the paranoid-schizoid position are already becoming apparent: most promi- nently, a sense of separation and the experience of a severing between inner and outer. Equally, Augustine’s account of an angry, revenge- hungry, and manipulative infant could come straight out of Klein. And yet, although Cavell’s description of the child as “deranged” draws on Klein and although there are some similarities between skepticism and the paranoid-schizoid position in particular, we must look elsewhere for the psychoanalytic kin to Cavell’s interpretation of skepticism. The Nursing Couple: Adelman Reads Shakespeare with Winnicott and Cavell There are good reasons to think about the resonances between Cavell and psychoanalysis, and object relations theory in particular, in the context of Shakespeare: both Cavell’s psychoanalytically most astute readings, and his most eloquent impressions of the consequences and possible causes of the skeptic’s avoidance, can be found in his work on Shakespeare’s plays. My main guide in navigating the psychoanalytically rich ground of Cavell’s reading of Shakespearean tragedy is Janet Adel- man. Despite an absolute silence on this subject in the scholarship on Cavell, Adelman is a strong influence on his interpretation of skepticism in and through Shakespearean tragedy, just as his work has informed her reading of the latter.37 Scrutinizing images of pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing in the plays and contextualizing them with early modern ideas about a mother’s perilous influence, Adelman convincingly shows in Suffocating Mothers 33toward an ordinary language psychoanalysis that Shakespeare’s tragic heroes recognize the origin of their unbear- able predicaments to be maternal. As her early essay “‘Anger’s My Meat’: Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus” in particular shows, her original interpretation of Shakespearean tragedy is drawn not from a generic understanding of psychoanalysis but more specifically from an interest in “feminism and object-relations psychoanalysis.”38 Object rela- tions theory is, of course, commonly associated with Klein, but another notable proponent is Winnicott. That Adelman collocates her reading of tragedy in Cavell and Win- nicott is crucial for any mapping of the conceptual resources that psy- choanalysis and ordinary language philosophy share. Both authors are, despite their demotion to a footnote in Suffocating Mothers, a strong influ- ence on her interpretation of tragedy through skepticism and vice versa: In associating this crisis of faith specifically with the mother’s body and with the loss of interior aliveness, and the resolution of this crisis with the return of the capacity to play, I am following the insights of Winnicott, for whom the mother’s reliable response to the infant’s needs, especially in the nursing situ- ation, creates “a belief that the world can contain what is wanted and needed, with the result that the baby has hope that there is a live relationship between inner reality and external reality, between innate primary creativity and the world at large.” . . . Cavell’s formulations are of course congruent with Winnicott’s; in his reading of The Winter’s Tale, birth stands for primary separation, what the skeptical annihilation of the world—like the paranoid’s refilling it with its own projections—is attempting to deny.39 Adelman is right in thinking of Winnicott and Cavell together. In place of Klein’s emphasis on internal processes, instincts, and phantasies, to which interpersonal relationships take a secondary role, Winnicott es- tablishes the primary importance of interpersonal relations themselves.40 While for Klein the world that the infant learns about is met with innate instincts that are already present in them, in the picture that emerges from Winnicott’s account there are no such innate and primary phan- tasies to be satisfied. As Phillips puts it, Winnicott’s infant “clamours for intimacy, not only for relief of tension—for relatedness, not simply for satisfaction” (W 9). Similarly, in Cavell’s reading of the passage from the Confessions, the child’s existence and sanity depend on his elders’ ability and availability to take notice. It is utterly dependent on its elders to interpret “the grips of its needs as the medium of expression” (PP 170). The strangeness of the phrase “the grips of its needs” renders well the intense and inchoate nature of the infant’s demands: they are not for instinctual satisfaction but for connection. It is in the depiction of this intense drive to connect that Cavell’s proximity to Winnicott rather than to Klein becomes evident. new literary history34 The difference between Klein’s and Winnicott’s developmental ac- counts may seem at first too psychoanalytically subtle to be pertinent to a reconsideration of Cavell’s philosophical contribution to the problem of skepticism. Klein defends herself vigorously against the charge that she portrays all infants as deranged.41 As noted, the splitting mechanisms at work during the paranoid-schizoid stage can lead to, but do not in themselves necessarily constitute, madness. This is recognized in Cavell’s phrasing about the child being “not exactly deranged, but in the condi- tion of derangement” (PP 170). Nevertheless, Klein equips the infant ab initio with aggressive phantasies, which the child learns to negotiate more or less adequately depending on the care it receives. For Winnicott, in early life there is no such condition of derangement; “ordinary babies are not mad,” he writes.42 While desire made Klein’s infant a mad-baby, or in Phillips’s imaginative phrase a “misfit,” Winnicott’s infant is de- termined in very different terms (W 84). This does not mean that the infant cannot become “mad”; Winnicott himself describes the individual from the very “beginnings of ‘I am’” as “raw . . . undefended, vulnerable, potentially paranoid.”43 But the crucial difference between Winnicott’s and Klein’s developmental accounts is this: any actual paranoia in the Kleinian infant is rooted in internally arising phantasy, whereas for Win- nicott it originates primarily in the infant’s environment. On its path to health and maturity Klein’s infant cannot but help cross through a condition of derangement, whereas Winnicott’s infant can hope to be spared. Klein’s view that this inner life is governed by innate instinctual impulses is ultimately incompatible with Wittgenstein’s interpersonal view of self that Cavell shares.44 Just how different Winnicott’s views on the infant self are from Klein’s becomes clear when considering his work on nursing. Although both Klein and Winnicott concentrate on the nursing situation, they focus on markedly different aspects: Klein describes the infant’s initiating ag- gression, whereas Winnicott always focuses on the infant as a dependent and relation-seeking part of the nursing-couple dyad. In a “Close-up of Mother Feeding Baby” (1949), Winnicott sketches an ordinary nursing situation where the nipple is offered, contact with the mouth made, the infant suckles, and then averts his face from the breast. Here “the baby had an idea, and the breast with the nipple came, and a contact was made. Then the baby was finished with the idea and turned away, and the nipple disappeared.”45 Highly sensitive to her baby’s feelings, the ordinary devoted mother is, Winnicott argues (using no doubt un- awares a very Wittgensteinian terminology), “attuned.”46 Attunement is incidentally also the term chosen by developmental psychologist Daniel Stern to describe a feedback loop between mother and infant, in which 35toward an ordinary language psychoanalysis both parties are, it seems, engaged in a finely tuned choreography and “attempting constantly to adjust their behaviour to one another’s.”47 In this ordinary nursing situation “natural feeding is given exactly when the baby wants it, and ceases as he ceases to want it.”48 The baby has the illusion of omnipotence; the nipple does not impinge on the infant, but is created by him or her when needed. This illusion of omnipotence, made possible by the mother’s “adaptive technique,” has crucial devel- opmental importance because, as is already suggested in the passage from The Child, the Family, and the Outside World cited in Adelman’s footnote on Winnicott and Cavell, it gives the baby “hope that there is a live relationship between inner reality and external reality, between innate primary creativity and the world at large.”49 In this early phase of development the mother’s responsiveness allows the infant self to integrate and to become secure enough to be “alive” to itself and to others. A well-managed nursing situation hence helps the infant to come to terms with the primary separation that birth marks and to integrate his self securely. Nursing is also important in Adelman’s interpretation of Shakespear- ean tragedy, particularly in her reading of Coriolanus. There is surely no Shakespeare play more concerned with the complex relationship between mother and child, which is crystallized in the nursing situa- tion with its myriad possibilities for fulfilment and frustration of needs. Coriolanus is filled to the brim with images of hunger; of neglect; of not having enough food, love, or power. First amongst the unsatisfied: the nursing couple of Coriolanus and Volumnia, whose name already poses the question of a volume waiting to be filled, of a want. That the nursing situation should also haunt Cavell’s reading of Shakespearean tragedy speaks again to the strength of Adelman’s influence. Cavell notes the ear-whispering scene between Hermione and Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale with much interest. Here his sense of the “mutually seduc- tive gestures” between Hermione and Mamillius—whose name is again incidentally evocative of the maternal breast or mammilla and brings to mind a much younger child—is reminiscent of Winnicott’s view of a well-managed nursing situation where mother and infant are wrapped up in each other (DK 194). Whether through Adelman or by a more direct route, Winnicott’s notion of the central importance of the nurs- ing situation finds its way into Cavell’s thinking about skepticism with and through Shakespearean tragedy. His focus on the nursing situation resonates strongly with Winnicott’s view of the foundational, integrative function of the first relationship rather than with Klein’s view of the instinctively aggressive infant. new literary history36 Cavell shares Winnicott’s sense that infancy clarifies the conditions for skepticism. The importance of the mother-infant relationship is acknowledged throughout Disowning Knowledge and particularly in the “Introduction,” where Cavell claims that “what philosophy registers as uncertainty in our knowledge of the existence of the world is a function of, say intellectualization of, the child’s sense of loss in separating from the mother’s body” (DK 13). At the same time, the terms in which Winnicott describes the effect of prolonged and consistent misattunement between mother and child bear a striking resemblance to Cavell’s descriptions of skepticism. On a separate sheet of paper that was found attached to Winnicott’s chapter on the establishment of a relationship with external reality in the posthumously published manuscript of Human Nature, he describes two kinds of relationship that can be the result of a failure of adaptation in infancy. The first is a “silent secret relationship to an essentially personal and private inner world of subjective phenomena,” which is divorced from the outside world.50 In the other, a false self is formed. Here, as Winnicott writes in The Family and Individual Develop- ment, the infant becomes “a collection of reactions to impingement,” forever hiding behind “a false self, which complies with and generally wards off the world’s knocks.”51 In the first scenario, the true self, though containing “spontaneity” and “richness,” remains essentially “incom- municable”; in the second case, the self is, though “compliant” to the outside world, false (HN 109). The false self is here in a state of disintegration, as opposed to unin- tegration. For Winnicott, unintegration is a positive experience made possible in the first instance by the security provided by the mother’s adequate holding and is linked to creativity, spontaneity, and aliveness. By contrast, “the term disintegration is used to describe a sophisticated defence, a defence that is an active production of chaos in defence against unintegration in the absence of maternal ego-support, that is, against the unthinkable or archaic anxiety that results from failure of holding in the stage of absolute dependence.”52 Importantly, although a complete insularity of self is incompatible with health, the ability to access states of unintegration, when the infant does not feel “a need to integrate, the mother’s ego-supportive function being taken for granted,” is charac- terized as a developmental achievement. 53 Winnicott also calls this the capacity to be alone.54 Like Winnicott, Cavell thinks about the skeptic’s “conversion of metaphysical finitude into intellectual lack” in terms of a defensive mechanism (DK 138). And, as will become clear in a moment, his distinction between the acknowledgment of our common separateness and skepticism runs parallel to Winnicott’s differentiation between the ability to be unintegrated, or alone, and the plight of disintegration. It 37toward an ordinary language psychoanalysis seems that Cavell’s and Winnicott’s views on the alignment of infancy and skepticism are truly, to borrow Adelman’s word, congruent. Fur- ther transposing Winnicottian insights to Cavell’s reading of skepticism (like Adelman does), this means that we are born into the condition of skepticism (and up to here Klein would agree). Contra Klein, however, our skeptical condition flowers to skepticism not from the inside out, from something that we carry inside us, but from the outside in, from something that happens to us. Cavell’s Separateness and Winnicott’s Aloneness Whether or not one subscribes to the view that skepticism begins at the mother’s breast, the resonances between Winnicott’s and Cavell’s ways of looking at infancy, particularly as heard in Adelman’s work, bring into view the particularity of Cavell’s interpretation of skepticism. For Adelman, the psychological fact behind the pronounced nursing and feeding imagery in Coriolanus is simple: “The taking in of food is the primary acknowledgment of one’s dependence on the world, and as such, it is the primary token of one’s vulnerability.”55 She understands the play’s obsessive returns to questions of feeding, starving, and nursing as grappling with the issue of our vulnerability and mortality. For Adelman, then, what is at the heart of tragedy and the tragic hero’s predicament is the avoidance of his separateness, exemplified par excellence in the infant’s vulnerability to and complete dependence on its mother. This is what Winnicott calls the “unthinkable or archaic anxiety” resulting from “absolute dependence.”56 Incidentally, this fear of vulnerability and dependence also provides his explanation for the misogyny that Adel- man diagnoses in Shakespeare’s tragic heroes: “The general failure of recognition of absolute dependence at the start contributes to the fear of WOMAN that is the lot of both men and women.”57 Here aggression dissimulates and most importantly defends vulnerability.58 The tragedy of this self-defense mechanism is that, following the logic of what Jacques Derrida calls autoimmunity, it destroys the very thing that it seeks to protect: a connection to others. The fact of separateness dictates the vital importance of being able to connect to others. But what is separateness? What Adelman’s tragic hero and what Cavell’s skeptic avoid is the fact that “we are separate, but not necessarily separated (by something); that we are, each of us, bodies, i.e., embodied; each is this one and not that, each here and not there, each now and not then.”59 For Winnicott too, the primary separation of birth marks the fact that even when we are enclosed in our mother’s new literary history38 womb our body is separate from hers; we are essentially alone (HN 132). The image Winnicott returns to again and again in thinking about these “earliest states” is one of two nontouching bubbles: a smaller one, the individual, enclosed within a bigger one, the first environment—the mother (HN 127). In less than ideal circumstances, in which the environ- ment encroaches or impinges on the individual, the momentum goes from the outside toward the inside and the outer bubble risks bursting the smaller bubble by pressing on it. Under near-perfect circumstances, the individual discovers his environment through his own movement, for instance through a move toward the nipple at the first feed or, ear- lier, through a movement in the womb. Here the border of the smaller bubble will move outward to touch the larger bubble, but it will do so without bursting, remaining separate (HN 128). Does Cavell, like Winnicott seems to do, give skepticism a primal scene? Winnicott’s claim and Cavell’s intimation that the self’s health depends on the mother is both contentious and controversial, not the least because the idolization of woman is merely the obverse of misogyny. In their accounts, the mother risks becoming a metaphysical presence, just like she does in Augustine, where thanks to some kind of transubstantiation the human milk the infant suckles, is in fact divine.60 Winnicott is rightly praised for championing a no-nonsense approach to motherhood by positing that it was by no means necessary to be perfect, but that being an ordinary good-enough-mother would do. Cavell’s turn to the nursing couple must, just like his interest in the female voice, I believe, be taken as primarily figurative. One can, however, not help but wonder whether these men’s solemnization of “woman” is not just another incarnation of that same ancient fear, which is always waiting in the wings. 61 In highlighting the importance of the primary relationship between infant and mother, Cavell does not necessarily give skepticism a primal scene. Like in Adelman’s reading of the significance of nursing in Coriolanus, in Cavell’s account of skepticism the figure of the infant becomes a signifier for our dependence and mortality. He is pointing us with renewed urgency toward the realization that the skeptic’s avoidance is triggered by the unavoidable and terrifying, and terrifying because unavoidable, fact that our bodies are separate from others, that our bodies are even at times separate from ourselves. And that we, like our bodies, are mortal. The similarities to Winnicott bring to the surface a more granular picture of Cavell’s rather elusive concept of separateness. By his simple “diagrammatic representation” of the smaller bubble enclosed in a big- ger one, Winnicott highlights the importance of the environment at this early stage for the longterm health of the individual. But he also posits 39toward an ordinary language psychoanalysis “the absolute isolation of the individual” at birth (HN 128; 127). This primary and original isolation is not something that could be avoided or overcome but forms “the basis of human nature in terms of individual development” (HN 131). Even after the initial steps of development have been absolved—and in fact, like Cavell, Winnicott believes that our human development is never finished and that we are infinitely perfect- ible—this separateness remains. In fact, for Winnicott, to a large extent development can be understood as, step by step, taking the individual “towards recognition of the essential aloneness of the human being” (HN 114). Beyond our ability to communicate and our enjoyment of being with others, each individual remains “an isolate, permanently non- communicating, permanently unknown, in fact unfound.”62 Riffing on his vocabulary, Phillips describes Winnicott’s self as “isolated, secret and silent” (W 151). One cannot help but be struck by the similarities of this account of aloneness and Cavell’s description of the human condition as being “hidden and silent and fixed” (DK 109). The Claim of Reason suggests that “perhaps we are forced to the concept of knowledge” when faced with the problem of skepticism, “because we do not quite know how to speak of the other’s aliveness to himself, his being together with himself, by himself, in as it were a private place, a place he has to himself.”63 The notion of “aliveness” is, to be sure, Winnicott’s and describes the secure self’s ability to rest in states of unintegration. Cavell’s insistence on the condition of separate- ness as not being debilitating to human relationships but foundational to them is reminiscent of the way Winnicott believes unintegration—as opposed to disintegration—to be integral to health. For Winnicott, our self is most alive and true when, not afraid of the dependence that our primary separation marks, we remain open to the experience of being unintegrated. For Cavell, too, the health of our bonds to others and ourselves depends on our ability to resist the skeptical temptation of denying how separate, dependent, and mortal we truly are. Does Cavell’s separateness then have to be understood in terms of Winnicott’s alone- ness as the description of this “private place” seems to suggest? Both Winnicott and Cavell stress the absoluteness of privacy just as they do its importance. For Winnicott, everything that happens in early life is in service of protecting the inner, “incommunicado,” separate element that is “sacred and most worth of preservation.”64 For Cavell, the idea of privacy inherent in philosophy’s fantasy of a private language is, in fact, not radical enough, because it “fails to express how private we are, metaphysically and practically.”65 Our privacy is more deep but also less deep than the skeptic wants to admit. It is deeper, in the sense that our separateness, just like our mortality and the finiteness of our bodies, new literary history40 cannot be intellectualized away. It is less deep, because this is not as much of a hindrance to our understanding each other as the skeptic would like us to believe. There is a tendency to smooth over Cavell’s acknowledgment of sep- arateness, undoubtedly because it feels too close to skepticism. Ordinary language philosophy is traditionally understood to counter skepticism by insisting on the ordinariness of our connection to each other. Cavell’s work shows, to the contrary, that an insistence on the ordinariness of our connection to each other does not have to entail a denial of our com- mon separateness, but must entail our full acknowledgment of it. The fact that both Winnicott and Cavell embrace the reality of separateness does not make them skeptics. Quite the opposite, as Adelman rightly notes, “birth stands for primary separation, what the skeptical annihila- tion of the world . . . is attempting to deny.”66 Indeed, the avoidance of the separateness that our primary dependence on our mother symbolizes would precisely mean falling back into skepticism’s compulsive patterns. For Winnicott, “the traumatic experiences that can lead to the organiza- tion of primitive defences, belong to the threat to the isolated core, the threat of its being found, altered, communicated with.”67 Cavell argues very much along the same lines in offering a new reading of the skeptic’s fantasy of private language “as an attempt to account for, and protect, our separateness, our unknowingness, our unwillingness or incapacity either to know or to be known.”68 For both thinkers, separateness an sich is not a problem; indeed it is a possibility that cannot be avoided and therefore must be acknowledged. This is something that is deeply understood in Cavell’s reading of the motif of nursing in Coriolanus. In his way of looking at the play, the “condition of insatiability (starving by feeding, feeding as deprivation)” manifested by Coriolanus and Vo- lumnia “is a condition sometimes described as the infiniteness of desire, imposing upon the finiteness of the body” (DK 148–9). The problem arises when they do not recognize that this hunger manifests not an occasional lack but a condition of lack, as “a name or a definition of the human, like being mortal” (DK 148). Coriolanus and Volumnia are insatiable not because they are starving; they are starving because they are insatiable. The problem of skepticism is not brought about by the possibility of separateness, but by an inability, or an unwillingness, to accept its givenness. Philosophy’s Holding Environment Can there be such a thing as an ordinary language psychoanalysis? Can philosophy become psychoanalysis and still know itself? For both 41toward an ordinary language psychoanalysis Cavell and Winnicott the border between philosophy and psycho- analysis is permeable. More surprising even than Cavell’s association of philosophical issues and psychoanalytic concerns is Winnicott’s repeated acknowledgments in Human Nature that psychoanalytic issues may also be of philosophical concern. The philosophical problem of skepticism is inserted in a list of matters that he deems pertinent to the issue of human development. Thus “the practical matter of the management of the mother and infant in the first hours and days after a baby is born,” significantly also including the first feed, is enumerated alongside “the claim of the psychotic that what is not real is real, and the claim of the antisocial child that what is untrue is true and that dependence (which is a fact) is not a fact” and, most importantly, “the philosophical problem of the meaning of the word ‘real’” (HN 111). The suggestion here is that the dynamics of the first interactions between mother and infant, for example at the breast, are pertinent to whether a psychotic, or an antisocial child, or indeed a philosopher are able to distinguish what ordinarily counts as real. Winnicott’s view implies that a lack of good-enough care can flower into a certain type of philosophical inquiry. A baby who has received persistently good-enough care might come to the conclusion that “I know that there is no direct contact between external reality and myself, only an illusion of contact, a midway phenomenon that works very well for me when I am not tired. I couldn’t care less that there is a philosophical problem involved” (HN 114–5). For this baby, the philosophical problem of skepticism has no real bite. On the other hand, the baby who, due to less-fortunate circum- stances, was not able to create a sense of continuity between inner and outer is “really bothered by the idea of there being no direct contact with external reality” (HN 115). In contrast to the fortunate baby, who is able to acknowledge separateness as a fact that does not necessarily threaten his integrity, for this baby “the philosophical problem becomes and remains a vital one, a matter of life and death, of feeding or starva- tion, of love or isolation” (HN 115). Put somewhat simplistically, what is suggested is that good-enough care in early life can impart resilience in the face of the philosophical problem of skepticism. In this picture psychoanalysis can become philosophy’s “holding environment,” a term that for Winnicott can mean both the maternal environment in which the infant is held and the analytic setting in which the analyst helps restore the patient to health by fulfilling a version of the maternal func- tion for him or her. “It is not every philosopher who sees that this problem that besets every human being is a description of the initial relationship to external reality at the theoretical first feed; or for that matter at any theoretical new literary history42 first contact,” Winnicott writes (HN 114). Winnicott’s sense that in the case of some children “some degree of primitive agony has to be carried on into life and living”69 is matched by Cavell’s claim that “in [his] own limited experience with children, certainly they are having problems that eventually, we know, as they flower, will become philosophical issues.”70 But it is with Winnicott’s notion that philosophical problems can be solved psychoanalytically that these projects leave their common ground. Cavell concedes, of course, Freud’s contention that the interpretation of dreams may lead to philosophically relevant results; this should, however, not be taken to mean that “our vain waiting for philosophy is now to be replaced by the positive work of something else, call it psychoanalysis.”71 Alain Badiou has suggested that, in maintaining that a grounding in antiphi- losophy should be part of psychoanalytic training, Lacan characterized philosophy not as the guardian of knowledge but rather as the victim of a particular kind of ignorance.72 For Cavell, psychoanalysis is not such an antiphilosophy, but neither is it a savior come to redeem philosophy. If he is critical of philosophy, he is even more severe with psychoanalysis’s own skeptical tendencies: “But psychoanalysis has not surmounted the obscurities of the philosophical problematic of representation and reality it inherits. Until it stops shrinking from philosophy (from its own past), it will continue to shrink before the derivative question, for example, whether the stories of its patients are fantasy merely or (also?) of reality; it will continue to waver between regarding the question as irrelevant to its work and as the essence of it.”73 The most eloquent passage about Cavell’s commitment to philoso- phy as opposed to psychoanalysis is paradoxically also one of his most suggestive invocations of Winnicott. It can be found in the “Remarks from discussion” following Vincent Colapietro’s paper in The Education of Grownups on voice and philosophy.74 Ruminating on the possibility of doing philosophy with children, Cavell remarks: “It gives me the creeps when certain kinds of adults are very impatient with them [children], perhaps dismissing them as silly. There is real work to be done here. Where does light go when it’s out? . . . And I think that those things can be addressed as though they are heartfelt problems, not just words. So what is the bargain you are establishing to be? A holding environment? That’s what Winnicott calls it, and a classroom is also a kind of holding environment.”75 The audacity of this comparison lies in the conviction it expresses, namely that philosophy can do if not the same, then some of the work that good-enough mothering can do in Winnicott’s developmen- tal model: it can banish bewitchments and establish or reestablish health. Like Wittgenstein’s project, Cavell’s is first and foremost metaphi- losophical: it is concerned with reforming or healing philosophy by offering an alternative, albeit still philosophical, path of inquiry. Like 43toward an ordinary language psychoanalysis Wittgenstein’s, Cavell’s project can only be called antiphilosophical if one concedes that he counters philosophy with nothing but itself. Where Winnicott implies that certain, debilitating ways of doing philosophy are caused by a failure in the first holding environment, Cavell believes that philosophy can become a holding environment unto itself. Kingston University London NOTES I am grateful to The Leverhulme Trust for the Early Career Fellowship that has funded this research. Thanks also to Tina Chanter, Simon Morgan Wortham, Stephen Mulhall, and Maren Scheurer. 1 Andrew Phillips, Winnicott (London: Penguin, 2007), 25 (hereafter cited as W); quoted in Stanley Cavell, “Finding Words,” The London Review of Books, February 20, 1997, http:// www.lrb.co.uk/v19/n04/stanley-cavell/finding-words. 2 Cavell, “Finding Words.” 3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 40/40e. 4 See Cavell, “Opera and the Lease of Voice,” in A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1994), 129–70. 5 Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), 52. 6 Steven G. Affeldt’s critique of Stephen Mulhall’s reading of Cavell exemplifies how subtle such an assumed undergirding structure can be. See Affeldt, “The Ground of Mutuality: Criteria, Judgment, and Intelligibility in Stephen Mulhall and Stanley Cavell,” European Journal of Philosophy 6, no. 1 (1998): 1–31. 7 Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 42. 8 Cavell, “Freud and Philosophy: A Fragment,” Critical Inquiry 13, no. 2 (1987): 378. 9 Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2010), 185; 512. 10 See Cavell, The Senses Of Walden (New York: Viking, 1974). 11 Cavell, Little Did I Know, 414–15. Much more remains to be said about the similarities between Winnicott’s and Cavell’s conceptions of the ordinary, for instance that for both the “ordinary” often expresses a wish. See Phillips, Winnicott, 140. 12 Timothy Gould, Hearing Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), 41. 13 See Arnold Davidson, “Beginning Cavell,” in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Fleming and Michael Payne (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1989), 240. 14 Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 27. 15 Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), 216; 217. 16 A notable exception to this rule is Ludger H. Viefhues-Bailey, who has considered the resonances between Cavell and Julia Kristeva in Beyond the Philosopher’s Fear: A Cavel- lian Reading of Gender, Origin and Religion in Modern Skepticism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Like Adelman, Viefhues-Bailey recognizes that “the skeptical worry is rooted in separation anxiety” (145). His reading of Cavell, however, differs from mine in that it considers the skeptic’s struggle with the maternal origin as a displacement of his grappling with the unfathomable divine. new literary history44 17 Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding O.S.B., ed. John E. Rotelle O.S.A. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997), 47. 18 Augustine, Confessions, 48; 47. 19 Augustine, Confessions, 43–44. 20 See Mulhall, Wittgenstein’s Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, §§ 243–315 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), 32. 21 Wittgenstein, Investigations, 76/76e. 22 Mulhall, Wittgenstein’s Private Language, 32. 23 Mulhall, Wittgenstein’s Private Language, 36. 24 Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), 99. 25 Cavell, Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 170 (hereafter cited as PP). 26 Cavell, “The World as Things,” in Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2005), 264. 27 Melanie Klein, “Weaning,” in Love, Guilt and Reparation, and Other Works 1921–1945 (London: Virago Press, 1988), 293. 28 Klein, “Weaning,” 291. 29 Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963 (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1984), 22; 6. 30 See Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” in Love, Guilt and Reparation, and Other Works: 1921–1945. 31 Cavell, “The Interminable Shakespearean Text,” in Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, 38. 32 Cavell, “What is the Scandal of Skepticism?” in Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, 148. 33 Cavell, “What is the Scandal of Skepticism?” 148. 34 Cavell, “What is the Scandal of Skepticism?” 148. 35 Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” 2; 22. 36 Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” 6. 37 I have written elsewhere on the depth of influence of Adelman’s insights into Shake- spearean tragedy on Cavell’s reading of them. See Chiara Alfano, “A Scarred Typmanum,” Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies 1 (December 2013): 19–38. 38 Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (London: Routledge, 1992), 323. 39 Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 359. She cites, respectively, D. W. Winicott’s The Child, The Family, and the Outside World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 90, and Cavell’s Dis- owning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003) (hereafter cited as DK). 40 For a more detailed account of the difference between Klein’s and Winnicott’s object relations theory please see Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, ed. Jay R. Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983). 41 See in particular Klein, “Notes on some Schizoid Mechanisms,” 1. The crassness of Klein’s account of early infancy is often exaggerated. See Meira Likierman, Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context (London: Continuum, 2001) for a balanced account of her work. 42 Winnicott, “Paediatrics and Psychiatry,” in Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1975), 159. 43 Winnicott, “The Capacity to be Alone,” in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (London: Karnac Books, 1990), 33. 44 See Danièle Moyal-Sharrock’s discussion of the mind-behavior gap in Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 203. 45toward an ordinary language psychoanalysis 45 Winnicott, The Child and the Family: First Relationships, ed. Janet Hardenberg (London: Tavistock, 1957), 40. 46 Winnicott, Babies and their Mothers, ed. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeleine Davis (London: Free Association, 1988), 67. 47 Daniel Stern, The First Relationship: Mother and Infant (London: Fontana/Open Books, 1977), 85. 48 Winnicott, The Child and the Family, 20. 49 Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 359. 50 Winnicott, Human Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1988), 109 (hereafter cited as HN). 51 Winnicott, The Family and Individual Development (London: Routledge, 2001), 24. 52 Winnicott, “Ego Integration in Child Development,” in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (London: Karnac, 1990), 61. 53 Winnicott, “Ego Integration in Child Development,” 61. 54 Winnicott, “The Capacity to be Alone,” in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development, 30. 55 Adelman, “‘Anger’s My Meat’: Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982), 131. 56 Winnicott, “Ego Integration in Child Development,” 61. 57 Winnicott, “Primary Maternal Preoccupation,” in Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis, 304. 58 See Adelman, “‘Anger’s My Meat,’” 131. 59 Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 369. 60 See Augustine, Confessions, 43. 61 See Elissa Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Pho- tography, Deconstruction (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2012) for an illuminating account of the uncanny status of the mother in philosophy. 62 Winnicott, “Communicating and Non Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites,” in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 187. 63 Cavell, Claim of Reason, 367. 64 Winnicott, “Communicating and Non Communicating,” 187. 65 Cavell, Claim of Reason, 370. 66 Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 359. 67 Winnicott, “Communicating and Non Communicating,” 187. 68 Cavell, Claim of Reason, 369. 69 Winnicott, Babies and Their Mothers, 38. 70 See “Chapter 6: Remarks from discussion,” in Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grown- ups, ed. Naoko Saito and Paul Standish (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2012), 147. 71 Cavell, “Freud and Philosophy,” 388. 72 Alain Badiou, The Adventure of French Philosophy, ed. and trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2012), 53. 73 Cavell, “Freud and Philosophy,” 393. 74 Vincent Colapietro, “Voice and the Interrogation of Philosophy: Inheritance, Aban- donment, and Jazz,” in Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups, 123–45. 75 Cavell, “Remarks from discussion,” 147.