Catherine Wheatley (2019) <i>Stanley Cavell and Film: Scepticism and Self-Reliance at the Cinema</i>

Abstract

As D.N. Rodowick aptly points out on the back cover, Catherine Wheatley's Stanley Cavell and Film will become a go-to volume both for those wanting to discover Cavell for the first time and for veteran readers looking for clarification or a novel way to approach the philosopher's work. Unlike many volumes dedicated to elucidating and initiating readers to more or less difficult authors, Wheatley's book admirably manages to combine legible exegesis with critical depth. The volume elegantly guides readers through Cavell's opus, familiarising them with key “master tones”, providing a way to tune into the philosopher's theoretical nuances and stylistic specificity. However, there is no attempt here to domesticate Cavell's idiosyncrasies. Quite to the contrary, Wheatley uses the philosopher's conceptual quirks to lead novice and expert alike out of the terrain of mere illustration in order to develop an original reading. That is, Stanley Cavell and Film succeeds in its aim of providing entry points to film studies scholars put off by philosophical density (p. 21), while also offering an original approach to the American philosopher's writing. Wheatley does this not simply by illuminating Cavell's work on and through film; she also confronts his philosophical project more generally, with one of her crucial insights being precisely that to separate Cavell's ‘film theory’ from his more general philosophy sacrifices much of the incisiveness of his work.