Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 43, No.

2, 2009

Ourselves in Translation: Stanley Cavell

and Philosophy as Autobiography

NAOKO SAITO

This paper offers a different approach to writing about

oneself—Stanley Cavell’s idea of philosophy as
autobiography. In Cavell’s understanding, the
acknowledgement of the partiality of the self is an essential
condition for achieving the universal. In the apparently
paradoxical combination of the ‘philosophical’ (which is
traditionally connected with a search for the objective and the
universal) and the ‘autobiographical’ (which is
conventionally associated with the subjective and the
personal), Cavell shows us a way of focusing on the self and
yet always transcending the self. The task requires, however, a
reconstruction of the notions of philosophy and
autobiography, and at the same time the destabilising of our
conceptions of self and language. Cavell seeks to achieve this
through the idea of finding one’s voice, understood as an
autobiographical exercise. This necessitates both negotiation
of the inheritance from the past and innovation for the future,
initiation into the language community and deviation from it.
What this amounts to, in ways that the paper seeks to explain,
is a process of the self and language in translation. This is a
sense of ‘translation’ that is broader than the conventional
understanding of the term. Such a conception can, it is argued,
exercise a therapeutic effect on the self, destabilising the myth
of self-identity. The implications of this account for the
contemporary vogue for narrative in educational research, as
well as for classroom practice, are considered.

RETHINKING THE CONNECTION BETWEEN AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND

PHILOSOPHY
‘Narrative’ has become a fashionable term in educational research and
practice, and its current vogue is related to reflective modes of thinking
and talking about one’s own self. As a concomitant phenomenon, the
writing of autobiography in various forms has become part of educational
practice, often with the expectation that this will have therapeutic effects.
In this general trend, there is a prevailing assumption that there must be an

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254 N. Saito

identifiable self, a ‘real me’, a self that is to be revealed in the process of

writing an autobiography. Such a mode of narrating one’s self, on the one
hand, tends to be assimilated to a unification of desire constructed within a
global market and, ironically, to end up with a loss of one’s self. On the
other hand, the performativity of disclosing one’s self in the name of
narrative often carries with it an air of moralism, where the listener is
forced to listen, on pain otherwise of being accused of being insensitive.
This is a form of violence to the ear of the other: language is trapped in the
narrow and fixed framework of the narrator, and it is imposed on the
listener. There is, however, an undeniable need, a desire for finding one’s
self, and this can be genuinely therapeutic. Is there not an alternative way
of responding to this need, a way that avoids these negative aspects of the
current preoccupation with narrative? This is a question to which this
paper tries to respond.
As a promising potential answer, I shall discuss an alternative approach to
narrating and writing about one’s self—Stanley Cavell’s idea of philosophy
as autobiography. This is an idea in which acknowledgement of the
partiality of the self is an essential condition for achieving the universal. In
the apparently paradoxical combination of the ‘philosophical’ (which is
traditionally connected with a search for the objective and the universal)
and the ‘autobiographical’ (which is conventionally associated with the
subjective and the personal), Cavell reveals a way of focusing on the self
and yet always transcending the self. The task requires, however, the
reconstruction of the notions of philosophy and autobiography, which at the
same time destabilises our conceptions of self and language. Cavell seeks to
achieve this through the idea of finding one’s voice in an autobiographical
exercise. This necessitates both inheritance from the past and innovation for
the future, initiation into the language community and deviation from it.
What this amounts to, in ways that will become clearer as this paper
progresses, is a process of the self and language in translation. This is a
sense of ‘translation’ that is broader than the conventional understanding of
the term. Such a conception, I shall argue, can exercise a therapeutic effect
on the self, destabilising the myth of self-identity.
In the next section I shall first clarify some problematic assumptions
entailed by the trend of narrative in education and point to ways out of
these, drawing some ideas from Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith and Paul
Standish’s The Therapy of Education (Smeyers, Smith and Standish, 2007).
In the following section, Cavell’s idea of philosophy as autobiography will
be introduced. By highlighting Ralph Waldo Emerson’s reference to the
‘nonchalant boy’ and the presence of the ‘silenced child’ in Cavell’s own
autobiographical writing, I shall show autobiographical exercises to involve
elements of inheritance and prophesy, and the process of translation to
involve both stealing and recreating. I shall then argue that finding one’s
voice through an autobiographical exercise is a work of mourning for the
rebirth of the self. Our selves, in their fated relationship with a language
community, are always and already involved in translation. In conclusion,
some educational implications will be drawn from Cavell’s idea of
philosophy as autobiography.

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NARRATIVE, THERAPY AND EDUCATION: ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT

THE SELF AND LANGUAGE
In educational research and practice the narrative turn—extending even to
the recounting of intimate details of one’s life—is a therapeutic endeavour
to find one’s self. There are certain assumptions behind this vogue, as The
Therapy of Education helps us understand. First of all there is an ‘inward
turn’, a reflective mode of thinking and talking about one’s own self (p. 9).
There is a strong form of self-centeredness and sentimentality—‘confes-
sional construction of subjectivities’, with an obsession with self-reflexivity
and self-esteem (pp. 60, 63). The drive to ‘find oneself’, familiar enough in
education, presupposes the existence of a ‘real me’ or the possibility of
identifying the core of the self. The more you narrate about your past and
present experiences, the closer you get to some inner core of the self. This is
a drive towards self-identity, in which ‘narrative pushes us perhaps towards
knowing rather than acknowledging’ (p. 62). The myth of the ‘real me’
tends to presuppose the isolated individual in the combination of ‘auto-’ and
‘biography’ (ibid.). Second, the narrative turn inevitably involves a certain
assumption about the self’s relation to language: to writing (on the part of
the narrator) and to reading (on the part of the reader). In what is called an
‘autobiographical exercise’ the language is used in such a way as to secure
and identify the self. With the use of the first person, there is the assumption
of authority of the ‘narrator’s viewpoint’, and this contributes to the sense of
the ‘unity and internal coherence’ of the story (ibid.).1
Narrative’s underlying desire for the expression of the self does, however,
harbour some problems. With the intention of securing the ground of the
self, the manifestation of what is apparently one’s own taste often ends up,
ironically, by being assimilated into a unification of taste in the global
market. Also, in spite of its professed attentiveness to alterity and
difference, the narrative mode often creates an uncomfortable feeling on
the part of the reader, a sense that the narrator’s language is burdened by a
self-importance that is forced upon the reader, an imposed listening that is
itself a kind of violence. This is a debased narcissistic form of narrative.
Behind it there is a drive towards identification in linear progression and
articulation, and an assumption that ‘differences are to be reconciled and
harmonized, whether within the group or within the self’ (p. 61).
Bearing these dangers of narrative in mind, but acknowledging the
therapeutic value of searching for the self, we need to ask whether there is
an alternative approach. This requires us to reconsider our conceptions of
the self and of language, and their relationship to education. The Therapy
of Education points us to such a way out—a way towards the ‘the non-
integrity of the self’ (p. 71). It is argued there that the self cannot be
something that is identified tout court, but that it is inevitably structured
by the binary of ‘reading and writing’ (pp. 64–66, 70). At the heart of this
structure are the fluidity of the alleged identity of the self and an inevitable
inaccessibility in the author’s location: ‘Just as the eye is not a part of the
visual field, so the ‘‘I’’ is not contained within the texts it generates or
confronts’ (p. 65). The implication here is that language and the act of

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reading and writing already carry ‘the otherness of words’ and hence
otherness within the self:

Reading involves the essentially binary structure of reader and text—of

listener and narrative, even of narrator and narrative or writer and script.
What this bipolarity of reading figures is a kind of otherness, and it does
this in two ways. First, otherness is there in the text . . . Second, otherness
is there in the way that, even in autobiography, the author cannot fully
contain herself in the writing (p. 64).

With this alternative approach to the self and language, there is still a
focus on the self, and yet, through reading and writing, the relationship
between the reader, the writer and the text is destabilised. Hence, there is
‘the responsibility of a reading that reaches no closure’ (p. 70); and this
may also reveal ‘the perhaps paradoxical importance, for the self and its
growth, of a turning of the attention away from the self’ (p. 66). Such a
shift of attention requires, the authors claim, ‘the wider sensitivity to
language that we are emphasising’, which, ‘with the more varied and in
some ways more precisely differentiated idea of narrative that it implies,
opens richer possibilities for therapy and education’ (p. 63).
The distinctive lines of the argument concerning the self and language
by the authors of The Therapy of Education can be further elucidated
through contrasting them with reader-response theory. In discussing the
influence of Dewey’s pragmatist theory of transaction in Louise Rosenblatt’s
reader-response theory, Jeanne M. Connell introduces Rosenblatt as a
leading figure in literary criticism who, in the second half of the 20th century,
challenged the dominance of the New Criticism (Connell, 2008, p. 106).
Connell highlights, as one of the distinctive features of Rosenblatt’s theory,
the ‘transactional relation between reader and the text’ mutually engaged in
the process of meaning-making. What is important here is the notion of a
‘balance’ between reader and text. Rosenblatt emphasises personal
experience (of the ‘I’, obviously) as a condition for participation in the
‘public realm of shared meanings’ (the ‘we’) (p. 104). Furthermore, Connell
stresses that it is a challenge for any transactional theory of reading to
establish ‘criteria for what constitutes a valid reading’ (p. 109). She refers
here to Rosenblatt’s appeal to Dewey’s notion of ‘warranted assertions’ in
the context of problem-solving: its point is to ‘determine meanings and
connections with other ideas that represent real problems to solve and to
consider contexts that are required for understanding these problems’. In this
problem-solving endeavour, ‘shared criteria’ are being formed in the process
of inquiry in ‘cooperative communicative efforts’ (pp. 110, 111).
Reader-response theory shows that the experience of reading is not a
matter simply of literary activity or worse, of what might be referred to
disparagingly as ‘linguistic play’: rather it is crucially related to the
transactional nature of human experience—how we, as individuals acting
together, bring richer meanings to the world. In this regard, and taking
‘text’ to refer not only to literal texts but to the fabric of experience itself,
reading is seen to extend beyond the procedure or method of problem-

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solving to the very process of the individual’s continual relating and re-
relating of herself to the text—and, thus, to the language community and
to others with whom she shares the experience of reading and meaning-
making. As Rosenblatt herself says: ‘Reader and text are involved in a
complex, nonlinear, recursive, self-correcting transaction’ (Rosenblatt,
2005, p. 9). In a more social context, for example, ‘dialogue between
teacher and students and interchange among students can foster growth
and cross-fertilisation in both the reading and writing processes’ (p. 28).
Rosenblatt’s reader-response theory elucidates some characteristic
features of the relationship between the self, the other and language—
those that are criticised by the authors of The Therapy of Education. First,
Rosenblatt’s theory illustrates the way such consensus is sought in the
process of reading. Moreover, she indicates that such consensus is never a
once-and-all fixed state but always subject to the continual process of
revision and reconstruction in negotiation over social criteria. Second, the
quality of transactional experience illustrated by the process of reading is
perhaps typically represented by what Connell calls ‘balance between
reader and text’ (Connell, 2008, p. 106, italics added), which might also be
called a state of equilibrium. There is then, it seems, this constant drive
towards finding settled ground, with every component contributing to an
interrelated balance in aid of the harmonious whole. Third, and related to
the second point, the transactional experience also is underpinned by the
principle of continuity—‘the continuity between human beings and their
social and natural worlds’ (p. 104). Fourth, it raises a question as to how
the ‘criteria’ of temporary consensus are to be articulated and made
transparent to those involved in the use of language. Rosenblatt herself
writes: ‘the assessment must be based on clearly articulated criteria as to
signs of growing maturity in handling personal response, relating to the
evoked text, and use of personal and intertextual experience vis-à-vis the
responses of others’ (Rosenblatt, 2005, p. 33).
While this offers an easily accessible way of accounting for the act of
reading, and the relationship between reader and text, it does anything but
capture the ‘non-integrity of the self’ and the ‘binary’ structure of reading
and writing. What then can be gained from shifting our attention to the
latter’s more complex, though ultimately more sensitive and compelling
interpretation of reading? In the next section, I shall develop the argument
presented by The Therapy of Education and try to elaborate an account of
autobiographical writing that takes on that sensitivity.

PHILOSOPHY AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY: THE NONCHALANT BOY AND

THE SILENCED CHILD
Stanley Cavell offers a way of responding to the need for finding one’s
self without falling into debased forms of narrative. He shows us the
apparently paradoxical task of writing in the first person while yet
releasing the ‘I’ beyond the self. This is represented in his idea of
philosophy as autobiography, in which autobiography destabilises and
reconstructs the relationship between the self and language.

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In A Pitch of Philosophy, Cavell explores the complex relationship

between philosophy and autobiography. He writes: ‘Philosophy’s
arrogance is linked to its ambivalence toward the autobiographical’
(Cavell, 1994, p. 3). The arrogance in question refers to the presumption
(at least of a particular kind of philosophy) to speak for human kind, in
universal terms (‘philosophy’s arrogance as the arrogation of the right to
speak for us’ (p. 8)), while the ambivalence in question has to do with that
same philosophy’s disdain for more personal kinds of writing (‘philosophy
has equal reason to shun the autobiographical’ (p. 3)). In such philosophy
it is as if the personal is repressed, though it is manifest, in spite of itself,
in this arrogance of voice. Philosophy acts as a force to expel the
autobiographical in its search for universality. The ‘I’ in this context needs
to be suppressed as it is taken to be merely subjective, and objectivity is
considered to be the mark of the genuinely philosophical. It is the
achievement of ordinary language philosophy, by contrast, to recognise
the necessity of speaking in the first person, and this is evident in that
characteristic phrasing of its approach: ‘When we say . . ., we mean . . .’.
The expression is first person, and it is plural: the ‘I’ is speaking for others,
in a bid to achieve objectivity, and hence aligning itself in the ‘we’. This is a
kind of acknowledgement of the inherent nature of philosophy as arrogation.
Cavell as an ordinary language philosopher takes the position that ‘the
interest in the new philosophy lay precisely in the necessity and openness of
its arrogance and autobiographicality, that these are not personal but
structural features of the necessity to say what we say’ (p. 10). And he
continues: ‘The philosophical appeal to what we say, and the search for our
criteria on the basis of which we say what we say, are claims to community’
(Cavell, 1979, p. 20): this is the act of ‘autobiographizing, signing the
world’ (Cavell, 1994, p. 35). What this suggests is that autobiography is
necessary for the achieving of neutrality as the task of philosophy and that
this feature, this necessary linkage, is the crucial feature of ordinary
language philosophy. If this is so, how can he resolve the apparent tension
between the personal and the universal, the subjective and the objective?
Two figures that occur in Emerson and Cavell respond to this question:
respectively, the ‘nonchalant’ boy and the ‘silenced’ child. On the face of
it, these two figures sound as though they constitute a striking contrast—
one assertive, the other silent. In fact they come together in such a way as
to complement one another and to shed light on an alternative
understanding of philosophy, in which the autobiographical is a crucial
component. Let us examine first the figure of the nonchalant boy who
appears in Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’, an essay that starts with the
declaration that a ‘man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light
which flashes across his mind from within’ (Emerson, 1990, p. 131). The
nonchalant boy appears to illustrate the meaning of this light:
‘Independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people
and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the
swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent,
troublesome’ (p. 133). This appears to be an undisciplined figure, whose
voice may be threatening or disturbing to the ear.

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In confronting such a child, what would be our response? We might be

prompted to think of the necessity of discipline. We are born into a culture
and live in a language community, and hence, we must acquire its
grammar and norms. Yet such a response seems to cover over a hidden
dimension of the voice—one that exposes us to the vulnerability and
fragility of the human condition. We are fated to be born into a culture and
live in a language community, and hence it is our necessity to acquire
social meanings. It is equally necessary, however, that we respond to the
unlimited reservoir of our desires, that we live ‘from within’, for this is an
excess that cannot be fully contained in those publicly shared meanings.
Emerson’s child voices the urgency of such need. As Emerson says: ‘This
one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that for ever degrades
the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds
the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside’ (p. 142).
Lawrence Buell contextualises his discussion historically to advance the
view that the Emersonian individual is not the ‘mundanely autobiogra-
phical ‘‘I’’’ and that the ‘inner light or authority was not idiosyncratic’
because ‘[d]epersonalization was indispensable to a truly privatized
spirituality’ (Buell, 2003, pp. 169, 236). The ‘private’ here is different
from the notion of the private in neo-liberalism. But this does not represent
a religious point of view. Instead, as Buell argues, ‘private spirituality’ has a
background of universality. His discussion takes the term ‘autobiographical’
in a negative way, however, and implies that the personal is merely
personal, with a suggestion that the authority of the ‘I’ be given by some
depersonalised, universal source. In contrast Cavell’s interpretation of the
private voice of the nonchalant boy does not dichotomise the relationship
between the personal and the impersonal. In his Emersonian moral
perfectionism, one thing that is understood as not to be superseded in the
condition of human being is its partiality: that is, the human being is partial
both in the sense of not being a whole and in the sense of having proclivities
or idiosyncratic tendencies towards something. Criticising Kant’s notion of
a noumenal self, ‘the fantasy of selflessness’, Cavell says that Emerson
denies the possibility that ‘the end of all attainable selves is the absence of
self, of partiality’ (Cavell, 1990, xxxiv). For him the autobiographical ‘I’ is
something that is the essential source of ‘neutrality as an achievement’
(Cavell, 1994, p. 35), or the process of a recovery from the state of
‘Lethe’—a state in which, in the habit of speaking with ‘éclat’, a man
forgets the original state of the ‘courage to be what you are’ (p. 34). Here
Cavell is responding to Emerson’s voice: ‘Ah, that he could pass again into
his neutral, godlike independence!’ (Emerson, 1990, p. 133). Unlike Buell’s
interpretation, Cavell’s is that the state of neutrality, or say, universality, is
not something given to you as a priori, but something that can be attained
only through the intensifying of the autobiographical ‘I’.
The second figure is the silenced child. In writing his autobiography, in
recounting his own past, Cavell presents himself as a child who inherits
the voices of his father and mother. They are the origins of his own voice,
and hence an ineradicable inheritance from the past, while at the same
time, in his ‘absorption of their opposite griefs’, the source of his sense of

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isolation, speechlessness, even madness (Cavell, 1994, p. 22). The idea of

‘perfect pitch’2 functions as a metonym for the attunement he sought in his
original career as a musician, and then as a philosopher. In the wake of
that experience Cavell shows in his own narrative how finding his own
language is a matter of inheritance as much as invention, and how finding
his own self is not a matter so much of the articulation and identification of
that self but of encountering, persevering and acknowledging the rift
within the self. He identifies this process as one of ‘stealing’— in the sense
both of the child’s voice being stolen (the ‘theft of selfhood, psychic
annihilation’ as he is moulded by or incorporated into the received
language) and of the child stealing his voice from his parents (appropriating
words for himself, against their apparently settled meaning in the
vocabulary he inherits).3 This presents the view that language develops
by deviation, in complex acts of ‘giving’ and ‘misgiving’ (p. 37). In this
sense inheriting language from one’s elders involves a process of translation
as treason. (The French word traduction shows more clearly the
etymological connections with being traduced and, hence, with treachery.
Thus the Italian expression: traduttore traditore [translator: traitor].) Here
translation is crucially related to the idea of stealing and transgression. The
self, or the ‘I’, of the nonchalant boy and the silenced child, therefore, is
represented by Cavell not as the object of identification, but as that part of
the self that already and always entails the unidentifiable, the ‘residuum
unknown, unanalyzable’ (Emerson, 1990, p. 168).
Cavell’s take on scepticism reinforces, albeit in an indirect way, this
way of listening to the voices of the nonchalant boy and the silenced child.
What do you do when you are confronted with the limits of reason—those
posed by these Emersonian children? Cavell would say that we should
neither acquiesce in a pondering of the limits of knowledge (say, in a
reverencing of the unknowable) nor expect simply to solve the problem
(say, in a foundationalist securing of knowledge); it is to be dissolved
rather than solved (Cavell, 2003, p. 9). He would rather say that we enter
into the muddle of life expressed by the child, with the acknowledgement
that ‘[o]ur way is neither clear nor simple; we are often lost’ (Cavell,
1979, p. 324). It is this sense of the unknown and the inaudible, the
ambiguous realm between the inner and the outer, that Cavell finds in the
Emersonian child. In our sometimes chaotic, often uncertain, and ever-
surprising moral struggle, a ‘moral reason can never be a flat answer to the
competent demand for justification’, nor can we simply think and act
‘within clear lines’ (pp. 303, 325). Cavell’s alternative emphasis is on the
need to seek ‘mutual attunements’ (p. 32). While not abrogating a search
for foundation, such an approach never settles finally on secure ground.
Cavell’s reading of scepticism helps us detect the peculiar kind of
tragedy that is involved in placing the Emersonian child in a culture: it
bears witness to our fated tendency to denial, the denial of the invisible
and inaudible within the familiar. When the voice of a dissident is
unbearable or intolerable, we may fall into a state where we speak as if the
tension were resolvable: measures must be taken. And then it is that
repression takes place, not only the repression of the child’s voice but also

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the repression of our own fear of confronting the unknown and the strange
fragility of the human condition. Denial of this aspect of the human
condition is in itself a manifestation of the tragic, as defined by Cavell—
the tragedy of repressing the inner light of the child and of our forgetting
such repression. Autobiography thus is inseparable from this broader task
of remembering in a culture.
Cavell summarises the structure of philosophy as autobiography as
follows:

An obvious first is that a blessing has to be seen to be offered, a promise of

an authorization for me to become what I am, which will be expressed as
establishing my right to exist, to have a birth; a second, that the authorization
is marked by the sense that I have arrogated the right to it, itself attested,
third, by my having intercepted the conversation of my parents and
translated their words by finding, fourth, a version of perfect pitch; and that
this movement is, fifth, a process of passing again into my neutrality, which,
sixth, bears testimony of the world I think (Cavell, 1994, pp. 38–39).

‘Neutrality’ here is a kind of philosophical achievement, one that is possible

only through an ‘autobiographical exercise’. Let us continue to explore the
relationship between philosophy and autobiography, and to consider how
the ‘I’ achieves the state of neutrality through the experience of writing.

OURSELVES IN TRANSLATION
The question was originally raised concerning how to respond to a desire
for finding one’s self, while at the same time releasing the self from
narrow self-centeredness, as is typically manifested in debased forms of
narrative. In Cavell’s idea of philosophy as autobiography, writing about
one’s self, with the ‘I’ as narrator, does not necessarily mean finding-
one’s-self. The act of finding entails the acts of stealing and misgiving, but
also, as we shall see, of burying, as critical conditions for rediscovering.
Recounting the past in an autobiographical exercise requires ‘borrowing’
language from one’s parents and ‘burying’ one’s identity (p. 44), acceding
to their words, succumbing to descriptions that are already there. As such,
finding one’s self necessitates losing one’s self in order to find the ‘non-I’
within the ‘I’. The self is one’s own, and yet at the same time not fully
one’s own—being always already in relationship with the other, the
unknowable and unidentifiable within and without the self. As the
nonchalant boy and the silenced child illustrate, the possessive form of
‘one’s own’ or ‘one’s self’ is paradoxically opened to the other in
borrowing and indebtedness. Cavell contrasts here Thoreau’s saying that
‘[i]t is difficult to begin without borrowing’ with Nietzsche’s idea of
‘celebrating his origins by burying something of himself’ (ibid.). With
these subtle and rich implications the idea of finding one’s self is
superseded by that of finding one’s voice. These aspects of losing and
burying one’s identity make an autobiographical exercise the work of
mourning—mourning over loss in order to enjoy morning, to celebrate the

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moment of rebirth. It is the therapeutic experience of encountering the

traumatic in the past as the condition of thinking again, learning to
abrogate the past for a new departure. The ‘clinical’ and the ‘critical’—
are thus inseparable in Cavell’s philosophy as autobiography (p. 31). A
Pitch of Philosophy anticipates the burden of this with the words:

Not to shun the autobiographical means running the risk of turning

philosophically critical discourse into clinical discourse. But that has
hardly been news for philosophy since its taking on of modern skepticism,
since Descartes wondered whether his doubts about his existence might
not class him with madmen, and Hume confessed that his thoughts were a
malady for which there is no cure. If the following autobiographical
experiments are philosophically pertinent, they must confront the critical
with the clinical, which means distrust both as they stand, I mean distrust
their opposition (p. 8).

Autobiographical exercises involve destabilising and destabilised relation-

ships between reader, writer and text (p. 15). The reader is engaged in
interrogating the text in response to the arrogation it poses (as is perhaps
most typically shown by philosophical texts). Of Wittgenstein Cavell writes:

Something his words await is for the student or reader . . . to intervene, to

ask something of them, an interrogation to match their arrogation. This is
perhaps why the words have stopped some place. When to stop, how to
end, is what the teacher cannot be taught. The distance from arrogation to
interrogation is not understandable as prorogation, which is to say, as
deferral; because to prorogue is to know how to begin again, or go on later,
and we have no assurance of this when cultivation has stopped (pp. 15–16).

In highlighting the idea of ‘interrogation’ here (which involves neither the

somewhat anxious questioning of the familiar ‘interrogation of the text’,
as in a certain genre of social science research, nor an attitude of patient
awaiting), Cavell snipes at Derrida’s notion of ‘deferral’, the idea that
eternal prorogation is inevitable. In contrast Cavell responds more fully to
the sense of a deadlock, of being stopped short, and to a psychological
anxiety over what cannot be said. It is suggested here that the text’s
arrogation, the fated tendency of philosophy to arrogance, its necessity to
speak for the human, on the one hand (p. 10), and the reader’s
interrogation of that text, on the other, come together in a potential
moment of attunement between the three—author, reader, text. This
requires the lending of an ear to the voice of the unknowable in the text,
even beyond the hand of the writer. Authorship cannot be located simply
and independently in the writer, the text or the reader. The achievement
of neutrality in an autobiographical exercise thus requires the participation
of these three voices. Autobiography in Cavell’s thinking does not point to
the ‘real me’, but, as The Therapy of Education also argues, to something
more like a ‘dissolution’ of the self (Smeyers, Smith and Standish, 2007,
p. 65)—at least, of the self in a certain incarnation. It is the process of
acquiring the standpoint of the double within the self. Referring to

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Thoreau’s writing, Cavell says that reading and writing are the processes
through which one learns to be ‘beside oneself’, a way of ‘being next to’
oneself (Cavell, 1992, p. 104), beside oneself ‘in a sane sense’ (Thoreau,
1992, p. 91; Cavell, 1992, p. 102). Dissolution here should be
distinguished from the idea of ‘solution’ in problem-solving: in dissolution
the original assumption is questioned anew in emerging contexts, and the
self must go back to the original wording that frames the problem and
dismantle it—or, perhaps better, to deconstruct—it (Standish, 2008).
Referring to Gilles Deleuze, The Therapy of Education restates the idea of
dissolution as the ‘dissolution of any capitalized Self’, the ‘I’ of the ‘I think’
being ‘fractured from one end to the other’ (Smeyers, Smith and Standish,
2007, p. 65; Deleuze, 1994, p. 86). In other words, this is the process of
encountering the irreconcilable other within the self. The autobiographical
self does not point to its integrity, unity or even authenticity.
This destabilising process—of text, writer and reader—inevitably
involves translation. It is not, however, that this sense of translation is
merely metaphorical, and to understand this involves realising the way
that the idea of translation is commonly misconstrued. Translation is not
well understood if it is assumed to depend upon a binary contrast between,
on the one hand, an original pure language and, on the other, a foreign
language that can be juxtaposed against the original and that is subordinate
to it. Rather, the thought is that translation is something that is already
woven into the process of the acquisition of the original language. It is not
just that languages never as a matter of fact exist in some pure unmediated
form, uncontaminated by influence from outside; it is also that the idea
that they might is predicated on metaphysical assumptions about the
relation between language and world, and about the nature of meaning,
that lose sight of language’s ongoing, evolving, fluid nature. If this is so,
language is already in translation, in movement in the self.
This has a further implication for the understanding of narrative.
Narrative is typically understood as having for its author the immediacy
and authenticity of the mother tongue. Cavell, however, exposes this
immediacy as an illusion and, following Thoreau, reconfigures the
relationship between speech and writing from the perspective of
translation: ‘Writing appears in Walden not as an extension but as an
experience of speech’ (Cavell, 1994, p. 41). In other words writing or
experience of the written word, which Thoreau and Cavell associate most
with the ‘father tongue’ (Cavell, 1992, pp. 15–16), is a reengagement with
the mother tongue (associated most obviously with speech).4 In acquiring
the father tongue through the medium of the mother tongue, one can
undergo a kind of rebirth. This reengagement with the language is the very
process of translation, a ‘discontinuous reconstitution of what has been
said, a recounting of the past, autobiographising, deriving words from
yourself’ (Cavell, 1994, p. 41). Finding one’s language means taking what
is given and adding something new to it, changing it to your purposes,
aligning it truly with how you come to see the world. Translation in this
broader, and perhaps, more originary sense is not a matter of an exchange
between an established mother tongue and an established foreign tongue,

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but something already conditioning the process of acquiring the mother

tongue, the possibility of language at all. This means that the experience of
translation already and always takes places within ourselves; or, say, that
we ourselves are necessarily involved in translation.
In discussing the idea of translation, Lovisa Berhdahl explores a rich
literature in Benjamin and Derrida, and it is especially her elucidation of
the self and language as uncertain and unknown—and hence ‘the
mysterious untranslatable’—that offers a significant insight here (Berg-
dahl, 2009). She sees my discussion of Cavell’s notion of philosophy as
translation (Saito, 2007) as having implications for narrative education,
with an emphasis on the experience of loss and ‘mourning’. The way that
Bergdahl draws out the educational implications of Derrida’s philosophy,
however, with its emphasis on a ‘respecting’ of difference, risks turning
the unknowable into something substantial, which would be a kind of
mystification. In Cavell’s idea of philosophy as translation, by contrast,
emphasis is put on the endless possibilities for new creation, on hope for
new departure from the state of loss: the negative gives way to affirmation.
In the following quotation, Cavell seeks to identify and place the subtle,
yet profound significant difference between his own Emersonian and
Thoreauvian philosophical commitments and those of Derrida:

For Derrida the land of thought is fully occupied, as it were, by the

finished edifice of philosophy . . . so that room for thought must be made,
say by a process of reading or writing or following on the pedagogy called
deconstruction; whereas for an American the question persists whether the
land of thought has as yet been discovered . . . And one can perhaps say
that working to avert foundation, in advance, is precisely what Emerson
and Thoreau were doing in founding, or deconfounding, American
thinking (Cavell, 1996, p. 65).5

If there are implications for education in Cavell’s idea of translation, they

are to be sought in the very moment of conversion from mourning to
morning, not in absorption in loss and the unknown (p. 212). With this
distinctive feature of Cavell’s philosophy as translation in mind, I move to
my concluding remarks.

CONCLUSION: EDUCATION AND THE ‘BIRTH OF CULTURE WITHIN

ONESELF’
This paper began with a criticism of the vogue for a certain type of
narrative in education, one that drives us into a narrowly self-focused
mode of talking and writing about ourselves. Behind this is a concern that
the vocal (and oftentimes arrogant) expression of the ‘I’ (which is
promoted in the name of education) creates a condition of blindness to the
other, not only the other outside, but also the unknown or the strange
within our own selves. The criticism, however, is not intended to negate
the very need for narrative in education. Rather, the underlying purpose of
this paper is to show, through this Cavellian lens, how an alternative kind

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of autobiographical exercise can transform our ways of thinking about

education—education that serves for our personal growth.
Cavell’s sense of the tragic is tied up with the moment of hope for
departure. The aversive voices of the nonchalant boy and the silenced
child disturb us out of our somnolence and enjoin us to live ‘on Chaos and
the Dark’ (Emerson, 1990, p. 132). It is a moment of disjunction from the
family and the familiar, and one that may even move us to say: ‘I shun
father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me’ (p.
134). This suggests an inner landscape of tension and struggle of home,
and the glimmer of hope in the vastness of the despair we confront. The
light is prophetic; it offers no guarantee. This duality of tragedy and hope,
of limitations and open possibilities ‘knotted’ together, represents the path
of Emersonian moral perfection—a perfection without final perfectibility
(Cavell, 1990, p. 12). The Emersonian child cannot tell beforehand
whether his words are accepted or not by other members of his language
community. In him we find the gathering impetus to what Thoreau, as an
adult, will say: ‘I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in
a waking moment, to men in their waking moments’ (Thoreau, 1992, p.
216). The possibility of departure from home is, as Emerson says, a sign of
hope: ‘The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget
ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal
memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to
draw a new circle’ (Emerson, 1990, p. 175). It is necessary, therefore, that
we respond to the unlimited reservoir of instinct ‘from within’, a voice of
prophesy, a spiritual excess that cannot be fully contained in universal
reason or any apparently shared criteria of the good.
Philosophy as autobiography will call for an education that kindles the
light of the nonchalant boy and the silenced child in the classroom. This,
however, cannot be a matter of purely personal satisfaction: it is a
legitimation neither of child-centred education nor of the ‘freedoms’ of
choice of life-long learning conditioned by consumerism. Rather its foremost
task is that of rejoining the child’s voice in the language community so that
he can (re)discover his place in culture and community. In other words,
education along the lines of Cavell’s philosophy as autobiography will guide
the child to express his ‘insatiable desire’ but in such a way that he puts his
words on trial in the language community. Finding one’s voice is an eternal
and ongoing process of deviation from a language community as much as it
is of initiation. Yet deviation is not the refusal of participation. As Cavell
again says: ‘Dissent is not the undoing of consent but a dispute about its
content, a dispute within it over whether a present arrangement is faithful to
it’ (Cavell, 1979, p. 27). If this is the case, the speaking of the ‘I’ in
philosophy as autobiography cannot be ‘merely’ a ‘personal’ act, whether in
terms of location (where the ‘I’ finds its place in culture) or of time (how the
‘I’ negotiates its trajectory of past, present and future.) Auto-bio-graphy is
the historical and cultural record of the ‘I’, one inheriting the voices of the
past, while projecting its own voice in prophesy.
Through such autobiographical exercises, the child will learn to acquire
a sense of himself: that it is this ‘I’ that contributes to the perfection of his

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own culture, and culture is something whose ‘birth’ the ‘I’ undergoes
within itself. As Cavell says:

In philosophizing, I have to bring my own language and life into

imagination. What I require is a convening of my culture’s criteria, in order
to confront them with my words and life as I pursue them and as I may
imagine them; and at the same time to confront my words and life as I pursue
them with the life my culture’s words may imagine for me: to confront the
culture with itself, along the lines in which it meets in me (p. 125).

The rift within the self—say, between one’s gleam of light, on the one
hand, and one’s inheritance from the past of constraints given by culture,
on the other—cannot be fully overcome. One has to live in and through
this rift. And yet still when one succeeds in finding ‘perfect pitch’ in one’s
voice, the moment for ‘the birth of culture within oneself’ (Cavell, 1994,
pp. 30, 50), there is this moment of awareness that ‘with a small alteration
of its structure, the world might be taken a small step—a half step—
toward perfection’ (p. 50). We can reconsider here the implication of
Emerson’s statement: ‘the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest
presentiment, to his wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most
public, and universally true’ (Emerson, 1990, p. 47). Emerson suggests
that the universal is accomplished only by this ‘I’, and yet the ‘I’ learns to
translate itself to what is beyond the self. The self is dissolved, but its
partiality is always to be retained and rediscovered. The dissolution of the
self is a continuous re-engagement with and re-commitment to language.
Can we not hope that this can provide us with the most therapeutic way
of finding one’s self—therapeutic in the sense that undergoing the phase
of the clinical is the condition of critical thinking?6

Correspondence: Naoko Saito, Graduate School of Education, Kyoto

University, Yoshida-Honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto-shi, Kyoto 606-8501,
Japan.
E-mail: saitona@www.educ.kyoto-u.ac.jp

NOTES
1. The idea of a coherent narrative self is also proposed by other writers in different strands of
philosophy. For example, David Granger, in interpreting John Dewey’s pragmatism, writes: ‘for
Dewey, claiming that the self’s sense-making agencies are largely narrative is tantamount to
recognizing that every existence is an event, and that a sense of continuity between our past and
imagined future is indispensable for the event’ (Granger, 2006, p. 219)
2. For an interesting discussion, see Gustafsson, 2005. Cavell’s use of the idea of perfect pitch is
discussed in Saito, 2009.
3. This touches on the Freudian aspect of Cavell’s philosophy. See, for instance, Cavell, 1996, pp.
90–91.
4. In discussing the relationship between the mother tongue and the father tongue, Cavell quotes
the following passage from Thoreau’s Walden: ‘Books must be read as deliberately and
reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that
nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the
written language, the language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory, a
sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes,

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 Ourselves in Translation 267

of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue,
this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear,
which we must be born again in order to speak’ (Thoreau, 1992, pp. 68–69; Cavell, 1992, p. 15).
5. Cavell’s coining of ‘deconfounding’ both alludes to deconstruction and signals a resistance to any
position too neatly so described. The word bears some examination. If the root idea term here
suggests a founding, and hence finding as founding in an Emersonian sense, it also says rather
more than this. Such a founding is a con-founding, a finding together; yet this is also a process
through which we are confounded, which is to say a process to and through which we are
damned—say, by the fixity of our words or by the consolidation of the ‘we’. If, as Derrida says,
deconstruction does not negate but rather includes construction, so our deconfounding incorporates
both our founding together and our being confounded. Yet the force of the prefix is to undo both of
these (apparently contradictory) movements: it unsettles our tendencies towards consolidation, and
it is the mode of our release from our damnation. A good reading deconfounds. For an elaboration
of these points, see Saito and Standish, 2009, where the idea of philosophy as translation is
discussed in relation to questions of scepticism and political participation.
6. The original version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Philosophy of
Education Society at Great Britain (Oxford, 30 March 2008). I thank the anonymous reviewers
for their comments and Paul Standish for his helpful suggestions in revising the original and in
developing it into the current version.

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