Acculturating philosophy to its sounds: on Stanley Cavell’s phonemic writing

Abstract Stanley Cavell discerned early on that philosophy and literature as practised by contemporary academics made for a contentious pairing. Writing, as he so often did, across disciplinary gaps and contested isthmuses, Cavell occasionally found himself foreign on his home turf or risking rebuke when visiting other intellectual terrains, texts, and traditions. Travelling between cultures, he took upon himself the art of acculturating one to another; such transit or translation regularly—if inimitably—addressed the very sound of the prose that gave expression to rival factions. Consider how he closes his magnum opus by asking ‘But can philosophy become literature and still know itself?’ Part of his own measured reply, by way of testing and exemplification, was a perpetual practice of writing philosophy as literature. In this article, borrowing and adapting Garrett Stewart’s notion of ‘phonemic reading’, I propose Cavell as a phonemic writer—one who sought to teach philosophy and literature about one another through the sound and soundness of the lettered wor(l)d.