Bearing the Beyond: Women and the Limits of Language in Stanley Cavell

The American philosopher Stanley Cavell is one of the very few thinkers in the Anglo-Saxon dispensation of philosophy who addresses the role of gender and desire in our possessing language. While Cavell's oeuvre is receiving more and more attention in Europe, the issues of gender discussed in and raised by his writing are not systematically explored. Against this silence in Cavell scholarship, this paper aims to show exegetically how philosophizing about language and about sexuality are connected in Cavell's work. Systematically, I will argue secondly that for Cavell not metaphysics but concrete gender and sexual arrangements motivate the yearning for the impossible, which characterizes so much of modern western philosophy. To this end I will trace a connection between Cavell's technical discussions of Wittgensteinian understanding of language and his own reflections on gender and marriage in opera and film.