Cavell’s Wager, and Ours: Thinking With and Against Cavell in Dark Times

In both 1990’s Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome and 2004’s Cities of Words , Stanley Cavell presents his contribution to democratic thought as an addendum to John Rawls’s Theory of Justice . In this essay I consider the implications of this for Cavell’s understanding of democracy, focusing on his discussion of “the wager of democracy” in the later text. When one attends to the details of that discussion, as I do at some length, it becomes clear that this is not truly a wager of democracy , but rather one of liberal justice . I argue that our times require a genuine wager of democracy, one geared towards a collective future that emphasizes solidarity and collective agency over equality, consent, and individualism. Ironically, Cavell’s own work outside these chapters makes important contributions to our understanding of what this would entail. I conclude that Cavell’s corpus is less consistent and coherent than previously thought, and that, if we are to bring out his true importance to democratic culture, we need to read him to a certain extent against himself and much more critically of his liberal individualism than scholars have thus far done.