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POSSESSION AND DISPOSSESSION:

WITTGENSTEIN, CAVELL, AND

GREGORY OF NYSSA ON LIFE

AMIDST SKEPTICISM1

NATALIE CARNES

But how could I deny that I possess these hands . . .? Let us suppose, then, thatwe are dreaming, and that all these particulars . . . are merely illusions; and eventhat we really possess neither an entire body nor hands such as we see.

Descartes, Meditations2

She is dreaming. Laboring with her first child, Emmelia pauses in her pain,whelmed by a tide of sleep that carries her to a vision of her enwombed child.Yet the dream-child is not in her womb but in her hands. Someone moreradiant than a human (she hesitates to name the visionary visitor an angel)instructs her to name the child Thecla. Is it easy to believe a mysterious visitorwho wants your child to be named after a famous virgin martyr? The visitorrepeats the message three times before leaving, granting a parting gift of easy

labor. Emmelia wakes and the child is placed in her hands, her dreamrealized. She names her daughter Macrina.

The cycles of life and death turn. Now Macrina is dying. Her brotherGregory does not yet know that she is dying; he knows only that their olderbrother has died and that he longs for the comfort of his sister. Journeying to

Natalie CarnesBaylor University, Religion Department, One Bear Place #97284, Waco, TX 76798-7284, USAEmail: [email protected]

1

I would like to thank Matthew Whelan, Stanley Hauerwas, Paul Griffiths, Brian Goldstone,Jonathan Tran, Ben Dillon, and Sean Larsen for their specific feedback on this article and for theirconversations on Wittgenstein and Cavell. My thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for

Modern Theology.2 Ren Descartes, Second Meditation, in John Veitch (trans.), The Method, Meditations, and

Philosophy of Descartes(Washington, DC: M. Walter Dunne Publisher, 1901), p. 220.

Modern Theology 29:1 January 2013ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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see her, he, too, has a vision in his sleep. In his dream, Gregory carries in hishands the relics of martyrs. They are blindingly bright. Three times the visionreturns. How do you know how to go on from such a dream? Unclear in his

understanding and troubled in his soul, Gregory hastens to his sisters side.3

The thrice-repeated vision, the radiating light, the mystery received inhand: The dream-hands of Emmelia and Gregory receive Macrina just beforeher birth and death. These are the only two dreams Gregory of Nyssa recordsin the hagiography of his sister, the Life of Macrina, but they are not the onlytwo references to hands, which labor throughout the Life, appearing overtwenty-five times in that short text. I want these diligently working hands tocontinue their labors by meeting two other pairs of hands: those of G. E.Moore, returned to again and again by Ludwig Wittgenstein, and those that

Stanley Cavell hopes will enable philosophy to accept Shakespeares Othelloand Desdemona back. I want, in other words, these hands to help me thinkabout skepticism: the threat it poses and the truth it presents. I want them tolead us to a place where we know how to go on with skepticism, how tomake peace in a world where it lingers.

The premise implicit in this article is that Wittgenstein and Cavell did notthemselves lead us to a place of peacebut that their philosophical journeysmay yet help us find our way to one. They help us because they teach us topass beyond the skepticism/anti-skepticism dilemma, because they work

toward a place I want to call epistemic dispossession.4

It is a place whereknowledge is received and certainty authorized without subjection to anepistemic anchor.

3 I was not able to interpret its meaning clearly, but I foresaw some grief for my soul and Iwas waiting for the outcome to clarify the dream. Virginia Woods Callahan and Roy JosephDeferrari (eds and trans), The Life of Saint Macrina in Saint Gregory of Nyssa Ascetical Works,Fathers of the Churchvol. 58 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1999), p. 174.

4 I gratefully lift this term, slightly modified, from Brian Goldstone and Stanley Hauerwas,who in turn claim to draw epistemological dispossession from Daniel Barber and Rowan

Williams. (Brian Goldstone and Stanley Hauerwas, Disciplined Seeing: Forms of Christianityand Forms of Life, South Atlantic Quarterly Vol. 109 no. 4 [2010], pp. 765790.) The term gatherstogether disparate insights and wisdoms I had been struggling to integrate. I invoke it, not tosuggest that we have no knowledge, but to suggest that we do not possessknowledge in the waythe skeptic and anti-skeptic seek. Epistemic dispossession is, on the one hand, shorthand forthe dispossession of epistemically-anchored certainty, and, on the other hand, a description ofthe posture by which we do hold knowledge: as received, not owned.

It is important to note also that the way I will invoke possession in this article is sometimesat odds with the way Cavell invokes it in a text of his I will return to often: Part IV ofThe Claimof Reason. There he advocates, for example, possessing ones existence by declaring it. Possessionfunctions throughout that text as a summons to responsibility. (Stanley Cavell, The Claim ofReason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy [New York: Oxford University Press, 1979],

p. 462.) I am in sympathy with this call to possession. But the possession I explore here hasmore in common with the moment in his memoir in which he writes, I would have been gladto be able to ignore whatever I have so far done, that is, to feel that I can simply assume itsexistence. No doubt in part I resent being confronted with my vanity. But there is somethingmore. If I am ever right about a philosophical idea it is precisely because the idea is not in mypossession. The goal of philosophy, as I care about it most, is the obvious, the undeniable . . .

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My purpose here is not to produce a commentary on Wittgenstein, Cavell,or Gregory of Nyssa; it is to be led by them on this journey of epistemicallydispossessing. I disciple myself particularly to the voices that speak from

three of their most resonant texts:On Certainty,The Claim of Reason, and theLife of Macrina. Yet even as I follow Wittgenstein and Cavell, I identify twosources of un-peace in their projects.5 One is an un-confessed (or ill-confessed) threat that looms over their work, and the other is the inhumandifficulty of resisting the skeptical temptations of isolation and dominationafter this threat is named. It is the threat of death, which becomes, under theskeptics anxiety, the threat of murder. For in the skeptics denial of finitude,he refuses to come to terms with the way that death attends life. Such refusalintroduces as a skeptical temptation the further threat of murder. The diffi-

culty of resisting isolation and domination rides on the incompleteness of(merely) epistemic dispossession, which will always undo itself unless deep-ened by more radical forms of dispossession. Such forms of dispossession aresuggested by Cavell, and, as I will argue, they are given life in a perfectedform by Gregory in his interpretation of his sister Macrina. Macrina illuminesepistemic dispossession as a form of love that refuses certain relationships toproperty and so becomes radiantly, relentlessly peaceful. The peace I seekwith these thinkers, then, is neither complacent nor passive. It is freedomfrom the grip of tyrannical requirements and self-defeating temptations. It is

the peace of being able to go on.The path I want to trace with Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Gregory begins in

the first section by identifying two ways we may wander off our trail, twoepistemological sirens that may tempt us from our path of epistemic dispos-session. These are skepticism and anti-skepticism, elaborated by Wittgensteinand Cavell as joined in their enthronement of epistemologically anchoredcertainty. In section two, I follow Cavell into the forms of life and death thatsustain and are sustained by skepticism to identify the potential murderous-ness of skepticism. Such exhuming of the skeptical life continues in section

three, where I describe the anthropology not only of skepticism, but also ofWittgenstein and Cavell, who identify an alternative to murderousnessanalternative that entails forms of dispossession. Yielding a vision for howdispossession might meet the threat of murderousness, Gregory of Nyssawill, in the fourth section, deepen such dispossession in his descriptions of

(Stanley Cavell,Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory[Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,2010], p. 515.) That instance of possession, cousin to passages in Disowning Knowledge I will

engage later, resonates with the epistemic dispossession I will elaborate.5 In a book derived from his class on moral perfectionism, Cavell himself writes of Wittgen-

stein, Wittgensteins disappointment with knowledge is not that it fails to be better than it is (forexample, immune to skeptical doubt), but rather that it fails to make us better than we are, orprovide us with peace. Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the MoralLife(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 5.

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Macrina, whose life interprets the relationships of property, love, and deaththat Cavell at times alludes to and that complete epistemic dispossession.

Epistemological Temptations: The Hands of G. E. Moore

I take us first to survey territory that has become familiar to readers of Cavellin order to remind us of the strangeness of the journey to which Wittgensteinand Cavell call us. Wittgenstein begins his posthumously-published work OnCertaintyby signaling the conversation he wishes to join: If you do knowthathere is one hand, well grant you all the rest.6 The you he responds tohere is G. E. Moore. In a famous essay, Moore had begun by linguisticallyholding up his right hand and remarking, Here is a hand, before doing thesame with his leftand then congratulating himself on proving the existenceof an external world. Thus Moore turns to common sense to refute theskeptics question of how one can know the existence of an external world,a sister-question to how one can know the existence of other minds.

Wittgenstein opens On Certainty by questioning Moores first premise.DoesMoore know that here is one hand? What does (how could) such anassertion mean? Wittgensteins purpose is not to side with the skeptic overagainst Moore but to demonstrate the senselessness of their debate. Howcould a person doubt the existence of a hand right in front of her? And whatcould it mean to try to secure knowledge of it?7

One can imagine particular cases in which one might doubt (and thereforesensibly assert) that a hand is here.8 Perhaps a doctor wants to reassure herpatient who just lost his hand of the cosmetic indistinguishability of a pros-thetic hand. She lines several prosthetic hands on a tableunder which anurse is hiding to poke his hand out of a small hole, thus placing it in a linewith the prosthetic handsand encourages her patient to guess the humanhand. Here is a hand, the patient says. (Uncertainly? Cynically? Dismiss-ively?) But in such a case, here is a hand neither yields nor threatensepistemic certainty. It neither unhinges nor secures ones relationship to theexternal world. It simply expresses the speakers attempt to name a particularobject with which his relationship is less than secure. It is a particular piece ofknowledge that is at stake, not an epistemic anchor of knowledge.

While Wittgenstein does not discuss determined (if theatrical) doctors, hedoes this same kind of work in On Certainty: he offers an anthropologicalsketchbook of the varieties of certainty, tracing different occasions for claim-ing to know, to believe, and to doubt, he works to loosen the philosophersgrip around epistemically-anchored certainty by gesturing towards the many

versions of certainty we successfully invoke in everyday lifekinds of cer-6 Ludwig Wittgenstein,On Certainty, G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (eds), Denis

Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (trans) (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), section 1.7 Ibid.,sections 2, 23.8 Ibid.,section 32.



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tainty that are not epistemically anchored. And it is not just the anti-skepticbut the skeptic, too, who is beholden to this anchored certainty, though thelatter disguises his attachment. Wittgenstein continues: If you tried to doubt

everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game ofdoubting itself presupposes certainty.9 Or as he again puts it, Doubt comesafterbelief.10

There are at least two different ways to elaborate how certainty and beliefprecede doubt in the skeptical picture. First, certainty is prior to doubt inimportance. The one who doubts holds objects of potential knowledge to astandard of certainty that they may either meet or fail to meet. Doubt, then, islionized only as a failure of certainty, which retains primacy as the goal ofinvestigation. That is, certainty, not doubt, authorizes knowledge. This sug-

gests the second priority of certainty, which is chronological. To be able todoubt one must first possess a standard of certainty by which that doubt maybe satisfied. The skeptics doubt is even produced by the search for thecrystalline purity of epistemically-anchored certitude. Often this certainty isfounded on the doubter himself (or perhaps only on his mind). It is only oncethis island of certainty has been identified (explicitly or not) that the skepticcan begin to articulate that which fails the test of certainty (principally, thatwhich is not the self or mind: others, the world, and the body). In otherwords, Wittgenstein shows us that it is only when we demand to possess

knowledge in a certain way that we mourn ourselves as bereft of it.The work Wittgenstein does in On Certainty continues lines of thought

from the Philosophical Investigations, including his discussion of criteriaand paina discussion that becomes central to Cavells own explorationsof skepticism. Wittgenstein remarks late in the Investigations, An innerprocess stands in need of outward criteria.11 In the case of pain, such criteriainclude behavior such as groaning, grimacing, and wincing, and the needpain has of them is expressibility (and thus intelligibility). Without pain-behavior, Wittgenstein claims, a child could not learn the wordtoothache, and

even if he invented a word for the sensation of toothache, he could not makehimself understood by it.12 Perhaps a later remark by Wittgenstein could beparaphrased as: The best picture of pain is pain-behavior.13 Or: Pain is not a

9 Ibid.,section 115.10 Ibid.,section 160.11 Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, fourth ed., G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S.

Hacker and Joachim Shulte (trans) (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), section 580.12 Ibid., section 257.13 What Wittgenstein does write is this: It is, one would like to say, not merely the picture of

the behaviour that belongs to the language-game with the words he is in pain, but also thepicture of the pain. Or, not merely the paradigm of the behaviour, but also that of the pain.Itis a misunderstanding to say The picture of pain enters into the language-game with the wordpain . Pain in the imagination is not a picture, and it is not replaceable in the language-game

by anything that wed call a picture.Imagined pain certainly enters into the language-game ina sense; only not as a picture. Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, p. 300.

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picture separated from pain-behavior. Or, as Cavell puts it, highlighting theimplausibility of the claim that pain could be pictured apart from pain-behavior: As though a picture of suffering, say GrnewaldsCrucifixion, is a

perfect picture of a man and of a cross but (necessarily) an imperfect orindirect picture of suffering. (It is a sort of picture of a picture of suffering.)14

Cavell wants to say that the picture of suffering is the picture of the man onthe cross.

Cavell interprets Wittgenstein on pain and criteria by parting ways withNorman Malcolm and Roger Albritton, who understand Wittgensteiniancriteria as solidifying certainty over and against skeptical doubt. Pain-behavior like wincing, in the Malcolm-Albritton interpretation, is the crite-rion that establishes the necessary existence of painunder certain

circumstances. In the case of Albritton, under the right conditions, a personsparticular pain-behavior almost certainly (where did the almost comefrom?) entails a toothache.15 Yet there are some circumstancesmalingering,playing a joke, rehearsing a playin which the criteria only seem to besatisfied and certainty cannot therefore be established. Malcolm dwells onthis seeming satisfaction of criteria to claim that when they are satisfied,criteria always establish certainty, but one must be careful to rule out thosesituations in which they cannot be satisfied.

For Cavell, Malcolm-Albrittons seeming presence of criteria bears no

weight, for the criteria themselves may be simulated. He returns criteria toWittgensteins concerns with language about pain to argue that criteria referto how we make ourselves known as speakers about pain, and in speakingabout pain the speaker considers circumstances like play rehearsals, hypno-sis, and joking around. A competent speaker does not pronounce a person inpain when she is merely performing Desdemona (though Desdemona maybe in pain). Criteria do not establish that the groaning person is not malin-gering, but that to claim the groaning person is in pain is to claim he is notmalingering.16 Cavell insists, that is, that criteria function grammatically, in

the sphere of human convention, not in the realm of ontological ordering. Indescribing the way we make ourselves known to one another, criteria suggestthe contingencies rather than the necessities of human agreement. In this way,criteria point to the depth of human attunement, the breadth of our agree-ment with one another about what pain looks like and how it may be iden-tified and spoken about.17

As human convention, criteria name the possibility of fallibility. Thespeaker may be wrong precisely for the reason that what is simulated in

14 Cavell,The Claim of Reason, p. 339.15 Ibid., p. 39. Cavell quotes Albritton and emphasizes the near certainty as a concession of

Albritton.16 Ibid., p. 43.17 Cavell treats Malcolm and Albrittons readings of Wittgensteins criteria in chapter two of

The Claim of Reason: Criteria and Skepticism, pp. 3748.



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feigning pain is the satisfaction of criteria. Malcolm cannot, then, deliver thecertainty he promises criteria yield. Cavell thus reintroduces the skepticalpossibility to show that Malcolm has not defeated it. Criteria can only express

our attunement because they also indicate our separateness; a note cannot beharmonized with itself. Drawing his interpretations of Wittgenstein togetherwith his interpretations of Emerson in a later work, Cavell images ourunhandsome condition: objects are evanescent and lubricant such thatwhen we clutch hardest at them, they slip through our fingers. How do weopen our impotently clutching hands?18

Forms of Life and Death: Hands to Accept Othello and Desdemona Back

In the wake of what he regards as Malcolm and Albrittons failuretheirreading Wittgenstein as trying to defeat skepticism, to supply the certaintyskepticism mournsCavell insists on the irrefutability of skepticism.19 Theattempt of such as Malcolm, Albritton, and Moore to defeat skepticism byepistemologically anchoring certainty characterizes anti-skepticism, a stanceoften expressed in readings of Wittgenstein that claim he rules out certainways of speaking and questioning as outside the language-game.20 What islost for Cavell when anti-skepticism supplants skepticism is the separatenessof humans, the way we are responsible for our relationships with oneanother. When he tries to anchor certainty about another human beings painin her pain-behavior, Malcolm denies the separateness of the other person,thus mirroring the skeptics mistake of construing her relationship to theother as one of knowledge. Cavell wants to point us back to people and formsof life that produce, maintain, and apply knowledge. It is through these formsof life that we receive the world and the minds of others. We might under-stand Malcolm as using criteria to try to defeat the received character of ourrelationship to the world and neighbor. I want to display Cavells situation ofskepticism in forms of life and death that also try to defeat the receivedcharacter of our relationship to the world by turning to two moments in thefourth part of the Claim of Reason: the parable of the perfected automaton(a rehearsal of skepticism) and the reading ofOthello(an unmasking of it).

18 Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America (Albuquerque, NM: Living BatchPress, 1989), p. 86.

19 Whether Wittgenstein in fact endorses such a view is a question over which famed phi-losophers and Wittgensteinian interpreters from Saul Kripke to Stephen Mulhall have spilledmuch ink. For an excellent discussion of how Wittgensteinian theologians have diverged in theirresponses to the skeptical threat, see Peter Dulas chapter, Wittgenstein Among the Theolo-

gians inUnsettling Arguments: A Festschrift on the Occasion of Stanley Hauerwass 70th Birthday,eds. Charles R. Pinches, Kelly S. Johnson, Charles M. Collier (Eugene, OR: Cascade Book, 2010).I am myself sympathetic to Dulas concern that Wittgenstein himself did not close off the threatof skepticism, as many of his (theological) interpreters are wont to do.

20 See, for example, those theological readers Dula criticizes in Wittgenstein Among theTheologians.

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In his rather bizarre parable of the perfected automaton, Cavell tells a storyabout a craftsman who eventually succeeds in perfecting his automaton (hecalls him the friend) to look and behave exactly like a human. The crafts-

man shows off his work by threatening his friend with a knife. The friendresponds to the threat humanly indeed: defending himself, grappling withthe craftsman, grunting, yelling as he does, No more. It hurts. It hurts toomuch. Im sick of being a human guinea pig. I mean a guinea pig human.21

The craftsman is pleased with the plausibility of the pain-response. He hasperformed his task well. But there is a third character in the story: the I whointroduces the question of how I should respond to the friend who dis-plays such convincing pain-behavior. Do I protect (protect?) the friend? DoI secure his (its) status as non-human? How would I do thatlook inside

him? Suppose even his insides are perfectly simulated human insides? AsCavell presses the difficulty of what it might mean to secure knowledge ofhuman pain, he gives the story a final twist: after I perform sympathy for thefriend, the craftsman tears off my shirt and snaps off my chest to reveal (Iglance down) some elegant clockwork.22

Cavells parable extends the truth of skepticism that I cannot masterknowledge of the other to include my inability to master knowledge ofmyself.23 It is not just that the friend might be a robot exhibiting pain-behaviorrather than a human being in pain, but that, in fact, Imight be a robot.24 We

have no way of securing knowledge of our or anothers humanness againstthe doubts of the skeptic. But what has happened to the skeptics island ofcertainty? If skepticism destroys my certainty about myself (my mind), doesit also destroy the possibility of skepticism? What territory has Cavell led usto where skepticism struggles to bear its own weight? If there is no island of

21 Cavell,The Claim of Reason, p. 405.22 Ibid., p. 408.23 Here, then, I would nuance Graham Wards claim in the July 2011 Modern Theologysym-

posium on Cavell: Cavell has demonstrated analytically the difficulties involved in the criteriathat I have arrived at for knowing something: that the criteria only go so far in allowing me toknow that the other is in pain since it is I who have provided the criteria and the other may befeigning the behaviour, acting out the empirical signs of pain. I have no access to the pain itself,and its possible realityonly its mediation and communication. In direct absence of the expe-rience of pain (to me), I cannot therefore call it pain, even though I understand the word whichI associate with the behaviour of the other. Graham Ward, Philosophy as Tragedy or WhatWords Wont Give,Modern TheologyVol. 27 no. 3 (July 2011), p. 479. Not only is it inaccurate toclaim the criteria come from meas if the criteria were not already evidence of our agree-mentsbut it is equally inaccurate that I have access to my own pain in itself. Even my ownpain eludes the grasp of epistemically-anchored certainty.

24 The parable is multivalent. I interpret only one strand in it, but there are darker valences onecould uncover. For example, the parable also suggests skepticisms inhumanity: as the craftsmanperfects the pain-response of the automaton, he continually tests the accuracy of the response bystabbing the automaton and discerning whether the automaton responds in the way a stabbedhuman would respond. Perhaps here we see that the search for real pain proliferates and calls forindifference to that which merely appears to be pain.



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epistemically-anchored certainty, are we simply awash in a sea ofuncertainty?

The problem with conceiving of us as lost in a sea of uncertainty is that it

accepts the skeptics epistemology, his terms for what constitutes knowledge.And Cavell does not think the problem is that we lack knowledge; it is thatwe do not know what to do with the knowledge we have. Or perhaps we doknow what to do with such knowledge but we nevertheless refuse it. Cavellwants to cast the skeptics problem of knowledge as a problem ofacknowl-edgment.What acknowledgment makes plain, for Cavell, is, first, the kind ofclaim knowledge makes on us and, second, the community that makes thatclaim intelligible. The problem of knowing whether a person is in painbecomes the problem of acknowledging a person in pain. What kind of claim

does a pained person make on us? Under what conditions and in what voicedoes she make that claim? These are questions raised by the automatonparable.

As we move to Cavells reading ofOthello, we take from the automaton thesuggestion that acknowledgment of the self is bound up with acknowledg-ment of another. That suggestion is drawn again in Cavells Othello, this timeby displaying the way, not just the anti-skeptic, but the skeptic, too, denies theseparateness of the other person. Separateness, in the sense that Cavellexplores here, does not suggest that we are separated(bysomething)25but

means something very like finitudea condition the skeptic denies bydemanding infinite security. Othello demonstrates the tragedy of thisdemand.

Cavell describes the way Othellos tormented suspicion of Desdemonasunfaithfulness capitulates the skeptics conversion of the human condition(metaphysical finitude) into an intellectual difficulty.26 Othello is tortured,not by the philosophers question of whether Desdemona exists, but by herseparateness from him and the way his love for her reveals to him his ownincompleteness, his dependence, his finitude. Othellos rage for proof and

for satisfaction leads him to demand the ocular availability of Desdemo-nas innocencean availability, it turns out, that comes only when her deathassures him that she is a mortal, not a devil. Cavell attends to a final vision ofthe two, dead on their bridal sheets.

A statue, a stone is something whose existence is fundamentally open tothe ocular proof. A human being is not. The two bodies lying togetherform an emblem of this fact, the truth of skepticism. What this man lackedwas not certainty. He knew everything, but he could not yield to what he

knew, be commanded by it. He found out too much for his mind, not too25 The truth here is that weareseparate, but not necessarilyseparated(bysomething); that we

are, each of us, bodies, i.e., embodied; each is this one and not that, each here and not there, eachnow and not then. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 369.

26 Ibid., p. 493.

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little. Their differences from one anotherthe one everything the other isnotform an emblem of human separation, which can be accepted, andgranted, or not. Like the separation from God; everything we are not. 27

In Cavells telling, Othellos rage for ocular proof masks his refusal of thesurfeit of knowledge he finds unbearable. Cavell situates the truth of skep-ticism ambiguously: is the truth of skepticism here that skepticism illus-trates the truth that we are separate from one another? Or is it a truth aboutskepticismperhaps that it casts this separation as a lack of knowledgerather than a piece of it? Or the truth that the knowledge skepticism seeks ofa human can only be gained of a corpse (a statue)the truth, then, thatskepticism harbors murderousness?

Here Cavell comes close to naming the threat of death that motivates theskeptical cover. But he narrates Othello as fleeing, not his death exactly, buthis finitude. Death is present, not as a threat, but as a consequence of a refusalof knowledge or of a quest for ocular proof. The relationship Cavell high-lights between skeptical rage and the threat of death is the way the firstprecipitates the second; I want to consider the reverse relationship. For whatCavell does not narrate, and what I want to return to, is the way Desdemonastrust renders her vulnerable to murder.

For now, though, back to Othello: Othellos lack of ocular proof of Desde-

monas faithfulness becomes itself the proof of her faithlessness, much likethe skeptics inability to secure the existence of an external world becomes anoccasion for mourning himself as bereft of that world. These are absencesmisconstrued; in turn they support a misconstrual of the world. Othello, likethe skeptic, tries to secure (or displace) his relationship with the other byknowledge, thus casting humans as community without commitments orclaims. But here the skeptic, in a different way than Malcolm and Albritton,misses what is important about criteria: not that they fail to secure knowledgebut that they express our deep attunement to one another, our shared

judgments.Instead of living with the knowledge of human separateness and theresponsibility for discovering our likenesses by maintaining our shared judg-ments present in criteria, Othello opts out of this fragile situation. He suc-cumbs to the twin threats (it sounds strange to call them temptations) ofisolation and domination. These are the two ways a person can shore herselfup against knowledge of her own mortality, can try to perform a securedinfinitude. They are not unrelated: Othello, in succumbing to the temptationto dominate Desdemonas person, to deny her separateness, cannot then bear

the isolation to which he dooms himself. Othellos consuming desire for asecured infinitude, theeroswe are calling a skeptical desire, is expressed asmurderous rage. To deny his own death, he kills his beloved. Having killed

27 Ibid., p. 496.



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Desdemona, who funded his own self in ways he could not control andwanted to deny, Othello can no longer bear his own existence. And so Cavellasks: [C]an philosophy accept [Othello and Desdemona] back at the hands

of poetry?28

If they died in the mad logic of skepticism, through whatlanguage and by whose hands could these tortured lovers live? Are therehands to affirm human separateness without succumbing to the temptationsto dominate others or isolate oneself?

The totalizing impulse to eradicate insecurityof knowledge or of onesexistenceis ultimately a self-mutilating effort. This is another way ofexpressing the interweaving of the acknowledgment of self and other.Writing about tragedy, Cavell expresses the insight this way: [T]he recogni-tion of the other takes the form of an acknowledgment of oneself, ones own

identity.29

Cavell claims that in the case of King Lear, for Lear to acknowl-edge Cordelia as his unjustly banished daughter is to acknowledge himself asthe unjustly banishing father.30 But surely a separateness that is bridged (justas it is found) only by human convention must require something more(prior, even) from Lear. For Lear to recognize himself as the unjustly banish-ing father is for Lear to present himself to Cordelia for her acknowledgment,to accept her judgment (her mercy) on himself, thus learning to receive her asa subject who forms her own judgments and a subject, therefore, to whom hemay be attuned. It was in this way that Othello could not accept Desdemonas

separateness. He could not acknowledge her because he could not presenthimself to her for her acknowledgment, could not, as it were, put himself inher hands. This is another way of naming his inability to yield to what heknew, be commanded by it.31 In refusing to yield to his own death, Othellocauses hers.

Cavells question echoes. What hands can accept Othello and Desdemonaback?

Anthropologies at Hand: The Hidden, the Revealed, and the Crucified

What hands, indeed? What founds the certainty the skeptic seeks is a pictureof what kind of being demands it. If an anthropology grounds skepticism,defusing skepticism entails excavating and querying the anthropology thatgives it force. In the skeptics anthropological picture, the body is that whichintervenes between souls, rendering them imperceptible to one another. Theinner is distinct from and withheld by the outer. The skeptical questionsespecially the question about other mindsare nourished by a body-soul

dualism in which the soul names the Iand the body that which masks the28 Ibid., p. 496.29 Ibid., p. 389.30 Ibid., p. 429.31 Ibid., p. 496.

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I.Hands, for the skeptic, conceal theIof which they are an instrument. Theseare hands that can be wielded, disowned, and reclaimed.

Wittgenstein wants to resist this picture as definitive of the human condi-

tion. It is Wittgenstein who inspires Cavells automaton example when helinks professing belief in the suffering of a friend and declaring that friendnot to be an automaton. His meditations come in the fourth fragment of thePhilosophy of Psychology, where, in the penultimate remark there, he turnsexplicitly to anthropology, writing: The human body is the best picture ofthe human soul.32 The statement is of a piece with a trajectory runningthroughout thePhilosophical Investigationsin which Wittgenstein tries to coaxus away from searching for that which is within, beneath, or behindforexample, meaning, pain, essenceto attend instead to what is right in front

of our eyes (so to speak)for example, saying, grimacing, resemblance. Thushe wants to reframe the body, not as veiling the soul, but as expressing it.Hands, then, are revelatory: what they do discloses the soul. These hands arethe I from which the soul is not separate.33

Cavell, too, wants to resist the displacement of outer by inner. Heextends Wittgensteins anthropological descriptions to critique those of theskeptic, who scoops mind out of behavior, thus rendering the body inex-pressive, inanimate (corpse-like).34 He explores Wittgensteins statement ofthe soul-picturing body as replacing a mythology of metaphysical hidden-

nessfor example, the soul as a garden that cannot be entered or the body asa veil or blindwith a different description of our blocked vision.35 WhileWittgenstein displaces hiddenness with revealedness, Cavell accepts hispicture and then relocates hiddenness within it. Agreeing that the body doesnot conceal the soul, Cavell describes the soul as hidden by the bodysessential revealing of it. It is our own mind that hides the others mind byrefusing, or not knowing how, to receive the other. The other is hidden fromus in our failure to acknowledge her. Sixty pages later he elaborates thisconviction by rewriting Wittgensteins body-soul aphorism and proffering a

new mythology of hiddenness: The crucified human body is our bestpicture of the unacknowledged human soul.36 This, I take it, is a way ofdescribing both the body as expressing the soul and the soul as hidden by arefusal to acknowledge it. The nailed hands of Cavells unacknowledged

32 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophy of PsychologyA Fragment inPhilosophical Investiga-tions, Fourth Edition, G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (trans) (Malden,MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), (iv) p. 24.

33 It is important to note, then, that Wittgenstein offers an alternative to the anthropological

dualism of the skeptic without requiring one to give up a metaphysical dualism. To the extentthat he uses the language of soul, he seems to endorse it.

34 I found this helpful formulation in Michael Fischer, Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 74.

35 Cavell,The Claim of Reason, p. 370.36 Ibid., p. 430.



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human soul perfectly express that unacknowledgment, perfectly revealhumanity denied, which is to say, these hands reveal the way we force eachother to remain hidden.

How can we help but think here of Desdemona, who will make herentrance later in Cavells essay? How can we not think of her corpse and ofher husband, who could not acknowledge her because he could not acknowl-edge himself as dependent, fleshly, finite, mortal? Earlier we read Cavellsvaluation of separateness to mean that I must present myself for acknowl-edgement in order to acknowledge the other. But it is only here thatCavell makes plain the risk such a presentation (present-making, gift-giving)entails. The risk is murder. Cavell passes rather quickly over the moment,re-narrating the threat of death more abstractly as the problem of finitude.

But the threat he utters returns in the figure of Desdemona. She entrustsherself to Othello, yet in acknowledging him with the gift of herself, she risksher unacknowledgment, which takes the form of her murder at Othelloshands. Here is the ill-confessed threat in Cavells statement that the crucifiedhuman body is our best picture of the unacknowledged human soul: toacknowledge another is to risk my crucifixion by her. The more neighborsone acknowledges, the more imminent the threat becomes. God save the onewho so acknowledges the world.

Othellos murder of Desdemona, the crucifixion of the unacknowledged

human soulthese horrors of skepticism urgently press the question ofresisting skeptical temptations. Yet Cavell suggests the difficulty of resistancewhen he describes skepticism as internal to the human condition. It is thecentral secular place where the human wish to deny the condition ofhuman existence is expressed and is therefore an argument internal to theindividual, or separate, human creature, as it were an argument of the selfwith the self (over its finitude).37 Interpreting this passage, Espen Dahlwrites, Cavells understanding of our finitude articulates a strange and darkdynamic of our self-relation: namely, that it is human to deny our human-

ity.38

Resisting the skeptical temptations is quite literally an inhuman diffi-culty. In Dahls Cavell, tragedy is not just an interpretation of skepticism, butthe genre toward which human life tends. Is there a way out of the seeminginevitability of tragedy?

There must be. Tragedy, for Cavell, is not the only genre toward whichhuman life may tend. Two years after publishing a meditation on the tragicends of Othello and Desdemona, Cavell meditates on happier possibilities forhusbands and wives in Pursuits of Happiness, a collection of essays treating

37 Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago, IL:University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 5.

38 Espen Dahl, Finitude and Original Sin: Cavells Contribution to Theology, Modern The-ologyVol. 27 no. 3 (July 2011), p. 503.

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Hollywood comedies of remarriage.39 As criteria are the conditions of bothigniting and defusing skepticism, finitude is the condition of both denyingand acknowledging humanity. Here skepticism is not denied, but neither

does it generate tragedy. As Peter Dula suggests, these remarriage comediesoffer an interpretation of the ordinary as a mode of attention in whichskepticism can end in marriagethat is, human communityrather thanmurder.40

It is not that these remarriages offer a wholly peaceable vision of humancommunity. Cavell writes of the violence humans do in denying one anotherin reflections onIt Happened One Night. Describing the way a sheet becomesa wall between the two main characters, Cavell notes how skepticismseparates humans bodies from their souls, (making monsters of them) a

violence we enact because we feel that others are doing this violence to us.41

Nor are these characters free from Othello-like suspicions of unfaithfulness.The divorce that renders necessary a re-marriage inThe Awful Truthis occa-sioned by such suspicions, which the movie never wholly resolves. Yet theyfind ways out of cycles of vengeance and suspicion by finding a way toacknowledgment, a reciprocity that does not wait for the perfected com-munity to be presented even though in matters of the heart, to make thingshappen, you must let them happen.42 The letting happen Cavell describesinvolves forsaking attempts to shore oneself up against lifes exigencies; it

means suffering little deaths (sometimes later reversedthese are comedies,after all) of status, reputation, wealth, and pride. These characters lean into adispossession that witnesses to the possibilities of love for meeting skepti-cism without isolating oneself or dominating the other. We might say that inthese remarriage comedies, we witness a re-conditioning of the human toaccept rather than deny the human, which is to say, her finitude.

What Cavell sees in his alternative to tragedy, is that a new way is made, notby the reception of a new piece of knowledge, but by the characters newreception of [their] own experience.43 It is a receptivity that is narrated

elsewhere as a search for a self other than the given self, elaborated by Cavellthrough invoking Emersons becoming. For Emerson, becoming turns allriches to poverty, all reputation to shame and so it shoves Jesus and Judasequally aside.44 Cavell enlists Emersonianbecomingto frame the moral per-fectionism that involves finding the journeys end in every step of the road

39 He treats many of these same movies again, explicitly paired with philosophers and otherthinkers, in his meditations on moral perfectionism in Cities of Words.

40 Peter Dula, Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology (New York, NY: Oxford University

Press, 2011), p. 20.41 Cavell,Pursuits of Happiness, p. 109.42 Ibid.,p. 109.43 Ibid.,p. 240.44 Cavell,This New Yet Unapproachable America, p. 10. Quoting Ralph Waldo Emersons Self-

Reliance.



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(a description at once of the good way of life and of thinkingphilosophy asjourney).45 We have a vision of a self meeting skepticism, a self that newlyreceives its experiences as a way of pursuing a new self and so continually

becoming. It is the catechesis into a human condition in which the temptationto deny the human is not inevitable.Re-marriage as becoming, receiving, pursuing, dispossessing, acknowl-

edging: it is a promising start. But Cavells essays also raise questions abouthow far we have come. Can the marriage relationship open to include otherforms of community, the absence of which Cavell notes several times? 46 Canthese (re-)marriages resist (re-)succumbing to the temptations of isolationand domination once the skepticism they face is murderous rather thandeforming? Can they resist the Iagos that would make them all Othellos? I

think they can. The ways of acknowledgment that must be learned will bemore difficult and the forms of dispossession more radical, precisely becausethe self is under a more imminent threat. This takes us to Macrina.

If the remarriage comedies extend the possibility of human becoming andacknowledgment, of meeting the skeptical threat with marriage rather thanmurder, Macrina displays that the possibilities for such becoming areendless, and that they are possible under the imminence of death. Even asdeath draws near, Macrina pursues a self that is ever-new and ever-becoming. And if thebecomingMacrina witnesses to is more radical than that

of the remarriage comedies, so is the dispossession she exemplifies.

Hands for Macrina: Possessing, Dispossessing, Receiving

We live by the hands of others. Yet it is by the labor of our own hands that weoften learn how to live deeply into this dependence.47 InThe Life of Macrina,Gregory gestures towards the complex networks of hands by which we live.In addition to the two dreams, hands appear to connect the manual andliturgical laboring throughout the Life, to describe the way Macrina was

nursed by her mothers hands, the way a painters hands could not captureMacrinas beauty, the way Macrina rebukes her older brother by taking himin hand and turning him toward philosophy and toil by hand rather thanfame, to describe blessings given and received, to note anointing for religiousduty, to mark the great skill of various siblings, to emphasize the care for thepoor, to lament the exile of Gregory at the hand of Emperor Valens.

The hands laboring through MacrinasLifesignal forms of life and labor inwhich one might live and know in ways that are epistemically dispossessed.

45 Cavell,This New Yet Unapproachable America, p. 1011.46 See, for example,Pursuits of Happiness, p. 239.47 Andrew Dinan discusses the manual laboring in theLife of Macrinain the context of the life

of her brother Basil, who wrote about manual laboring as important precisely because it teachesone dependence on neighbor, land, and God. Andrew Dinan, Manual Labor in the Life andThought of St. Basil the Great, inLogosVol. 12, no. 4 (Fall 2009), pp. 133157.

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Macrina makes plain the way that knowledge can never be separated frompatterns of living and the way epistemic dispossession is perfected in thedispossession of wealth, status, and pride. In her particular hands and forms

of life, Macrina offers an interpretation of epistemic dispossession both nearand far from Cavell. It is near in the way labor surfaces in relationship topossession and knowledge, as in the introduction to Cavells suggestivelytitled collection on Shakespeare, Disowning Knowledge. There he considersOthello as exemplifying the violence in masculine knowing that seems tointerpret the ambition of knowledge as that of exclusive possession, call itprivate property. And the attempt to convert knowledge into property joinstogether two problematics:

This linking of the desire of knowledge for possession, for, let us say,intimacy, links this epistemological problematic as a whole with that ofthe problematic of property, of ownership as the owning or ratifying ofones identity. As though the likes of Locke and Marx, in relating theindividual to the world through the concept of laboring, and relating thedistortion of that relation to the alienation or appropriation of labor, werepreparing a conceptual field that epistemology has yet to follow out. 48

An epistemology that would follow out the way labor links and communi-

cates distortions between individual and world would find new ways foraddressing skepticism. For, as attempts to establish epistemically-anchoredcertainty betray affinities with the skeptics anxiety about the insecurity ofknowledge, so does the wish to become undispossessable express an effortto overcome ones anxiety about possessions, what Cavell calls a skepticismwith respect to belonging and to belongings.49 We might say that posses-sions and belongings, including knowledge, are ways we can shore ourselvesup against the treacheries of creaturely living. Knowledge is always in dangerof becoming a possession to secure our status, a stake to claim our standing.

(Academics should recognize the temptation more than anyone.) Unlessaccompanied by dispossession, the philos of sophe desiccates into desireabsent love.

But Macrina does not just forsake the wish to become undispossessable.She actively dispossesses herself such that her life and lack of propertywitness to the dispossessed soul. She gives her inheritance into the hand of apriest so that she can fulfill her ascetic commitments. She has no possessionsand will be covered, in the end, with a cloak of her mothers. She spends herlast conversation comforting and exhorting her younger brother, and with

her breath nearly spent, she reserves her final words for prayer, making

48 Stanley Cavell,Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare(New York, NY: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1987), p. 10.

49 Ibid.,p. 10.



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supplication with her hand and then whispering in a low voice. It is a prayerof thanksgiving, an offering or dispossessing of her words. She praises Godfor fashioning Gods creatures with Gods own hands, asks forgiveness for

her sins, and commends her soul to Gods hands once again. In naming Godshands as creating her and accepting her after death, Macrina describes Godshands as bookending her life. Her mother and her brother are the humanbookends, receiving by their dreams Macrina at her birth and death. As hertongue runs dry, Macrinas hands continue to pray when her mouth cannot,and as she signs the close of her prayer, her life expires. Her self is taken fromher as she acknowledges her giftedness and offers herself as gift.

The Life does not end with Macrinas death. Macrinas corpse radiatinglight, her religious sisters tell Gregory of two miracles in Macrinas life. The

first occurs when Macrina invited her mother to heal her cancerous breast bymaking the sign of the cross over it, touching it with her own hands. Thesecond happens when Macrina healed the young daughter of a soldier,whose wife connects the miracle with the blind recovering sight from thehands of God. Macrinas hands, and the hands of those in her community,perform the work of the hands of the God from whom they receive them-selves and to whom they offer themselves. To live into her identity asreceived is to cultivate her gift into a greater gift; to refuse possession of herhands is to receive her hands as the hands of God.50

We have here Gregorys twist on Cavells anthropology, a twist that trans-figures Macrinas dispossession. First, Cavells anthropology: near the end ofPursuits of Happiness, when Cavell is discussing the new reception of onesexperience as ones own, he invokes Kierkegaard to ponder the end ofChristianity and suggest what is to succeed Christianity is a redemptivepolitics or a redemptive psychology that will require a new burden of faithin the authority of ones everyday experience, ones experience of the every-day, of earth not of heaven . . .51 Everyday experience rather than what? Theimplied alternative is made explicit in the opposition that succeeds it: earth

not heaven. Cavells heaven competes with the everyday, devaluing it anddistracting us from attending to what is right in front of our eyes. Suchexplicit critique of religion (Christianity) as proposing a transcendence thatcrushes immanent concerns is but a slender thread in his corpus, yet itreaches the level of substantive concern to the extent that it is encoded in hisanthropology of humans as finite. When Cavell elaborates what finitudeentails, he describes the way it names our separateness and our inability to getbehind language. But applied to humanity, finitude suggests not just a spatial

50 There has been a famous discussion of gifts and gift-giving among John Milbank, Jean-LucMarion, and Jacques Derrida. But more than any of these positions, the portrait of reception,

becoming, and presenting that I briefly sketch shares themes with Kaja SilvermansFlesh of MyFlesh(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

51 Cavell,Pursuits of Happiness, p. 240.

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dimension but a temporal one as well. Finitude names the end of a human,her death. This temporal dimension is made obvious in the case of Othello,whose separateness from the woman he loves makes clear to him his mor-

tality. He denies his mortality by denying Desdemona, giving her death thathe might not confront his own. For Othello, to refuse finitude is to refuse bothseparateness and death. When Cavell claims the human is finite, he claimsthat the human ends at death, that death names the end of becoming, that herdispossession and love are similarly finite. Yet in Macrina we see a way ofembracing heaven without forsaking earth, of displaying the way sacrificesrequired for acknowledgement perfect rather than compromise oneshumanity, and the way the dispossessed journey of divinization consum-mates rather than denies ones humanity. Macrina displays the possibilities

for living into a God whose transcendence does not compete with imma-nence by displaying a becoming radicalized beyond Cavells comedies ofremarriage.

Here is Gregorys twist: Macrina interprets human creaturehood for us asexpressing finitude even while witnessing to the infinite. Her creaturehoodexpresses finitude by affirming that we cannot find a way around or beneathour language, that we cannot secure our own existence, that we are separatefrom one another, even that we are subject to death. Yet it also witnesses tofinitudes reaching beyond itself, its openness to the infinite. And Gregorys

infinite is not the skeptics infinite. It names neither infinite security nor thedenial of others. It names the possibility of an endless creaturely becoming. Itis an infinite toward which the skeptics desire may be recatechized, wherethe human condition may complete its conversion. The difference betweenskeptical and Nyssenian (Macrinian) desire is significant: in its desire to leavefinitude behind, the desire of modern skepticism lacks trust in that it tries tosecure its own foundations against the exigencies of creaturely becoming andhuman communities. And it is a desire that likewise lacks patience in that itinsists on possessing the infinite at once rather than growing into and receiv-

ing it over time. Yet Macrinas desire is filled out through such trust andpatience. We might call this trust faith and this patience hope and so findanother way to claim that lacking faith and hope, eros ossifies into desireabsent love.

If skepticism is desire mis-catechized, if it is desire that lacks faith and hopeand is therefore no longer a form of love, then is it easy to re-catechetize it?Is it easy to believe visionary visitors who want our children to be named formartyrs? It is terribly difficult. Cultivating patience to receive amidst thecontingencies of life is never easyespecially when we recognize crucifixion

(martyrdom) as a standing threat.Yet Macrinas Life is a meditation on her death, raising the possibility of

martyrdom in the first few pages. Framing the stories of Macrinas life, theunity of theLife of Macrinais given in the story of the death of Macrina, thelast hours on her deathbed. TheLifefocuses on the way she faces her death,



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deflected by her mother and brother in the dreams her life taught them toreceive. The difficulty, we learn to see, of Emmelias vision is not that itreveals too little but that it reveals so much. It reveals that her daughters life

will follow the footsteps of a martyr, that her then-infant will love and desireand grow in such a way that she will risk crucifixion. Who can receive suchknowledge? The vision imparted knowledge to which Emmelia learns toyield over a lifetime that adequated her to receive its surplus. In the mean-time, Emmelia names her daughter after the girls grandmother and calls herThecla only in secret. It is only after Macrina has founded a community ofvirgins and radiated light from her corpse, only after Gregory has himselfdreamed about holy relics just before Macrinas death and been prompted towrite herLifethrough discussing her holiness with a friend, that Gregory can

venture this tentative interpretation of the dream: [I]t seems to me that theone who appeared was . . . foretelling the life of the child and intimating thatshe would choose a life similar to that of her namesake.52 Gregorys hagiog-raphy takes up the subtle, important task of describing how his sister, wholived a long life and died of natural causes, bore the mantle of her martyrnamesake.

We see in Gregorys descriptions of Macrina the way love requires one tosuffer death and suffering death well requires hope; the way receiving herselfmeans becoming Christ and becoming Christ means dispossessing herself.

Macrinas dispossessiondeeply connected with a sense of her own gifted-ness, which is itself an acknowledgment of her own creaturelinessbecomesboth the way that she is able to face death without illusion and the way she isable to continue receiving life, the way she is able to move into a creaturelyinfinitude. Against our epigraphic Descartes, who wants to secure knowl-edge (that he can nevertheless not deny) that he possesses these hands,Macrina receives herself as gift originating from the hands of God. Uncon-cerned to possess her hands, she receives her hands as she receives her-selfas gift from God. In accepting herself as gift, Macrina can both receive

others as gift and re-present herself as gift to others. By her hands that tendto others, that dispossess of wealth, that pray to God, Macrina dwells in Lovein such a way as to face death and receive her self as love that can see Love.She receives, not theknowledgeof God but the knowledge ofGodnot seeingas God sees but seeing God. Her self, opened by love to face death, receivesa vision of the Bridegroom, Love Itself, as she crosses the threshold towarddeath. This is a measure of just how far Macrinas dispossession is fromCavells: it is a dispossession lived in a community where criteria are not onlyhuman-made and -maintained, but angels may drop in for conversation. It is

a dispossession that can face death and murder because its demands are moreradical and its promises more wondrous. These are shifts made possible by

52 Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Saint Macrina, p. 164.

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the location of separation, not primarily in finitude, but in creaturehood,which is broken open toward infinity without ever leaving such separationbehind.

The epistemic dispossession Gregory illustrates names our inability fully tograsp our origins and the difficulty of discerning the origins of our dreamsand visions. But it also names our epistemic surfeit. We are not yet adequateto the radiance we have received, which means we must become adequate toour gift, to prepare ourselves to receive it. Such preparation, itself possibleonly as a gift, requires cultivating a humility that allows us to relinquishlaurels and release ideas that are merely comforting.53 To accept ourselves asreceivedas createdis to prepare ourselves to receive better, more fully,that we may continue to go on.

But receiving can be difficult, threatening even. Othello could not bear toreceive the knowledge of his own dependence on Desdemona. He could notbear the fleshly finitude his love made clear to him in the way he received hisself from Desdemona, the way her presence displayed his inability to securehis own life. Othello refuses both knowledge and epistemic dispossession,for he insists on an anchored certitude by denying knowledge of his finitude.To receive the knowledge that Desdemona could give Othelloto acknowl-edge herwould require him to see the way death attends our life, the wayour life cannot be secured from death. It would require further that he

present himself for acknowledgment, which is to expose himself to the risk ofcrucifixion. Yet who can voluntarily face the threat of crucifixion? Only theone dispossessed of his very life. Only the one who has learned the love thatcannot be practiced apart from faith and hope.

I have been trying to describe what this dispossession means, how it is wejourney more deeply into epistemic dispossession. I have been describingwhat it means to dispossess oneself of ones very life as living more deeplyinto ones identity as receiving life from beyond herselfan identity ofcreaturehood. I might also say that to live dispossessed is for me to abandon

the attempt to save my life, that I may instead find it in losing it.

53 Gregory of Nyssas commitment to a divine transcendence that does not contrast with a

divine immanenceand therefore a divine agency which does not compete with humanagencymeans that his theology can find ways to accommodate Cavells emphasis on humanachievement without the anxiety that such achievement leaves gift behind. For an interestingtheological engagement with Cavell that nevertheless does so worry, see Judith E. Tonning,Acknowledging a Hidden God: A Theological Critique of Stanley Cavell on Scepticism,Heyth-rop JournalVol. 48 no. 3 (2007), pp. 384405.



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