Education for the Politics of “Voice”: Cavell, Butler, and Acknowledging Others

Abstract

To address the modern political task of listening to the voices of excluded others, this paper will propose “the politics of voice” based on the thought of the American philosopher Stanley Cavell. It begins with a critique of Kelz's comparison, in political terms, between Cavell and Judith Butler. Butler's politics constantly challenges the norm by confronting its finitude and opening it to infinite possibilities so that the opinions that are currently invisible can be recognized. No matter how much existing knowledge is thus renewed, however, the actual understanding of others with this new knowledge will remain narcissistic unless one gets out of the objectifying construction of “Othering” in which “I know you.” In contrast, Cavell teaches us another sphere of politics, where acknowledging others is indivisible from self-acknowledgment in that our “voices”—particular ways of inhabiting our everyday lives constituted by general knowledge—are simultaneously discovered in the form of finding out that they are absolutely different by accepting human epistemic finitude. After demonstrating the complementarity of Cavell's and Butler's politics through the example of slavery, I shall explore the prospects for political education from their respective ways of engaging with language.