Excuse as Entry into Comedy

Sorry I will not quote an extensive swath of his prose and thereby impinge upon your attention.

Excuses betoken, we might say, the incessant, unending vulnerability of human action, its exposure to the independence of the world and the preoccupation of the mind.

And a page later we may read

Excuses mark out the region of tragedy, mark it as the beyond of the excusable, the justifiable, the explainable, (the sociable?). Who among philosophers has a theory of forgiveness, and whether it is giveable? It must be a theory of comedy.

There is far more in the context of this rift on Austin's How To Do Things with Words by Stanley Cavell in his Bucknell lectures published under the title Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida. You may wish that I had quoted more. You may even be sorry that I haven't. And yet you may be happy and not sorry at all that what little is given here impels you to Cavell or to Austin or to both.

And so for day 681
24.10.2008