Between Acknowledgment and Avoidance

Abstract Cavell describes the human subject as coming to discursive-reflective awareness and thus to the acquisition of selfhood by way of entry into language. In emerging in this way, the human subject is both bound to ordinary life and resistant to it, in both taking on norms from others and seeking its own path. Ordinary life is thus inherently open to being experienced as uncanny: both familiar and enabling to the human subject and foreign to it. Open re-orientation within the ordinary is sometimes achievable through the entering of a claim of reason that is simultaneously a claim to self-knowledge and to community as well as to reason. Doing the work of reading is a further way of continuing the work of re-orientation.