Reading Cavell's "the World Viewed": A Philosophical Perspective on Film (Book Review‪)‬

Reading Cavell's "The World Viewed": A Philosophical Perspective on Film. By William Rothman and Marian Keane. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000. $49.95 cloth; $19.95 paper. In Reading Cavell's "The World Viewed": A Philosophical Perspective on Film, William Rothman and Marian Keane take on a number of film-critical tasks and obligations. Their preeminent task and promise is to provide a chapter-by-chapter "reading" of Stanley Cavell's The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (cited below as WV; all other citations of Cavell are from Rothman and Keane). Indeed, in following the Cavellian maxim that a text or author should be consulted on the question of reading procedures, they take their cue from Cavell, repeatedly paraphrasing an axiom from Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome to the effect that "Emerson is a thinker ... with the accuracy and consequentiality one expects of a mind 'worth following with that attention necessary to decipher one's own'" (22). So another promise--beyond that of applying Cavell's Emersonian criteria of "accuracy and consequentiality" to their reading of Cavell--is to achieve the level of self-understanding necessary to claim an understanding of Cavell.