Voce e conversazione nella riflessione etica di Stanley Cavell

Voice and conversation are two key concepts of Stanley Cavell’s philosophical perspective. Starting from the study of the later Wittgenstein, the focus on a personal voice engaged in a conversation is for Cavell connected with the vulnerability of language, with the possibility of being inexpressive, but also with the agreements we have in our shared forms of life. The aim of this paper is to analyse the moral characterization Cavell gives to these topics within Emersonian Perfectionism, in which the quest for a voice in one’s own story and language is presented as the necessity to make oneself intelligible to others. By exploring the threat to expressivity in terms of a rejection of the Cartesian cogito, the perfectionist approach insists on the need for a self-transformation, which is exemplified by the female characters in Hollywood cinema of the Thirties and Forties, who claim their own identity as autonomous individuals.