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Stanley Cavell

Stanley Cavell Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Stanley Cavell Quotes

“A photograph does not present us with ‘likenesses’ of things; it presents us, we want to say, with the things themselves. But wanting to say that may well make us ontologically restless. ‘Photographs present us with things themselves’ sounds, and ought to sound, paradoxical … It is no less paradoxical or false to hold up a photograph of Garbo and say, ‘That is not Garbo,’ if all you mean is that the object you are holding up is not a human creature. Such troubles in notating so obvious a fact suggest that we do not know what a photograph is; we do not know how to place it ontologically. We might say that we don’t know how to think of the connection between a photograph and what it is a photograph of.”

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Book:The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition
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“So far as photography satisfied a wish, it satisfied a wish not confined to painters, but a human wish, intensifying since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation - a wish for power to reach this world, having for so long tried, at last hopelessly, to manifest fidelity to another... Photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting, one which does not so much defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether: by automatism, by removing the human agent from the act of reproduction.”

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Author:Stanley Cavell
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