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„Out of the Continental Mind” and Into an American Courtroom: On Metonymic Rationality in Cavell

When Cary Grant, in The Awful Truth (1937), fails to sustain the suave, rational act in face of Irene Dunne’s presumed infidelity, she says that he is “out of his continental mind”. This could well be the very awful truth of their narrative: that there is a mind apart to America, a type of rationality independent from inclusions and exclusions constituent to the continental mind (and philosophy). It is in this position that Stanley Cavell engages philosophy and with it ; what is more, it is not the truth so much as its awfulness that Cavell is concerned with. This is where philosophy for Cavell demands recourse to psychoanalysis ; also, it is in this position that Cavell mobilizes gender into a dispositif where awfulness, truth and constitution come to combine for America to become. With this in mind, I propose to discuss the Cavellian woman, of his cinema books, who dominates the “green world” of the Hollywood remarriage comedies, warranting the rules of engagement which are out of the continental mind. I will focus on the comedies where this seems not to be taking place – Adam’s Rib (1949) and His Girl Friday (1940) ; their woman however does the same to courtrooms and the adjacent spaces, as if to suggest that the green world is not absent but rather metonymic to the very places they would assign to (pure) reason. Finally, I propose to show that this Cavellian assemblage is where Deleuze’s philosophical fascination with woman, film and America suffers a critical reconfiguration.

Stanley Cavell; America; philosophy; film; psychoanalysis; metonymy

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