Part of the appeal of the psychoanalytic outlook is its alertness to multiple nuances and deeper layers of meaning beneath our surface utterances. It is this dimension that much analytic philosophy appears to miss, with its insistence on a rigorously transparent discourse that eliminates all possible ambiguity. Cavell comments illuminatingly and at length on how his writing has wrestled with the problems of finding the right voice, in order to meet "philosophy's ancient challenge to consider one's life". Hence his influential readings of Ludwig Wittgenstein were compelled to "to demand literary as well as philosophical responses, and moreover philosophical responses for which analytical training in searching out arguments, while not dispensable, was not perfect training." The resulting voice, though "refusing to choose" between analytic and continental philosophy, does nonetheless point us in a significantly more humane direction than today's prevailing science-based model, moving "without embarrassment" into lines and images from poetry and novels, or into the arena of film, in order to articulate a philosophical vision.

The vision that emerges by the end of this lengthy autobiography is a sombre one, as is perhaps not unreasonable to expect given the fact that it was started to distract the author from an impending heart operation, with the stated aim of cataloguing "what Freud calls the detours on the human path to death". The closing moral is that "telling one's life, the more completely, say incorporating awkwardness, becomes one's life, and becomes a way of leaving it [...] The news is that this awkwardness, or say, self consciousness [...] stops asserting itself nowhere short of dying."

It would be misleading to close this review without warning the reader that the "self-consciousness" just referred to is often a very obtrusive feature of the author's writing style. Cavell is strongly attracted to a self-reflexive mode of communication reminiscent of the work of Jacques Derrida, where long and convoluted sentences wind back on themselves, and every thought is expressed in multiple drafts, with no conclusion that is not provisional and subject to further possible revision. It is a style that is very much an acquired taste, and which can easily generate mental indigestion, particularly in a work of this length. Those of us who would agree with Cavell that anglophone philosophy needs to find a more humane voice will nevertheless be very wary of following him down this particular stylistic route. For all that, this is a revealing and often moving autobiography that also exemplifies a very distinctive way of doing philosophy.