Fetishism and Scepticism, or the Two Worlds of Christian Metz and Stanley Cavell

In his ‘Lecture on Ethics’, prepared for delivery at the University of Cambridge sometime between September 1929 and December 1930, though unpublished in his lifetime, Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests that final and conclusive agreements on such ordinary yet powerful human experiences as ethics, aesthetics, or belief cannot be hoped for. But this does not mean that experiences like belief are incommunicable or incomprehensible; hence Wittgenstein’s long fascination with intermediate and impure cases as occasions for investigating these experiences philosophically, though often indirectly. In this way, Wittgenstein presents by example two philosophical procedures central to his later philosophy: the examination of intermediate