摘要：IN THIS ESSAY IWANT TO TAKE UP A SET OF POSSIBILITIESopened up by two texts, Partha Chatterjee's The Nation and its Fragments and Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe. A crucial, if somewhat under-theorized problematic in both cases is the question of the "limit," the limits of "community" for Chatterjee and of "history" for Chakrabarty. What makes such limits possible. What lies beyond or outside the limit. To put it another way: what are the tensions that inform these limits, and that bring them into crisis. It is my contention that certain questions can be opened up in this regard by bringing these texts into conversation with the philosopher Stanley Cavell, listening to his provocative encounters with the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations. What allows me to make these connections here is the recent work of Veena Das which uses Cavell and Wittgenstein in ways that point us to a somewhat different set of problems involving the production of knowledge. Centrally, as I will argue—for historiography, for anthropology, and other less disciplined encounters of thought in the world—the problems and possibilities open out onto the terrain of what has been named in philosophy as ethics. And Cavell takes us some distance in understanding the complex relationship between ethics and language. For me the immediate pressure for this conversation comes from utterances I hear in a very different sphere.
