Thinking the everyday, the ordinary. Umgangssprache, infra-ordinaire and infra-realism

Abstract

In this article I intend to show how the ‘the ordinary”, which American philosopher Stanley Cavell (1926-2018) first developed borrowing from John L. Austin’s ordinary language philosophy, and from the second Wittgenstein and Emerson’s (and Thoreau’s) transcendentalism, and then identified with the Hollywood comedy of remarriage, can echo with the aesthetic and ethic reflections of some Spanish writers of the 1920s and 1930s who were especially aware of “all that out here”. Two aspects of the work of Benjamín Jarnés (1888-1949) serve to illustrate this unexpected proximity: his appreciation of Ortega y Gasset’s infrarealism (the approach to the insignificant); his passion for 1930s cinema, particularly the first animated movies, emblem of the artistic grace, whose mission —just as the goal of Cavell’s experience— is to unite mankind, reinstating a relationship of acknowledgement among people.