Abstract: Can there be such a thing as a Wittgensteinian literary criticism? By looking carefully at what Stanley Cavell does in his ephocal reading of King Lear, “The Avoidance of Love,” Toril Moi shows that a “Wittgensteinian” critic will take up a certain phenomenological or existential attitude in relation to the act of reading. This is not a method, then, but an commitment to reading as an existential commitment, and to reading as an act of acknowledgment.