Avital Ronell

Biography

Ronell was born in Prague to Israeli diplomats and was a performance artist before entering academia. She emigrated to New York four years later, in 1956. She attended the prestigious Rutgers Preparatory School and graduated in 1970. As a young immigrant, she frequently encountered xenophobia and anti-Semitism. She gained a Bachelor of Arts from Middlebury College, and subsequently studied with Jacob Taubes and Hans-Georg Gadamer at the Hermeneutic Institute at the Free University of Berlin. Ronell received her Doctorate of Philosophy in German studies under the advisement of Stanley Corngold at Princeton University in 1979, and carried "some wounded memories from graduate school" with her close friend and philosopher Laurence Rickels. Pulled along by Gisele Celan-Lestrange, she met Jacques Derrida at a symposium devoted to Peter Szondi. Derrida recounts the meeting in a letter dated the 23rd of June 1979 from The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond:

She subsequently studied with Derrida and Helene Cixous in Paris. Ronell would soon become a close friend of poet and novelist Pierre Alferi, who would later influence Ronell in the titling of several of her major works. A professor at the University of Virginia for a short time period, Ronell claims she was fired because she taught continental philosophy and "went to the gym on a regular basis: [her] colleagues were shocked by this—it didn't correspond to their image of an academic woman!" She joined the comparative literature faculty at the University of California, Riverside and then at University of California, Berkeley where she taught with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy and Judith Butler. She was a close friend of the controversial writer Kathy Acker and identified with Kathy Acker's fiction. She highlights how they wrote "in correspondence" "destined to each other—in need, in any case, of the complementarity that [their] writing invited and indicated." In 1996, she moved to New York University where she then co-taught a course with Jacques Derrida until 2004. In 2009, she began co-teaching courses with Slavoj Zizek who continues to hold the position of visiting professor at NYU's Department of Germanic Languages and Literature. In 2010, Francois Noudelmann also co-taught with her, and co-curated the Walls and Bridges program with her in 2011. In addition to her own writing, she introduced Jacques Derrida to American audiences by translating his reading of Kafka's "Before the Law," his essay on the law of gender/genre, and his lectures on Nietzsche's relation to biography, among many other translations.

Overview of works

Avital Ronell argues for the necessity of the unintelligible, the flaw and breakdown. She has supported her argument for the necessity of the unintelligible by saying, "If we could communicate, we wouldn't need to communicate." She also recounts in her work on the police brutality against Rodney King that the idiom of the "perfectly clear" recurrently serves as a code for the white lie. Ronell frequently refers to her authorship over texts in terms of another "signatory," "operator," or "television," and not in terms of her proper name as author over previously published work. In addition, she makes an important part of her work the focus upon thinkers who clean up after other thinkers and how "sanitation departments" undermine the very work they mean to accomplish because they offer an altogether different experience of reading and writing from that of the thinkers they try to clean up. Thus to paraphrase Ronell's texts is not a simple or clearly achievable task. Unmentioned in this page, is her book "Scum manifesto", since the writings here have a certain slant towards one set of ideals.

Dictations: On Haunted Writing (1986)

Ronell investigates Goethe's dictations to the future. In particular, she examines how Goethe did not write one of his most influential works, Conversations with Eckermann, but instead dictated the work to his young schizoid companion, Johannes Peter Eckermann. Heralded by Nietzsche as "the best German book," Conversations with Eckermann contains Goethe's last thoughts about art, poetry, politics, religion and a host of concerns for the fate of German literature and philosophy. Ronell thus reads Conversations with Eckermann as the return from beyond the grave of the great master of German literary and scientific works.

Ronell begins her investigation in Goethe's scientific writings and explores Goethe's focus on "a certain domain of immateriality—the nonsubstantializable apparitions … [of] weather forecasting … ghosts, dreams, and some forms of hidden, telepathic transmissions." Ronell renames the Goethe-effect what she calls "killer texts" and describes the effect as the textual machination destructive of values, of the "worthier (Werther, from The Sorrows of Young Werther)." The first part opens on Freud's debt to Goethe and reprints the frontispiece of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Ronell names Goethe the "secret councilor (Geheimrat)" of Freud and already anticipates her work on the Rat Man in the third footnote where she alludes to the "suppository logic, inserting the vital element into the narrative of the other." In the first section Ronell aims to "attune [her] ears to the telepathic orders that Goethe's phantom transmitted to Freud by a remote control system.

In general, Dictations: On Haunted Writing traces the closure without end of influence's computation. Ronell's task entails a reading practice where the analysis of a text must investigate the endless movement towards closure in dictation. Ronell thus practices what is called anasemic reading, a practice developed by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, in which the psychoanalyst traces the textual metaphors, rhetorical structures, and linguistic associations of a writer/patient.

"Part Two" presents a case of literary parasitism between Eckermann and Goethe, and opens at the scene of Goethe's table in Weimar "the eleventh of September 1828, at two o'clock." In other words, Ronell re-imagines the scene that Eckermann illustrates at the beginning and ending of Conversations with Eckermann. Ronell starts to address the fiction of the writer as a particularly admirable human being and argues for the necessary passivity of the writer as a human being. Ronell also troubles the notion of a body of work as a totality. Ronell remaps earlier arguments about feminine appropriation in terms of writing, for Eckermann, which "involves recuperating something 'for myself,' for the most part instinctively; it entails repetitive acts of appropriation."

Dictations: On Haunted Writing explores how the work of writing in general adheres to a call dictated from elsewhere, a call formative of desire.

The Telephone Book: Technology — Schizophrenia — Electric Speech (1989)

Ronell questions the operations that such ordinary objects as the telephone and book dictate. She signs the text as the operator of the switchboard alongside Richard Eckersley, operator of design, and Michael Jensen, operator of compositor. Eckersley's design departs from his "typographic subtlety and restraint" towards a computer design, marked by new page-making software programs to interpret the text typographically. Eckersley dislodges the text from presumed conventional settings and shifts the focus of reading with inexplicable gaps, displacements between sentences and paragraphs, mirror imaging of pages facing one another, words blurred to the point of indecipherability, and a regular exaggeration of negative line spacing, spilling sentences over into each other. Pushing the limits of an ordinary "Table of Contents" or "Footnotes," the operators set up a "Directory Assistance," in which chapters appear as reference indexes, and a yellow pages entitled "Classified," in which footnotes appear as soliciting advertisements.

The text begins with "A User's Manual" that warns it "is going to resist you."

Following "A User's Manual," the text begins as if the reader answers a call: "And yet, you're saying yes, almost automatically, suddenly, sometimes irreversibly." Ronell makes clear that The Telephone Book is a philosophical project on questions concerning the telephone, the call, and the answering machines: "always incomplete, always unreachable, forever promising at once its essence and its existence, philosophy identifies itself finally with this promise, which is to say, with its own unreachability."

Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (1992)

Ronell takes as her point of departure Nietzsche's articulation that, as long as culture has existed, it has supported and inspired addiction. Often untimely, she develops an argument investigative of the destructive desires that coincide with the war on drugs and with the very addiction to drugs which the war claims to want to vanquish. The result is a text whose performance disturbs simple comprehension and frustrates any reading that wishes to tackle drugs on one side or another of a binary opposition. Ronell appeals to literature as the most advanced testimony to the culture of addiction and closely reads Madame Bovary.

Prior to the title page, Ronell showcases quotes from Martin Heidegger, Gustave Flaubert and Samuel Beckett. The text opens with a series of sixteen "hits" informative of both the structure of doing drugs and of the structure of cultural transmission. The "hits" serve as a series of references which survey the literary and philosophical landscape as relates to drugs. "Toward a Narcoanalysis" consolidates the text's itinerary to an account of the sort of analysis Ronell begins to explore by appealing to Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. "EB on Ice" performs a first-person account where Ronell complicates the certitude with which the reader can identify the first-person narrator as herself, as EB, or being on ice as being in the refrigerator, as being on methamphetamine. "Shame" highlights something like the downsizing of interpretation as it only occupies eight pages and draws the reader's attention to the possibility that the text experiments with the potential indifference between drugs and texts. "Scoring Literature" makes up the largest portion of the text and includes nineteen subsections along with a "Doctor's Report" of E. Bovary. "Cold Turkey: or, The Transcendental Aesthetic to be Eaten" is formatted as three installations, three nano-installations, and two nano-intervals of a theatrical play where Ronell convokes Ernst Junger, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Marguerite Faust, Marguerite Duras, Freud, Irma, Voice Off, Nietzsche, Saint Theresa, Emma B, Walter Benjamin, chorus, priest, and delusions of a non-addict.

Finitude's Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium (1994)

Research assistant and friend, Shireen R.K. Patell, helped bring Finitude's Score to fruition. Finitude's Score collects a series of reflections on the fragile memory left at the close of the millennium. It looks into the projects responsible for devastating humanity and a thinking of the future. Ronell asks why the twentieth century stakes so much on a diction of deficiency. For Ronell, it says that, "we have been depleted." Ronell traces the relegitimization of war, the philosophical status of the rumor, the questionable force of the police, the test sites of technology, the corporeal policies of disease and a thoroughgoing reconstitution of the subject of law. In sum, Finitude's Score reads the desire to finish once and for all, to be done with issues definitively, as the everlasting legacy of the Western logos.

Stupidity (2002)

Ronell breaks down stupidity. In particular, she unfolds the complex problematic of stupidity as something that baffles knowledge in general, and therefore as something that especially baffles knowledge about itself. Among other considerations, Ronell finds that stupidity often takes the form of mastery and intelligence's doubles. She further goes to show that stupidity does not acquire the status of concept. It only reaches the level of quasi-concept.

The Test Drive (2005)

Inflected in the title and throughout the work is the concept of the Freudian drive as it inheres in the test. At the limit of the test as that which grounds scientific knowledge, Ronell questions the distinction between the literary and human sciences as this distinction depends upon the constitutive limits of fiction and witnessing. Her work thus questions the structure of the test as it functions to legitimate everything from research to love and trauma.

Reception

Many scholars have praised Ronell's work. In 1994, Diacritics offered a special edition "On the Work of Avital Ronell." In the special edition, Jonathan Culler writes: "Over the past decade, Ronell has put together what must be one of the most remarkable critical oeuvres of our era ... Zeugmatically yoking the slang of pop culture with philosophical analysis, forcing the confrontation of high literature and technology or drug culture, Avital Ronell produces sentences that startle, irritate, illuminate. At once hilarious and refractory, her books are like no others." At the 11th Annual Oscar Sternbach awards, recipient Judith Butler tipped her hat to Ronell and added that she felt deeply indebted to Ronell for the influence of her work. In 2009, Diane Davis edited a collection of essays entitled Reading Ronell where Butler writes in "Ronell as Gay Scientist": "The different path that Ronell takes is precisely the path of difference: gay, difficult, affirmative, ironic." Davis herself contributes to the volume by writing of the "singular provocation of Ronell's 'remarkable critical oeuvre,'" "the devastating insights, the unprecedented writing style, the relentless destabilizations." In the sixth session of The Beast and the Sovereign on February 6 of 2002, Jacques Derrida devotes special attention to Ronell's Stupidity and commends the untranslatable complexity of her "irony." Ronell has been said to have "achieved a work of thinking at the highest level," to have produced "writing [that] is always astute and imaginative—even witty [...] cogently argued, exceptionally erudite, and stunningly original," and to be "the most interesting scholar in America."

Books

Selected honors and awards