Avital Ronell
Biographic Data
| ID | 389755 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Avital Ronell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Avital |
| FAMILY NAME | Ronell |
| SIGNATURE | RONELL A |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0009-0007-7707-5077 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 146 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Justice and Personality: A Promissory Note
Drucilla Cornell located her work and alliances at contested borders of exchange, translation, prickly political showdowns, gender affiliation, and inherited jointures of enmity. Cornell made us think about what it means to live in America today, meaning yesterday and today, ceding to the destructive pull of a national death drive and the repeal of rights to which women and minorities never cease being susceptible. Her work “asks and answers” the…
Unscheduled
Derrida and his shadow
Rerouting the tradition of defiant putdown, his name is a shibboleth for troubled intervention, still unearthing values stubbornly uninterrogated by other branches of philosophical enquiry. He drew from Carl Schmitt the persistent atmospherics of hostility to politicize social aspects of aggregation and Mitsein. The oeuvre of Jacques Derrida thus continues to stir hostility, generating implications of seething mistrust for the textual and institu…
Tremblements
Dans les Conversations de Madeleine de Scudéry, la paresse met en évidence des dynamiques sociales et politiques et peut apparaître comme une réaction ambivalente aux changements politiques
Chapter 9 On Risk-Taking in the Psychoanalytic Text: The Reality-Test
Experimenting: Essays with Samuel Weber
The work of Samuel Weber has greatly influenced writers and thinkers across the arts and humanities: including literary, critical, and cultural theory; media, communication, theater, and cultural studies; new media and technology; psychoanalysis; and philosophy. His remarkable and inaugural texts have been especially important to the deconstructive tradition, given his early recognition of the importance of the writings of Jacques Derrida. Taught…
Lapses: When Friends Clock Out
Remembrance involves so many shots in the dark, part of an effort to locate the disappeared as they clock out. In the dead center of Hölderlin’s hymn, Andenken, the question flares: ‘But–where are my friends?’ Nancy, writing on Derrida’s inconceivable demise, says we await them, demanding a return in some form, drawing on a shadowing nearness, maybe an image that appears in distinction to the non-image of the living friend. Have they really elaps…
The Next Level: Rollbacks and Erasures in Three Acts
The Next Level:Rollbacks and Erasures in Three Acts Avital Ronell ACT ONE—Medial Contestation Gripped by invasive aspects of multifactorial collapse, we are bound to ask about the nature of technological impingements and their political resolve. Part of the job description involves keeping pace with the cognitive shakeups provoked by technical mutations and their existential counterparts—critical rounds that can wear one down and kill one's creat…
The Gestell from Hell: Philosophy Sets Up ‘America’
‘America’, bloated with philosophical significance, serves as a meeting grounds for Heidegger and Derrida, flagging theoretical standoffs, identity crashes, a Nietzscean tipoff, and unstoppable poetry wars. Also featuring psychoanalytical stopovers and Rilkean putdowns
The Time of My Life
A period of mourning has kept me away from music, so my head fills with static bombs instead. I usually like to work with some sort of sonic signature. A subtle incentive laying down a basic beat, musical accompaniment allows me to pummel at a stubborn knot in life. In his work on cryptonymy, Laurence Rickels has claimed that background music rings a death knell. That may be so. I’m always hitching a ride on the death drive—the flex of my drivenn…
The Transfer of Complaint: A Narcissistic Time-Share
Reflecting on the debts collected by Shoshana Felman's work, within the theoretical contexts of the time in which the 1977 Yale French Studies issue of 'Psychoanalysis and Literature' first appeared, this article takes as its point of departure Lacan's analysis of Hamlet's father as the barred Other, focusing on Hamlet's 'complaint'. The nature of the complaint (plainte, or Klage, also closely allied to Anklage, or accusation) is then explored in…
Hannah Arendt Swallows the Lessing-Prize
Hannah Arendt Swallows the Lessing-Prize Avital Ronell “Real are the dead whom you have forgotten.... they are living ghosts ... ” (“Aftermath of Nazi Rule” 254) 1. The Drama of a Citation In the end, Hannah left everyone floored. Stupefied and troubled, she found herself ensnared in the granting of a citation that could not evade the aggressive qualities and edges of performative imposition. Addressing the foreign/homeland audience through the t…
La Malédiction: The Sentencing of Lacoue-Labarthe
La Malédiction:The Sentencing of Lacoue-Labarthe Avital Ronell (bio) The thought-poem, phrase, wants to end itself, stop its complaint, but risks drowning in affect—it has been enraged and must stop. Organized around a plaintive cry, the text, whose title I would be tempted to translate as “Sentencing,” tries to contain an encroaching sense of rage, uncontrollably on the take. The complaint must not tip over into hate speech, a constant temptatio…
Derridémocratie
Teacher's Pet
Normally I live and write in dog time. The disadvantages of laggard pacing add up, but the slowdown, I tell myself, permits me to cover Derridean expanses, without cutting too many corners. The gnawing attention to detail, when you live and write in dog time, can be irritating to some Daseins. In my work, I often take my cues from an inherited twofer, Kafka and Derrida; in their manner, I seize on the most miniscule disturbance, going after the m…
Loser sons: Politics and Authority
"There are sons who grow up unhappily believing that no matter what they do, they cannot please their fathers. Often unable to shed their sense of lifelong failure, either they give up and suffer in a permanent sulk, or they try with all their might to prove they are worth something after all. These are the "loser sons," a group of historical men as varied as President George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden, and Mohammed Atta. Their names quickly illust…
L'Impossible Monsieur Bébé, cette déconstruction incessante
Have I Been Destroyed? Answering to Authority and the Politics of the Father
Exploring the cobelonging of the philosophical and the political, this essay reflects on the question of authority. Plato more or less invented authority when he sought to establish a reliable force that would intercede between power and persuasion. Rhetorical persuasion had failed philosophy when it did nothing to prevent the state's murder of Socrates. Philosophy was too puny to fight the power. Authority and its cognates gave Plato the arsenal…
Surrender and the Ethically Binding Signature: On Johnson's Reparative Process
Research Article| December 01 2006 Surrender and the Ethically Binding Signature: On Johnson's Reparative Process Avital Ronell Avital Ronell Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google differences (2006) 17 (3): 129–150. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2006-015 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Avital Ronell; Surrender and the Ethically Binding Signature: On Johnson'…
Koan Practice or Taking Down the Test
The test drive
The Testamentary Whimper
Research Article| July 01 2004 The Testamentary Whimper Avital Ronell Avital Ronell Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2004) 103 (2-3): 489–499. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-489 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Avital Ronell; The Testamentary Whimper. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 July 2004; 103 (2-3): 489–499. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-…
The Experimental Disposition: Nietzsche's Discovery of America (Or, Why the Present Administration Sees Everything in Terms of a Test)
1The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at New York University
Proving Grounds: On Nietzsche and the Test Drive
The figure of the test--as something that permeates modern existence but still lacks determination--belongs to what Nietzsche saw as our age of experimentation. Science itself invites us to read the scene of experimentation, its fractured promises and articulated procedures, the historical renewals, stalls or question marks, which the experimental disposition has generated. Often we are encouraged to seek answers, provisional or regulative, in te…
Stupidity
There is something about stupidity that is untrackable; it evades our cognitive scanners and turns up as the uncanny double of mastery or intelligence." "The political and social implications of stupidity have been articulated by Marx, Nietzsche, Deleuze, among others. Urgent yet recalcitrant, stupidity provokes a crisis in our understanding of politics, ethics, and psychoanalysis. The dilemma posed by the limited subject involves national identi…
The Law of Genre
Koan Practice or Taking Down the Test
The Uninterrogated Question of Stupidity
Research Article| July 01 1996 The Uninterrogated Question of Stupidity Avital Ronell Avital Ronell avital ronell is currently Acting Chair of the Department of German at New York University. Her recent books include Finitude's Score: Essays toward the End of the Millennium (U of Nebraska P, 1994), Crack Wars: Literature/Addiction/Mania (U of Nebraska P, 1992), and The Telephone Book (U of Nebraska P, 1989). Search for other works by this author …
The Worst Neighborhoods of the Real
The Law of Genre
All Ears: Nietzsche's Otobiography
[Discussion on Boschenstein]
Taking it Philosophically: Torquato Tasso's Women as Theorists
Of the ensemble that we have come to call Goethe, the theoretician and the poet were often at war with one another. When he applied himself to the sciences, Goethe was often driven by a marked fascination for monstrosities, degeneracy (Abarten) and malformation. 1 This can hardly be said to be the case in his poetical endeavours, though one might argue that Werther, for instance, is born of such a passion. To whatever extent the works preceding h…
Postponements: Women, Sensuality and Death in Nietzsche
The telephone book: Technology--Schizophrenia--Electric Speech
The Differends of Man
The Worst Neighborhoods of the Real
The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida
Originally published in French in 1982, this collection is a good representation of the range of Derrida's working styles.--South Atlantic Review
The Walking Switchboard
The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech
Crack Wars: Literature-Addiction-Mania
Ronell uses culturally acceptable addictions such as romance novels, gasoline and more to ask why there is no culture without drug culture
Video/Television/Rodney King: Twelve Steps beyond The Pleasure Principal
Research Article| July 01 1992 Video/Television/Rodney King: Twelve Steps beyond The Pleasure Principal Avital Ronell Avital Ronell Avital Ronell is in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent books are The Telephone Book: Technology - Schizophrenia - Electric Speech (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989) and Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1992). Her current pr…
Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania
Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania
The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech
A Telephone Conversation: Fragments
Toward an Ethics of Decision
There are certain things that force your hand. You find yourself incontrovertibly obligated: something occurs prior to owing, and more fundamental still than that of which any trace of empirical guilt can give an account. This relation-to whom? to what?-is no more and no less than your liabilitywhat you owe before you think, understand, or give; that is, what you owe from the very fact that you exist, before you can properly owe. You do not have …
Hallucinogeneric Literature: Avital Ronell's Narcoanalysis
Avital Ronell (« Crack Wars », 1992) demontre la facon dont le modele de la drogue peut eclairer la nature de la culture moderne. Son oeuvre est une demonstration de toutes ses multiples implications, a la fois dans la forme fictionnelle et l'histoire culturelle, resumees dans sa succincte definition de ce qu'elle appelle halucinogenres
Dictations: On Haunted Writing
[Dictations] will change not only the way we read Goethe, but the way we read. - Rainer Nagele, author of Reading after Freud. Avital Ronell, author of Crack Wars and The Telephone Book, defies the undefiable. In Dictations she looks at Goethe, the dictator. A figure whose every word is treated with reverence by Germanists, Goethe is exemplary. But of what? As if teetering between life and death, Goethe was born in a legendary way: thought to be …
The Uninterrogated Question of Stupidity
Research Article| July 01 1996 The Uninterrogated Question of Stupidity Avital Ronell Avital Ronell avital ronell is currently Acting Chair of the Department of German at New York University. Her recent books include Finitude's Score: Essays toward the End of the Millennium (U of Nebraska P, 1994), Crack Wars: Literature/Addiction/Mania (U of Nebraska P, 1992), and The Telephone Book (U of Nebraska P, 1989). Search for other works by this author …
Finitude's Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium
Finitude's Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium
Suspending the distinction between headline news and high theory, Avital Ronell examines the diverse figures of finitude in our modernity: war, guerrilla video, trauma TV, AIDS, music, divorce, sadism, electronic tagging, rumor. Her essays address such questions as, How do rumors kill? How has video become the conscience of TV? How have the police come to be everywhere, even where they are not? Is peace possible? [W]riting to the community of tho…
The Experimental Disposition: Nietzsche's Discovery of America (Or, Why the Present Administration Sees Everything in Terms of a Test)
1The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at New York University
Proving Grounds: On Nietzsche and the Test Drive
The figure of the test--as something that permeates modern existence but still lacks determination--belongs to what Nietzsche saw as our age of experimentation. Science itself invites us to read the scene of experimentation, its fractured promises and articulated procedures, the historical renewals, stalls or question marks, which the experimental disposition has generated. Often we are encouraged to seek answers, provisional or regulative, in te…
Philosophy (21 works) · Psychology (21 works) · Art (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Political science (13 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Literature (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism (9 works)