Reading Ronell

Reading Ronell PDF Author: Diane Davis
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252090950
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Avital Ronell has won worldwide acclaim for her work across literature and philosophy, psychoanalysis and popular culture, political theory and feminism, art and rhetoric, drugs and deconstruction. In works such as The Test Drive, Stupidity, Crack Wars, and The Telephone Book, she has perpetually raised new and powerful questions about how we think, what thinking does, and how we fool ourselves about the troubled space between thought and action. In this collection, some of today's most distinguished and innovative thinkers turn their attention to Ronell's teaching, writing, and provocations, observing how Ronell reads and what comes from reading her. By reading Ronell, and reading Ronell reading, contributors examine the ethico-political implications of her radical dislocations and carefully explicate, extend, and explore the paraconcepts addressed in her works.

Reading Ronell

Reading Ronell PDF Author: Diane Davis
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252090950
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Get Book Here

Book Description
Avital Ronell has won worldwide acclaim for her work across literature and philosophy, psychoanalysis and popular culture, political theory and feminism, art and rhetoric, drugs and deconstruction. In works such as The Test Drive, Stupidity, Crack Wars, and The Telephone Book, she has perpetually raised new and powerful questions about how we think, what thinking does, and how we fool ourselves about the troubled space between thought and action. In this collection, some of today's most distinguished and innovative thinkers turn their attention to Ronell's teaching, writing, and provocations, observing how Ronell reads and what comes from reading her. By reading Ronell, and reading Ronell reading, contributors examine the ethico-political implications of her radical dislocations and carefully explicate, extend, and explore the paraconcepts addressed in her works.

The Telephone Book

The Telephone Book PDF Author: Avital Ronell
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803289383
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
The telephone marks the place of an absence. Affiliated with discontinuity, alarm, and silence, it raises fundamental questions about the constitution of self and other, the stability of location, systems of transfer, and the destination of speech. Profoundly changing our concept of long-distance, it is constantly transmitting effects of real and evocative power. To the extent that it always relates us to the absent other, the telephone, and the massive switchboard attending it, plugs into a hermeneutics of mourning. The Telephone Book, itself organized by a "telephonic logic," fields calls from philosophy, history, literature, and psychoanalysis. It installs a switchboard that hooks up diverse types of knowledge while rerouting and jamming the codes of the disciplines in daring ways. Avital Ronell has done nothing less than consider the impact of the telephone on modern thought. Her highly original, multifaceted inquiry into the nature of communication in a technological age will excite everyone who listens in. The book begins by calling close attention to the importance of the telephone in Nazi organization and propaganda, with special regard to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In the Third Reich the telephone became a weapon, a means of state surveillance, "an open accomplice to lies." Heidegger, in Being and Time and elsewhere, elaborates on the significance of "the call." In a tour de force response, Ronell mobilizes the history and terminology of the telephone to explicate his difficult philosophy. Ronell also speaks of the appearance of the telephone in the literary works of Duras, Joyce, Kafka, Rilke, and Strindberg. She examines its role in psychoanalysis—Freud said that the unconscious is structured like a telephone, and Jung and R. D. Laing saw it as a powerful new body part. She traces its historical development from Bell's famous first call: "Watson, come here!" Thomas A. Watson, his assistant, who used to communicate with spirits, was eager to get the telephone to talk, and thus to link technology with phantoms and phantasms. In many ways a meditation on the technologically constituted state, The Telephone Book opens a new field, becoming the first political deconstruction of technology, state terrorism, and schizophrenia. And it offers a fresh reading of the American and European addiction to technology in which the telephone emerges as the crucial figure of this age.

The UberReader

The UberReader PDF Author: Avital Ronell
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252092295
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
"Avital 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.”--Jonathan Culler, Diacritics For twenty years Avital Ronell has stood at the forefront of the confrontation between literary study and European philosophy. She has tirelessly investigated the impact of technology on thinking and writing, with groundbreaking work on Heidegger, dependency and drug rhetoric, intelligence and artificial intelligence, and the obsession with testing. Admired for her insights and breadth of field, she has attracted a wide readership by writing with guts, candor, and wit. Coyly alluding to Nietzsche’s “gay science,” The ÜberReader presents a solid introduction to Avital Ronell’s later oeuvre. It includes at least one selection from each of her books, two classic selections from a collection of her early essays (Finitude’s Score), previously uncollected interviews and essays, and some of her most powerful published and unpublished talks. An introduction by Diane Davis surveys Ronell’s career and the critical response to it thus far. With its combination of brevity and power, this Ronell “primer” will be immensely useful to scholars, students, and teachers throughout the humanities, but particularly to graduate and undergraduate courses in contemporary theory.

The Test Drive

The Test Drive PDF Author: Avital Ronell
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252092309
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
The Test Drive deals with the war perpetrated by highly determined reactionary forces on science and research. How does the government at once promote and prohibit scientific testing and undercut the importance of experimentation? To what extent is testing at the forefront of theoretical and practical concerns today? Addressed to those who are left stranded by speculative thinking and unhinged by cognitive discourse, The Test Drive points to a toxic residue of uninterrogated questions raised by Nietzsche, Husserl and Derrida. Ranging from the scientific probe to modalities of testing that include the limits of friendship or love, this work explores the crucial operations of an uncontestable legitimating machine. Avital Ronell offers a tour-de-force reading of legal, pharmaceutical, artistic, scientific, Zen, and historical grids that depend upon different types of testability, involving among other issues what it means to put oneself to the test.

Stupidity

Stupidity PDF Author: Avital Ronell
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252071270
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
"Avital Ronell's work studies the fading empire of cognition, modulating stupidity into idiocy, puerility, and the figure of the ridiculous philosopher instituted by Kant. Investigating ignorance, dumbfoundedness, and the limits of reason, Stupidity probes the pervasive practice of theory-bashing and related forms of paranoid aggression. A section on prolonged and debilitating illness pushes the text to an edge of a corporeal hermeneutics, "at the limits of what the body knows and tells.""--BOOK JACKET.

Crack Wars

Crack Wars PDF Author: Avital Ronell
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252071904
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
"Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary takes up the problems of drugs and addiction in numerous ways, which Ronell unpacks and presents as exemplary of the contemporary fascination with extreme danger. For Ronnell, Emma Bovary represents the first addict, embodying a yearning that calls from the bottom of her depleted soul, and which places her in a chronic state of dissatisfaction."--BOOK JACKET.

Fighting Theory

Fighting Theory PDF Author: Avital Ronell
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252076230
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
International interest in the work of Avital Ronell has expressed itself in reviews, articles, essays, and dissertations. For Fighting Theory, psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle conducted twelve interviews with Ronell, each focused on a key topic in one of Ronell's books or on a set of issues that run throughout her work. What do philosophy and literary studies have to learn from each other? How does Ronell place her work within gender studies? What does psychoanalysis have to contribute to contemporary thought? What propels one in our day to Nietzsche, Derrida, Nancy, Bataille, and other philosophical writers? How important are courage and revolt? Ronell's discussions of such issues are candid, thoughtful, and often personal, bringing together elements from several texts, illuminating hints about them, and providing her up-to-date reflections on what she had written earlier. Intense and often ironic, Fighting Theory is a poignant self-reflection of the worlds and walls against which Avital Ronell crashed.

Loser Sons

Loser Sons PDF Author: Avital Ronell
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252036646
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Looking beyond our current moment, she interrogates the problems of authority, paternal fantasy, and childhood as they have been explored and exemplified by Franz Kafka, Goethe's Faust, Benjamin Franklin, Jean-François Lyotard, Hannah Arendt, Alexandre Kojève, and Immanuel Kant. Brilliantly weaving these threads into a polyvocal discourse, Ronell shows how, with their arrays of powerful symbols, ideologies of all sorts perpetuate the theme that while childhood represents innocence, adulthood entails responsible cruelty. The need for suffering--preferably somebody else's--has become a widespread assumption, not only justifying abuses of authority, but justifying authority itself. Shockingly honest, Loser Sons recognizes that focusing on the spectacular catastrophes of modernity might make writer and reader feel they're engaged in something important, while in fact what they are engaged in is still only spectacle.

Dictations

Dictations PDF Author: Avital Ronell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780803289451
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
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 stillborn, he was brought to life by extraordinary efforts. Eighty-three years later he died, or seemed to, and was praised as an immortal spirit. His spirit immediately began to haunt. Four years later Johann Peter Eckermann published two volumes recounting his conversations with Goethe. Goethe quickly got the best of him. He spoke eerily through Eckermann to a world eager to hear his latest words. Eckermann's books are usually considered to be by Goethe, and Eckermann himself has become another of Goethe's creations. The master of Faust and Wilhelm Meister keeps coming back. He visited the dreams and anxieties of persons as sensitive as Kafka, Nietzsche, and Freud, speaking up in quotations or casting his shadow over poems, stories, and the birth pangs of psychoanalysis. He is a difficult case. Avita Ronell has never shied from the difficult. In Dictations, her first book, originally published in 1986, she starts at the edge of an abyss—the question of spirit, as exemplified by an author whose writings transcended even himself. Often invoked but never seen, spirit has been a matter literary scholars have declined to look at or look for. Here, though restless, it comes into view. In a new preface, Ronell describes the circumstances surrounding the writing and reception of the book.

Politics of Possibility

Politics of Possibility PDF Author: Gary A. Olson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317253868
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
In the probing interviews in this vibrant new book, eminent scholars struggle with some of the most crucial issues facing contemporary intellectuals. Poststructuralist philosopher Judith Butler discusses the pain of rigorous intellectual work, saying that it is necessarily extremely hard labor, as she examines the intersection of discourse and political action. Award-winning filmmaker, philosopher, and social theorist David Theo Goldberg reviews his life s work, especially on issues of racism. Literary critic and feminist philosopher Avital Ronell sets out to disrupt the standard logic of signification, to force readers into fresh ways of perceiving a subject at hand. Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha discusses how critical literacy is intimately connected to the question of democratic representation, and he elaborates on how cultural difference can lead to a politics of discrimination. And neo-Marxist cultural critic Slavoj i ek takes readers on an exhilarating journey through a wide range of critical subjects."