"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.

_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. (shrink)

"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.

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 illustrate that (...) not only are their problems serious, but they also make serious problems for others, expanding to whole nations. When God is conceived and inculcated as an angry and impossible-to-please father, the problems can last for generations. In _Loser Sons,_ Avital Ronell draws on current philosophy, literary history, and political events to confront the grim fact that divested boys become terrifying men. This would be old news if the problem didn't recur so often with such disastrous consequences. 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. To understand the implications of her insights, Ronell addresses them directly to her readers, challenging them to think through their own notions of authority and their responses to it. (shrink)

These are the "loser sons," a group of historical men as varied as President George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden, and Mohammed Atta.

_Parages_ brings together four essays by Derrida on the fictions of Maurice Blanchot. Three of the essays—"Living On," "Title To Be Specified," and "The Law of Genre," are by now canonical. The fourth, "_Pa_ce Not" as well as Derrida's 1986 introduction to the French edition of the book, appear here in English for the first time. This was a breakthrough publication in the analysis of Blanchot, a notoriously difficult writer. It is safe to say Derrida contributed much to that writer's (...) reputation in both French and English, always insisting on the philosophical pertinence of Blanchot's work to any discussion of the relationship between literature and critical thought. Through patient citation, and an ample collocation and readings of Blanchot's various motifs, Derrida explores a variety of questions, including the limits of genre, the procedure of crossing out, and the evocation of a non-dialectical and non-privative negativity. The book marks a crucial stage in Derrida's itinerary and provides a context for his later writings on apophatics in such works as _On the Name_ and his response to Heidegger on death in _Aporias_. (shrink)

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 elapsed –? Or, are they bound to show (...) up at midnight, like the Rat Man’s father or Hamlet’s ghost? Derrida wonders if we don’t take another few laps with them, worried and anxious about their well-being over there. Ach! Give us the off chance of an apparition, a sign, an alias vanishing down the block. With Derrida Nancy turns a radical corner: We don’t have at hand the syntax to say a disappearance so resolute. We have no cause to assert a fact that is not fact, the factum negativum, of one perpetually disappearing. For nobody is dead, not so dead or dead so, as if we were not still involved in naming a state of being, of being de-parted. That is why he offers a sidebar on rethinking the philosophical formulation, ‘God is dead’. (shrink)

‘America’, bloated with philosophical significance, serves as a meeting grounds for Heidegger and Derrida, flagging theoretical standoffs, identity crashes, a Nietzscean tipoff, and unstoppable poe...

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 is then explored in relation to various writers and thinkers — Rilke, Benjamin, Nietzsche, Heidegger, among others — and more specifically via a reading of (...) François Roustang's La Fin de la plainte, and his own interpretations of Freudian narcissism. Scanning the wreckage for which the little narcissists are responsible, the article aims to give more insight into the structuring principles of those who whine incessantly. (shrink)

For twenty years, Avital Ronell has stood at the forefront of the confrontation between literary study and European philosophy.

Exploiting puns that reveal suggestive conceptual connections, this article incorporates a reading of Derrida on literature and democracy in a Derridean reading of Nietzsche, that antidemocrat, who offers a link by which to explore some of Derrida's more concealed utterances on the related subjects of futurity, political formations, the will to fiction, and acts of promising. Focusing on Beyond Good and Evil, riding the motif of testing, the question is taken up of a new species of philosopher, “the coming philosophers,” (...) and the problem of the feminine in Nietzsche, which should be grafted onto it, as an opening onto the “to come.”. (shrink)