Avital Ronell ( ; ; born 15 April 1952) is an American academic who writes about continental philosophy, literary studies, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the humanities and in the departments of Germanic languages and literature and comparative literature at New York University, where she co-directs the trauma and violence transdisciplinary studies program. As Jacques Derrida Professor of Philosophy, Ronell also teaches at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee.
She has written about such topics as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone; the structure of the test in legal, pharmaceutical, artistic, scientific, Zen, and historical domains; stupidity; the disappearance of authority; childhood; and deficiency. Ronell is a founding editor of the journal Qui Parle.
In 2018 an eleven-month investigation at New York University determined that Ronell had sexually harassed a male graduate student, and the university suspended her without pay for the 2018–2019 academic year.
Biography Avital Ronell was born in Prague to Israeli diplomats and was a performance artist before entering academia.Andrea Juno, "Avital Ronell," in Re/Search: Angry Women 13, (Re/Search Publications, 1991), pp. 127, She emigrated to New York in 1956. She attended Rutgers Preparatory School and graduated in 1970.Avital Ronell, The ÜberReader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell, pg. 10–11, University of Illinois Press, 2008, As a young immigrant, Ronell later stated, she frequently encountered xenophobia and antisemitism.Avital Ronell, Fighting Theory: Avital Ronell in Conversation with Anne Dufourmantelle, pg. ix, translated by Catherine Porter, University of Illinois Press, 2010, She earned 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. She received her doctorate of philosophy in German studies at Princeton University in 1979, where her advisor was Stanley Corngold and her dissertation concerned self-reflection in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Franz Kafka. When she met Jacques Derrida at a symposium and he asked her name, she introduced herself as "Metaphysics", and he later wrote that he "found this little game rather clever."Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, pg. 308, translated by Andrew Brown, Polity Press, 2013, Jacques Derrida, "Envois," The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, pg. 196, University of Chicago Press, She subsequently studied with Derrida and Hélène Cixous in Paris. She went on to help introduce Derrida to American audiences by translating his essay on Kafka's "Before the Law", his essay on the law of gender/genre, his lectures on Nietzsche's relation to biography, and a number of other works.Amazon.com: The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Books: Jacques Derrida, Christie McDonald, Peggy Kamuf, Avital Ronell Ronell became a close friend of poet and novelist Pierre Alféri, Derrida's son, who later influenced Ronell in the titling of several of her major works.Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, pg. 310, translated by Andrew Brown, Polity Press, 2013, Alféri moved in with Ronell as a teenager following the revelation of his father's adultery.
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!"Avital Ronell, Fighting Theory: Avital Ronell in Conversation with Anne Dufourmantelle, pg. 28–9, translated by Catherine Porter, University of Illinois Press, 2010, 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.Avital Ronell, "The Rhetoric of Testing" in Stupidity (University of Illinois Press, 2002), pp. 120 She was a close friend of the writer Kathy Acker and identified with Acker's fiction, saying they were "destined to each other."Avital Ronell, Kathy Goes to Hell, pg.14, University of Illinois Press, 2010, In 1996, she moved to New York University, where she co-taught a course with Jacques Derrida until 2004.
In 2009, the Centre Pompidou invited Ronell to hold an interview series with such artists and thinkers as Werner Herzog, Judith Butler, Dennis Cooper, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Suzanne Doppelt. Also in 2009, she began co-teaching courses with Slavoj Žižek. In 2010, François Noudelmann also co-taught with her, and co-curated the Walls and Bridges program with her in 2011.
Ronell served as Chair to the Division of Philosophy and Literature and to the Division of Comparative Literature at the Modern Language Association from 1993 to 1996, and gave a keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2012.
She identifies as queer.
Overview of works Ronell argues for "the necessity of the unintelligible." In an account of the 1992 Rodney King beating, Ronell argued that the idiom of the "perfectly clear" recurrently serves as a code for the white lie.Avital Ronell, "TraumaTV," Finitude's Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium, pg. 307, University of Illinois Press, 1994, Instead of referring to herself as the author of a text, she has sometimes described herself as a "signatory," "operator," or even "television." She sometimes focuses on thinkers who clean up after other thinkers, arguing that what she calls "sanitation departments" sometimes undermine the work they are tidying up after.Avital Ronell, "The Worst Neighborhoods of the Real: Philosophy - Telephone - Contamination," in Finitude's Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium (University of Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 221,
Dictations: On Haunted Writing (1986) Ronell investigates one of Goethe's most influential works, Conversations with Eckermann, which he did not write but instead dictated to a young 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 the fate of German literature and philosophy. Ronell reads Conversations with Eckermann as a return from beyond the grave of the great master of German literature and science.
Ronell starts by exploring Goethe's focus on "a certain domain of immateriality—the nonsubstantializable apparitions ... [of] weather forecasting ... ghosts, dreams, and some forms of hidden, telepathic transmissions."Avital Ronell, "Introduction" in Dictations: On Haunted Writing, University of Illinois Press, pg. xxii, 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."Avital Ronell, "Notes" in Dictations: On Haunted Writing, University of Illinois Press, pg. 194, 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.Avital Ronell, "Part One" in Dictations: On Haunted Writing, University of Illinois Press, pg. 5,
In general, Dictations: On Haunted Writing traces the closure without end of influence's computation.Liliane Weissberg, "Avital Ronell, 'Dictations: On Haunted Writing' (Book Review)," Germanic Review, 64:3 (1989:Summper), pg.136 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."Avital Ronell, "The Pas de Deus or Was is Goethe," in Dictations: On Haunted Writing (University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 71 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.Avital Ronell, "The Pas de Deus or Was is Goethe," in Dictations: On Haunted Writing (University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 80 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."Avital Ronell, "The Pas de Deus or Was is Goethe," in Dictations: On Haunted Writing (University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 81
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.Don Mills, "Deconstructed the conventions of graphic design: Obituary of Richard Eckersley," National Post, 21 April 2006: PM.11, [Toronto Edition] 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.
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."Avital Ronell, "Delay Call Forwarding" in The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 2, 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."Avital Ronell, "Delay Call Forwarding" in The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 3,
Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (1992)