Ronell, Avital 1956-

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RONELL, Avital 1956-

PERSONAL: Born April 15, 1956, in Prague, Czechoslovakia; daughter of Paul G. and Evelyn (Garfunkel) Ronell. Education: Princeton University, Ph.D. (Germanic languages and literature), 1979. Politics: "Left of left."

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of Germanic Languages and Literature, New York University, 736 Broadway, New York, NY 10003. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: University of California, Berkeley, associate professor of comparative literature, beginning 1986; New York University, New York, NY, currently professor of German, English, and comparative literature and chair of Department of Germanic Languages and Literature. Summer seminar professor, European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fulbright-Hayes fellow; award from Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

WRITINGS:

Dictations: On Haunted Writing, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1986, revised with new preface, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1993.

The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1989.

Crack Wars: Literature-Addiction-Mania, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1992.

Finitude's Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1994.

Stupidity, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 2002.

Contributor of numerous articles to periodicals. Contributor of essays to Thirteen Alumni Artists, by Lisa Philips, Middlebury College Museum of Art, (Middlebury, VT), 2000.

WORK IN PROGRESS: The Test Drive.

SIDELIGHTS: A native of Czechoslovakia, professor and writer Avital Ronell plays to a global classroom. She lived in Israel and completed her education in Berlin and Paris, where Ronell studied under the groundbreaking feminist Helene Cixous. She has taught on both coasts of the United States and in many countries, most notably Switzerland, where Ronell conducts seminars at the European Graduate School.

Ronell's writing takes on a diverse range of themes. In The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, she argues that "communication technology has changed human beings so deeply, irreversibly, and suddenly that we [are] mesmerized, unable to recognize the changes wrought in our way of living in the world," according to Whole Earth Review contributor Howard Rheingold. Ronell begins her thesis, fittingly enough, with Alexander Graham Bell's first long-distance phone call in October, 1875; "the precise moment," noted Rheingold, "at which the power of the technological world floods into human history and changes it irrevocably." In another significant event, the author recalls, the philosopher Martin Heidegger in 1934 received a call from officials of the Nazi Party asking him to cooperate in the identification and removal of Jewish faculty members from a German university where Heidegger worked. Such history-changing events, prompted by telephone calls, suggest a link to "a web of ideas, inventions, and power-relations that constitute a cryptic metaphysical infrastructure of the modern world," Rheingold stated.

Crack Wars: Literature-Addiction-Mania has as its theme the phenomenon of what interviewer Alexander Laurence called the "speed culture," in which one makes "definite judgments in an instant and [moves] on to the next problem." "We have judgments without having really taken the time to consider what a definition of drugs might be," Ronell told Laurence in Write Stuff. "We have categories and classifications. Soft or hard drugs. Or the narcotic schedules, as they're called. We have taxonomies. Before you make people serve time no one has taken the time, or given the time, to consider what it is that we're as a culture so phobic about." In Crack Wars Ronell coins the word Narcossism, which she defined to Laurence as "narcissism [that] has been recircuited through a relation to drugs. Narcossism is supposed to indicate the way that our relation to ourselves has now been structured, mediated, that is, by some form of addiction and urge. Which is to say, that to get off any drug, . . . precipitates a major narcissistic crisis. Basically I wanted to suggest that we need to study the way the self is pumped up or deleted by a chemical prosthesis."

By 1994 Ronell had produced a fin de siecle work, Finitude's Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium. The topics include the AIDS crisis, the Gulf War, and the tumult surrounding the case of the 1991 beating of motorist Rodney King in Los Angeles. Bruce Hainley of Artforum International found this work to be not just "philosophy (about Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger)" but also "about AIDS, music, the telephone, rumor, the state, torture, racism, war video, television—in short, the speed of now, that future: how to read it, which is 'the question of how to read' at all." Hainley found that Ronell "intricately, amazingly, and disturbingly connected" the Gulf War to the Rodney King case, and decided that one entry titled "Trauma TV" offers "the most illuminating essay on TV and video ever written."

Ronell published the provocatively titled Stupidity in 2001. True to its title, the book is "an investigation of all things stupid," in the words of Times Literary Supplement critic Jonathan Ree. "It is a large topic, and Ronell is wise to have chosen to nibble at its edges rather than trying to swallow it whole." Ree added that stupidity, "as Ronell understands it is a kind of black hole devouring the light of rationality itself." The author cites philosophy and literature, including the works of Kirkegaard, Kafka, Karl Marx, and Nietzsche. But Ree noted in Ronell's view, "Philosophy . . . is nothing but a monstrous despot whose oppressive legalism has reigned supreme throughout the entire history of 'the West'.... Philosophy, she goes on, has 'demonstrated a need to impound those who cannot speak for themselves, who have not reached a certain legislated majority.' Philosophy, it seems, has blood on its hands."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, April, 1993, review of Crack Wars: Literature-Addiction-Mania, p. 17.

Artforum International, November, 1994, Bruce Hainley, review of Finitude's Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium, p. 14S.

Bloomsbury Review, September, 1990, review of The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, p. 17.

College Literature, June, 1995, review of Finitude's Score, p. 191.

Journalism Quarterly, autumn, 1990, review of The Telephone Book, p. 619.

Journal of Popular Culture, spring, 2001, Ray Browne, review of Finitude's Score, p. 198.

Journal of the History of Ideas, January, 1995, review of Finitude's Score, p. 173.

Modern Language Notes, December, 1989, review of The Telephone Book, p. 1220; July, 1992, review of The Telephone Book, p. 668; December, 1992, Akira Mizuta Lippit, review of Crack Wars, p. 1046.

New Statesman and Society, April 27, 1990, review of The Telephone Book, p. 36; April 17, 1993, review of Crack Wars, p. 46.

New York Times Book Review, June 3, 1990; September 22, 1991, review of The Telephone Book.

Poetics Today, spring, 1997, review of Finitude's Score, p. 132.

Times Literary Supplement, December 6, 1991, review of The Telephone Book, p. 3; March 22, 2002, Jonathan Ree, "It's the Philosophy, Stupid," review of Stupidity, p. 8.

Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 1995, review of Finitude's Score, p. 64; winter, 1997, review of Dictations: On Haunted Writing, p. 16.

Whole Earth Review, winter, 1991, Howard Rheingold, review The Telephone Book, p. 87.