Performing Women

Saturday October 12th | 7.30pm | NYLA The author Zoom

Avital Ronell Ph.D., was born in Prague. Her parents were Israeli Loser Sons: Politics and Authority, (University of Illinois Press, diplomats who returned to Israel before going to New York. Avital 2012) Ronell studied at the Hermeneutics Institute in Berlin with Jacob Taubes, ultimately earned her doctorate at Princeton University, There are sons who grow up unhappily and then worked with Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous in believing that no matter what they do, they Paris. She was professor of comparative literature and theory at cannot please their fathers. Often unable to the University of California at Berkeley for several years before shed their sense of lifelong failure, either eventually returning to New York, where she currently is chair they give up and suffer in a permanent sulk, of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature and or they try with all their might to prove they teaches German and comparative literature and theory – in are worth something after all. These are addition to her yearly Fall semester seminar about Derrida – the "loser sons" a group of historical men and where she continues to churn out a breathtaking range of as varied as President George W. Bush, deconstructive rereadings of everything from technology, the Osama bin Laden, and Mohammed Atta. Gulf War, and AIDS, to opera, addiction, and stupidity. Their names quickly illustrate that not only are their problems serious, but they also make serious problems for others, expan- ding to whole nations. When God is conceived and inculcated as an angry and impossible-to-please father, the problems can last for generations.

Bibliography

Loser Sons: Politics and Authority, (University of Illinois Press, 2012) Fighting Theory, (University of Illinois Press, 2009) The Test Drive, (University of Illinois Press, 2007) Dictations: On Haunted Writing, (University of Illinois Press, 2006) Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania , (University of Illinois Press, 2004) Stupidity, (University of Illinois Press, 2002) Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium, © Samuel Lugassy (University of Nebraska Press, 1998) The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Avital Ronell Speech , (University of Nebraska Press, 1989) USA

An event created and organized by the Villa Gillet - 25 rue Chazière - 69004 Lyon - France Tel : 00 33 (0)4 78 27 02 48 - Fax : 00 33 (0)4 72 00 93 00 - www.villagillet.net / 1 Fighting Theory, (University of Illinois Press, The Test Drive, (University of Illinois Press, Dictations: On Haunted Writing, (University of Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania , 2009) 2007) Illinois Press, 2006) (University of Illinois Press, 2004)

International interest The Test Drive deals "Dictations will change Avital Ronell asks why in the work of Avital with the war perpetrated not only the way we read "there is no culture without Ronell has expressed by highly determined Goethe, but the way we drug culture." Tracing itself in reviews, reactionary forces on read."- Rainer Nagele, and tracking the zones of articles, essays, and science and research. How author of Reading after modern dependencies, dissertations. For Fighting does the government at Freud. Dictations treats she deals with the usual Theory, psychoanalyst once promote and prohibit the way in which Goethe drugs and alcohol (and and philosopher Anne scientific testing and continues to speak from their celebrities: Freud’s Dufourmantelle conducted undercut the importance beyond the grave; not cocaine, Baudelaire’s twelve interviews with of experimentation? To only in the texts of Kafka, hashish, the Victorians’ Ronell, each focused on a what extent is testing Nietzsche, and Freud, laudanum), and moves key topic in one of Ronell’s books or on a set of at the forefront of theoretical and practical but also in the ventriloquised writings of the beyond them to addictive mappings that are issues that run throughout her work. concerns today? Addressed to those who are left spiritualist, Johann Peter Eckermann. culturally accepted -- an insatiable appetite What do philosophy and literary studies have stranded by speculative thinking and unhinged for romance novels, for instance, and romance to learn from each other? How does Ronell by cognitive discourse, The Test Drive points itself as well as the satellite technologies of place her work within gender studies? What to a toxic residue of uninterrogated questions our everyday existence. It is a commonplace does psychoanalysis have to contribute to raised by Nietzsche, Husserl and Derrida. of modern culture to presume that there is a contemporary thought? What propels one in Ranging from the scientific probe to modalities subculture or counterculture deeply saturated our day to Nietzsche, Derrida, Nancy, Bataille, of testing that include the limits of friendship or with drugs, but such modern cultures need and other philosophical writers? How important love, this work explores the crucial operations subcultures, and need drugs on every level. are courage and revolt? Ronell’s discussions of of an uncontestable legitimating machine. Culture defines itself, its classes, its power such issues are candid, thoughtful, and often Avital Ronell offers a tour-de-force reading of structures, and its economy in terms of how personal, bringing together elements from legal, pharmaceutical, artistic, scientific, Zen, it allows and encourages drugs to circulate. If several texts, illuminating hints about them, and historical grids that depend upon different drugs are dangerous and belong to a thinking of and providing her up-to-date reflections on types of testability, involving among other the death drive, that danger seems to increase what she had written earlier. issues what it means to put oneself to the test. their appeal for millions. Where do the mind- altering effects of drugs begin? What is art but a kind of drug, a source as Baudelaire and Benjamin state of intoxicated destructuring? On a political scale, Ronell investigates how the so-called drug culture has become the perverted site for state-sanctioned ethnocide. 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 Ronell, 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.

An event created and organized by the Villa Gillet - 25 rue Chazière - 69004 Lyon - France Tel : 00 33 (0)4 78 27 02 48 - Fax : 00 33 (0)4 72 00 93 00 - www.villagillet.net / 2 Stupidity, (University of Illinois Press, 2002) Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the The Telephone Book: Technology, its role in psychoanalysis—Freud said that the Millennium, (University of Nebraska Press, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech , (University of unconscious is structured like a telephone, and 1998) Nebraska Press, 1989) Jung and R. D. Laing saw it as a powerful new body part. She traces its historical development Nietzsche, Einstein and Suspending the distinction The telephone marks from Bell’s famous first call: "Watson, come Deleuze agree: the question of between headline news and the place of an absence. here!" Thomas A. Watson, his assistant, who used stupidity, its unremitting sway, high theory, Avital Ronell Affiliated with discontinuity, to communicate with spirits, was eager to get needs to be dealt with. examines the diverse figures of alarm, and silence, it raises the telephone to talk, and thus to link technology This book explores the urgency finitude in our modernity: war, fundamental questions about with phantoms and phantasms. In many ways of stupidity, its hiding places guerrilla video, trauma TV, the constitution of self and a meditation on the technologically constituted as well as its everyday public AIDS, music, divorce, sadism, other, the stability of location, state, The Telephone Book opens a new field, appearances. It maps areas of electronic tagging, rumor. systems of transfer, and becoming the first political deconstruction of thought in which stupidity has technology, state terrorism, and schizophrenia. been traditionally concealed Her essays address such the destination of speech. questions as, How do rumors Profoundly changing our And it offers a fresh reading of the American and or repressed and tunes into European addiction to technology in which the stupidity’s static in the realms of literature, kill? How has video become concept of long-distance, it telephone emerges as the crucial figure of this philosophy and politics. Neither a moral default the conscience of TV? How have the police come is constantly transmitting effects of real and nor a pathology, stupidity has no duty to truth to be everywhere, even where they are not? Is evocative power. To the extent that it always age. yet nonetheless bears ethical consequences. peace possible? “[W]riting to the community of relates us to the absent other, the telephone, At the same time there is something about those who have no community—to those who and the massive switchboard attending it, plugs stupidity—what Musil and Deleuze locate as have known the infiniteness of abandonment,” into a hermeneutics of mourning. The Telephone "transcendental stupidity"—that is untrackable; her work explores the possibility, one possibility Book, itself organized by a "telephonic logic," it evades our cognitive scanners and turns up as among many, that “this time we have gone too fields calls from philosophy, history, literature, the uncanny double of mastery or intelligence. A far”: “One last word. It is possible that we have and psychoanalysis. It installs a switchboard major phobia in the lexicon of learning, stupidity gone too far. This possibility has to be considered that hooks up diverse types of knowledge opens up new unintelligibilities, as Schlegel might have said--an unexpected range of explosive if we, as a species, as a history, are going to get while rerouting and jamming the codes of the stammers--marking at times a new beginning, anywhere at all.” disciplines in daring ways. Avital Ronell has the philosophical primal scene of stupor. done nothing less than consider the impact of Stupidity points to what has been historically the telephone on modern thought. Her highly inappropriable—the banality and stupidity of evil, original, multifaceted inquiry into the nature of as Hannah Arendt says of Eichmann. communication in a technological age will excite On some level stupidity is a "feminine" problem, everyone who listens in. or has been evicted from philosophical premises The book begins by calling close attention to the to occupy what is marked as feminine incertitude. importance of the telephone in Nazi organization Still, poets such as Hölderlin and Rilke claimed and propaganda, with special regard to the the predicament of stupidity (or sheer idiocy) as philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In the Third reflecting the true nature of poetic origination. Reich the telephone became a weapon, a means The work studies the modulation of stupidity into idiocy, puerility, and the figure of the ridiculous of state surveillance, "an open accomplice philosopher, instituted by Kant. Investigating to lies." Heidegger, in Being and Time and ignorance, dumb-foundedness, and the limits elsewhere, elaborates on the significance of of reason, it probes the pervasive practice of "the call." In a tour de force response, Ronell theory-bashing in supposedly intelligent social mobilizes the history and terminology of the sectors. A section on prolonged and debilitating telephone to explicate his difficult philosophy. illness pushes the text to an edge of corporeal Ronell also speaks of the appearance of the understanding, "at the limits of what the body telephone in the literary works of Duras, Joyce, knows and tells." Kafka, Rilke, and Strindberg. She examines

An event created and organized by the Villa Gillet - 25 rue Chazière - 69004 Lyon - France Tel : 00 33 (0)4 78 27 02 48 - Fax : 00 33 (0)4 72 00 93 00 - www.villagillet.net / 3