The UberReader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell - Softcover

Ronell, Avital

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252073118 ISBN 13: 9780252073113

Verlag: PAPERBACKSHOP UK IMPORT, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

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_x000B__x000B_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. _x000B_Coyly alluding to Nietzsches gay science,? The ÃœberReader presents a solid introduction to Avital Ronells later oeuvre. It includes at least one selection from each of her books, two classic selections from a collection of her early essays (Finitudes Score), previously uncollected interviews and essays, and some of her most powerful published and unpublished talks. An introduction by Diane Davis surveys Ronells career and the critical response to it thus far. _x000B_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. 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

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Avital Ronell is a professor of German, comparative literature, and English at New York University, where she directs the Research in Trauma & Violence project. She is author of Dictations: On Haunted Writing,The Telephone Book, Crack Wars,Finitude's Score,Stupidity, and The Test Drive. Diane Davis is an associate professor of rhetoric at the University of Texas at Austin.  She is the author of Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter.

Avital Ronell is a professor of German, comparative literature, and English at New York University, where she directs the Research in Trauma & Violence project. She is author of Dictations: On Haunted Writing, The Telephone Book, Crack Wars, Finitude's Score, Stupidity, and The Test Drive. Diane Davis is an associate professor of rhetoric at the University of Texas at Austin.  She is the author of Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter.

Avital Ronell is a professor of German, comparative literature, and English at New York University, where she codirects Transdisciplinary Studies in Trauma and Violence.

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The berReader

Selected Works of AVITAL RONELLBy AVITAL RONELL

University of Illinois Press

Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07311-3

Contents

Acknowledgments................................................................................................................................................xvIntroduction Diane DavisPART I The Call of Technology.................................................................................................................................51. Delay Call Forwarding.......................................................................................................................................382. Support Our Tropes: Reading Desert Storm....................................................................................................................633. TraumaTV: Twelve Steps Beyond the Pleasure Principle........................................................................................................894. State of the Art: Julia Scher's Disinscription of National SecurityPART II Freedom and Obligation: Minority Report on Children, Addicts, Outlaws, and Ghosts.....................................................................1015. On the Unrelenting Creepiness of Childhood: Lyotard, Kid-Tested.............................................................................................1286. Toward a Narcoanalysis......................................................................................................................................1417. Deviant Payback: The Aims of Valerie Solanas................................................................................................................1458. Preface to DictationsPART III Psyche-Soma: The Finite Body.........................................................................................................................1619. A Note on the Failure of Man's Custodianship................................................................................................................16810. The Disappearance and Returns of the Idiot.................................................................................................................18811. The Philosophical Code: Dennis Cooper's Pacific RimPART IV Danke! et Adieu: On Hookups and Breakups..............................................................................................................20512. The Sacred Alien: Heidegger's Reading of Hlderlin's "Andenken"............................................................................................22713. On Friendship; Or, Kathy Goes to Hell......................................................................................................................24014. Loving Your EnemyPART V The Fading Empire of Cognition.........................................................................................................................25915. Slow Learner...............................................................................................................................................29316. The Experimental Disposition: Nietzsche's Discovery of America (Or, Why the Present Administration Sees Everything in Terms of a Test).....................30717. Koan Practice or Taking Down the Test......................................................................................................................32418. "Is It Happening?".........................................................................................................................................329Index

Introduction

Diane Davis

Gustave Flaubert once said "the worth of a book can be judged by the strength of the punches it gives and the length of time it takes you to recover from them." According to this calculus of evaluation, typically reserved for literary texts, Avital Ronell's exceptionally hard hitters are works of inestimable value. It's not unusual to take tiny hits in a critical work that advances a specific position or viewpoint; however, the distinguishing feature of the Ronellian punch is that it's the effect of no positive knowledge claim. Ronell's critical texts operate not as formal arguments but as the obliteration of any possible argumentative ground, and that's what delivers the KO blow.

Each of Aristotle's twenty-eight general topoi or commonplace strategies of argumentation-argument from opposites or analytic division or cause and effect, etc.-presumes some steady ground, some prior knowledge against which to push off. And indeed, Ronell's texts are seductively oriented around sites of apparent familiarity: who doesn't suppose s/he knows a little something about the telephone, drugs, writing, opera, or military maneuvers? But rather than building an argument or inquiry on that potential point of stasis, Ronell's texts abruptly dissolve it, generating such a tight zoom on the putative object of knowledge that it slips from your appropriative grasp, withdrawing into a foreign space. The telephone Ronell analzyes, for example, turns out to be something unfamiliar, unlocatable, uncanny-not an originary site at all but a haunted one, a presence that cannot be situated securely within the present. The destabilizing force of Ronell's extreme close-ups institutes a break, an interruption in inherited meaning. And the punch takes place in this feat of ironic destruction, in or as this devastating withdrawal of understanding that leaves you with no recourse to anything like counterargument. "Nevertheless," Ronell reminds us, "interruption may always be a sign of life." Inasmuch as the deracinating suspension is also an opening, it aligns itself with futurity and the sober potentiality of Nietzsche's "open sea." Ronell's punch is simultaneously her gift: wherever knowing falters, thinking and reading can begin.

* * *

The editor's introduction is typically responsible for situating the force and significance of an author within a philosophical, political, or historical framework. Anyone familiar with Avital Ronell's oeuvre will, however, appreciate my dilemma: How to situate a writer whose signature move is to sweep away the grounds by which one might do so? How to locate on an intellectual map these texts devoted to radical remappings, including those urged by "literature and psychoanalysis but also by the logic of teletopical incursions that has supplanted ground and grounding"? I have no excuse, nothing to say for myself about what follows except that attending faithfully to a body of work like this one may mean breaking here and there with generic expectations.

Brief Overview

Ronell's work has a sharp ironic edge and is, in this sense, reminiscent of the works and inroads of the great German ironists. Although she likes her theory "with a French accent" and is considered one of America's leading deconstructionists, she is first of all a Germanist whose approach and perspective owes a great deal to her studies in German philosophy, music, and literature. She often claims to have a dusty philological side, and indeed her work is, we might say, solidly grounded in this rich tradition, many of the underlying histories and presumptions of which she nonetheless disrupts-an effect of what she calls her "irreverent type of reverence." Ronell's intellectual trajectories are extremely complex, and one finds in her work an extraordinary confluence of several distinct scholarly traditions: it's tempting to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PAPERBACKSHOP UK IMPORT
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0252073118
• ISBN 13: 9780252073113
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 343
• Herausgeber: Davis Diane
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande