"There are three things required for happiness: good health, selfishness, and stupidity, and without stupidity the others are useless." -- Gustave Flaubert 
There is something about stupidity that is untrackable; it evades our cognitive scanners and turns up as the uncanny double of mastery or intelligence. 
The political and social implications of stupidity have been articulated by Marx, Nietzsche, Deleuze, among others. Urgent yet recalcitrant, stupidity provokes a crisis in our understanding of politics, ethics, and psychoanalysis. The dilemma posed by the limited subject involves national identity, masochism and sexual politics, as well as the relation of poetic utterance to the stammer in which it originates. Essentially linked to the philosophical primal scene of stupor, stupidity also points to what has been historically inappropriable, as when Hannah Arendt considers Eichmann in terms not only of the banality but also the stupidity of evil. 
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."

Stupidity

Literature & Fiction

Ronell, Avital

History & Criticism

University of Illinois Press

Beginning with Nietzsche's discovery of the 'experimental disposition', Ronell explores testing's ascension to truth in modern practice. To know something, and to know that it is true, has never been a simple matter of recognition and assent. Instead, increasing numbers of tests of ever increasing complexity have been established to determine and constitute what is true, probable, or verifiable. Tests are pervasive, and inflect the master-narratives of our historical existence. The Bible dramatically presents tests of Abraham and Job, great works of literature track the tested subject, the vast apparatus of modern science and technology is built upon extraordinarily exacting tests, and the need for truth in times of trial and crisis links state-run testing apparatuses to events of arrest, torture, and death. On the evening of 9-11 the President of the United States said, 'We are being being tested'.What propels this drive to test? What can satisfy it? What is the subterranean history of its effects? In "The Test Drive", internationally acclaimed scholar Avital Ronell explores vast areas of testing in the works of Husserl, Popper, Freud, Lyotard, Derrida, and others, including Zen philosophies. She then proceeds through the major transformations in twentieth-century philosophy and science that have inclined the world toward more and more tests. Higher education is perpetually involved in tests, tests about tests, and in the creation, assessment, refinement, and justification of tests, so much so that some critics argue that education has become obsessed by tests. Ronell shows that the obsession to test is likely more deeply rooted and more broadly exercised. The need to define, the need to know, the need to be sure, and the need to establish rank, are needs that press with the urgency of hunger.

The Test Drive

Business & Money

Job Hunting & Careers

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, candour, and wit. Coyly alluding to Nietzsche's gay science, The UberReader presents a solid introduction to Avital Ronell's later oeuvre. It includes at least one selection from each of her books, two classic selections from a collection of her early essays (Finitude's Score), previously uncollected interviews and essays, and some of her most powerful published and unpublished talks. An introduction by Diane Davis surveys Ronell's career and the critical response to it thus far. 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.

The UberReader: SELECTED WORKS OF AVITAL RONELL

Essays & Correspondence

Fighting Theory

International interest in the work of Avital Ronell has expressed itself in reviews, articles, essays, and dissertations. For Fighting Theory, psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle conducted twelve interviews with Ronell, each focused on a key topic in one of Ronell's books or on a set of issues that run throughout her work.What do philosophy and literary studies have to learn from each other? How does Ronell place her work within gender studies? What does psychoanalysis have to contribute to contemporary thought? What propels one in our day to Nietzsche, Derrida, Nancy, Bataille, and other philosophical writers? How important are courage and revolt? Ronell's discussions of such issues are candid, thoughtful, and often personal, bringing together elements from several texts, illuminating hints about them, and providing her up-to-date reflections on what she had written earlier. Intense and often ironic, Fighting Theory is a poignant self-reflection of the worlds and walls against which Avital Ronell crashed.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Loser Sons: Politics and Authority

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.

Complaint: Grievance among Friends

In Stupidity Avital Ronell explores the fading empire of cognition, modulating stupidity into idiocy, puerility, and the figure of the ridiculous philosopher instituted by Kant. Drawing on a range of writers including Dostoevsky, Schlegel, Musil, and Wordsworth, Stupidity investigates ignorance, dumbfounded-ness, and the limits of reason.

Avital Ronell asks why "there is no culture without drug culture." She deals with the usual drugs and alcohol (and their celebrities: Freud's cocaine, Baudelaire's hashish, the Victorians' laudanum), and moves beyond them to addictions that are culturally accepted--an insatiable appetite for romance novels, for instance, and romance itself. It is a commonplace of modern culture to presume that there is a subculture or counterculture deeply saturated with drugs, but such modern cultures need subcultures, and need drugs on every level. Culture defines itself, its classes, its power structures, and its economy in terms of how it allows and encourages drugs to circulate. If drugs are dangerous, that danger seems to increase their appeal for millions. If drugs are unnatural and addictive, gasoline is a drug. What is art but a kind of drug, and what is art criticism but a kind of criticism of drugs and drug-induced states? Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary takes up the problems of drugs and addiction in numerous ways, which Ronnell unpacks and presents as examples of the safe and unsafe. From Emma Bovary's romantic hallucinations to her suicide by arsenic, she moves through this realistic novel constantly reaching for the unreal. For Ronell, Emma Bovary represents the first addict, embodying a yearning that calls from the bottom of her humanity, and which it seems can only be satisfied by some sort of drug.

Crack Wars: LITERATURE ADDICTION MANIA (Texts and Contexts)

For 20 years, Avital Ronell has stood at the forefront of the confrontation between literary study and European philosophy. This work introduces Avital Ronell's oeuvre. It includes at least one selection from each of her books, two classic selections from a collection of her early essays, interviews, and essays.

"[Dictations] will change not only the way we read Goethe, but the way we read". -Rainer Nagele, author of Reading after Freud. Dictations treats the way in which Goethe continues to speak from beyond the grave; not only in the texts of Kafka, Nietzsche, and Freud, but also in the ventriloquised writings of the spiritualist, Johann Peter Eckermann.

Dictations: ON HAUNTED WRITING

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ronell, Avital. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ronell, Avital

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ronell, Avital. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Stupidity

The Test Drive

The UberReader: SELECTED WORKS OF AVITAL RONELL

Fighting Theory

Loser Sons: Politics and Authority

Complaint: Grievance among Friends

Stupidity

Crack Wars: LITERATURE ADDICTION MANIA (Texts and Contexts)

The UberReader: SELECTED WORKS OF AVITAL RONELL

Dictations: ON HAUNTED WRITING