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"Ronell, Avital"
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Complaint
\"It is not, nor it cannot come to good. But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.\" Thus spoke Hamlet, one of the great kvetchers of literature. Every day, gripers challenge our patience and compassion. Yet Pollyannas rile us up with their grotesque contentment and unfathomable rejection of protest. Avital Ronell considers how literature and philosophy treat bellyachers, wailers, and grumps--and the complaints they lavish on the rest of us. Combining her trademark jazzy panache with a fearless range of readings, Ronell opens a dialog with readers that discusses thinkers with whom she has directly engaged. Beginning with Hamlet, and with a candid awareness of her own experiences, Ronell proceeds to show how complaining is aggravated, distracted, stifled, and transformed. She moves on to the exemplary complaints of Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, and Barbara Johnson and examines the complaint-riven history of deconstruction. Infused with the author's trademark wit, Complaint takes friends, colleagues, and all of us on a courageous philosophical journey.
eBook
The Next Level: Rollbacks and Erasures in Three Acts
Gripped by invasive aspects of multifactorial collapse, we are bound to ask about the nature of technological impingements and their political resolve, which involves keeping pace with the cognitive shakeups provoked by technical mutations and their existential counterparts.
Journal Article
Loser Sons
There are sons who grow up unhappily believing that no matter what they do, they cannot please their fathers. 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. 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-Francois Lyotard, Hannah Arendt, Alexandre Kojeve, and Immanuel Kant. Shockingly honest, Ronell addresses the implications of her insights directly to her readers, challenging them to think through their own notions of authority and their responses to it.
eBook
The Transfer of Complaint: A Narcissistic Time-Share
Reflecting on the debts collected by Shoshana Felman's work, within the theoretical contexts of the time in which the 1977
Yale French Studies
issue of 'Psychoanalysis and Literature' first appeared, this article takes as its point of departure Lacan's analysis of Hamlet's father as the barred Other, focusing on Hamlet's 'complaint'. The nature of the
complaint
(
plainte
, or
Klage
, also closely allied to
Anklage
, or accusation) is then explored in relation to various writers and thinkers - Rilke, Benjamin, Nietzsche, Heidegger, among others - and more specifically via a reading of François Roustang's
La Fin de la plainte
(The End of the Complaint), and his own interpretations of Freudian narcissism. Scanning the wreckage for which the little narcissists are responsible, the article aims to give more insight into the structuring principles of those who whine incessantly.
Journal Article
Hannah Arendt Swallows the Lessing-Prize
Hannah had every reason to scrap modulations of muteness from her registry, for she is mistrustful of those who went silent in the night of need, retreating to the relative safety of an \"inner emigration.\" [...]Germans who practiced some form of muteness, barely squeaking out protest, fell short of the creditable bar: \"while they may well produce sound, they do not produce speech and certainly not dialogue\" (16). The opening of borders begins with minute euphoric incursions, pushing back on what Nietzsche described as the encroachments of a monstrously cold state. [...]ritual ceremonies marking accomplishment of any scale-the event of anniversary, benchmark, dissertation defense, best office-worker, or holiday-bring communities together in celebration, warming a place for Mitsein.
Journal Article
La Malédiction: The Sentencing of Lacoue-Labarthe
[...]the oversized anger \"sans nom\" issues from a facet of Mother that cuts into history, an modus operandi that psychoanalysts of the archetype call the Death Mother.4 Let me back this up. Sparing nothing, not even the viability of his extended reflections, her terms reappear at crucial junctures of theoretical arbitration.\\n Moving counter to Badiou's interpretive spark, the inclusion of Rimbaud may well mark an allegorical irony, not only because the event of an eternity found again rides on the back of paradise lost- though, granted, maybe the quasi-mystical couple of sea and sun, as they depart, nonetheless appease, eternalize on the Nietzschean scale of \"Alle Lust will Ewigkeit, tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit.\"
Journal Article
The Test Drive
The Test Drive deals with the war perpetrated by highly determined reactionary forces on science and research. How does the government at once promote and prohibit scientific testing and undercut the importance of experimentation? To what extent is testing at the forefront of theoretical and practical concerns today? Addressed to those who are left stranded by speculative thinking and unhinged by cognitive discourse, The Test Drive points to a toxic residue of uninterrogated questions raised by Nietzsche, Husserl, and Derrida. Ranging from the scientific probe to modalities of testing that include the limits of friendship or love, this work explores the crucial operations of an uncontestable legitimating machine. Avital Ronell offers a tour-de-force reading of legal, pharmaceutical, artistic, scientific, Zen, and historical grids that depend upon different types of testability, involving among other issues what it means to put oneself to the test.
eBook
EPILOGUE
This fragment of dialogue is taken from a play I wrote and performed in at Hau3 in Berlin, What Was I Thinking? Autothanatography and Spectral Colloquy. 1 Remembering its performance when Laurence Rickels nearly stole the show as head nurse in the asylum where I was thematically parked, with me in coercive custody of an icy version of Susan Bernstein, whose relentless prods required the production of autobiographemes helps me return to the time when I last saw Friedrich Kittler. Though he was weakened by illness, we managed to share meals that summer, and to fill in the blanks of
Book Chapter