Avital Ronell has won worldwide acclaim for her work across literature and philosophy, psychoanalysis and popular culture, political theory and feminism, art and rhetoric, drugs and deconstruction. In works such as The Test Drive, Stupidity, Crack Wars, and The Telephone Book, she has perpetually raised new and powerful questions about how we think, what thinking does, and how we fool ourselves about the troubled space between thought and action.
In this collection, some of today's most distinguished and innovative thinkers turn their attention to Ronell's teaching, writing, and provocations, observing how Ronell reads and what comes from reading her. By reading Ronell, and reading Ronell reading, contributors examine the ethico-political implications of her radical dislocations and carefully explicate, extend, and explore the paraconcepts addressed in her works.
| Cover Title Page Copyright Page Contents 1 Diane Davis Introduction 9 Jean-Luc Nancy Addressee: Avital 21 Judith Butler Ronell as Gay Scientist 31 Peter Fenves The Courage of the Critic: Avital Ronell and the Idea of Emergence 49 Susan Bernstein Conference Call: Ronell, Heidegger, Oppen 60 Laurence A. Rickels Take Me to Your Reader 74 Werner Hamacher Uncalled: A Commentary on Kafka's "The Test" 94 Elissa Marder Avital Ronell's Body Politics 113 Pierre Alferi Serial 116 Gil Anidjar War Bodies 131 Samuel Weber The Indefinite Article or the Love of a Phrase 143 Shireen R. K. Patell Learning Impossibility: Pedagogy, Aporia, Ethics 164 Hent de Vries Testing Existence, Exacting Thought: Reading Ronell with Deleuze 186 Thomas Pepper The Problems of a Generation or Thinking and Thanking Zwang AND Drang 205 Tom Cohen Roaming (Dis)Charges: "Catastrophe of the Liquid Oozing" 222 Elisabeth Weber "Vectorizing Our Thoughts Toward 'Current Events'": For Avital Ronell Contributors Index | "This collection of energetic essays engages the writing of Avital Ronell while contributing fresh, sophisticated thinking to such fields as philosophy, rhetoric, feminism, and literary criticism. . . . Highly recommended."—Choice|Diane Davis is an associate professor of rhetoric & writing, English, and communication studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the editor of The ÜberReader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell.