Avital Ronell

Avital Ronell
Born	(1952-04-15) 15 April 1952 Prague, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic)
Era	20th-/21st-century philosophy
Region	Western
School	Continental philosophy, Critical theory, Deconstruction, Disability studies, Existentialism, Hermeneutics, Post-structuralism, Third-wave feminism, Queer theory
Main interests	Addiction, Deficiency, Dictation, Disappearance of Authority, Disease, Drugs, Excessive Force, Ethics, Legal Subjects, Ontology, Rumor, Stupidity, Technology, Telephony, Tests, Trauma, Unworking, War
Notable ideas	allotechnology, "Being-on-drugs," biophony, "I am stupid before the other," killer texts, narcoanalysis, narcossism, obliterature, "suppository subject (sujet suppositaire)," tropium, toxicogeography
Influences Walter Benjamin, Johann Peter Eckermann, Gustave Flaubert, Sigmund Freud, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, R. D. Laing, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida

Avital Ronell (/ˈɑːvɪtəl roʊˈnɛl/; born 15 April 1952) is an American philosopher who contributes to the fields of continental philosophy, literary studies, psychoanalysis, feminist philosophy, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a University Professor in the Humanities and in the Departments of Germanic Languages and Literature and Comparative Literature at New York University where she co-directs the Trauma and Violence Transdisciplinary Studies Program. As Jacques Derrida Professor of Philosophy, she teaches regularly at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee. Under the advisement of Stanley Corngold, Ronell received her Doctorate of Philosophy in German Studies from Princeton University in 1979 for a dissertation written on self-reflection in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Franz Kafka, but subsequently disclosed in interviews she had wanted Dictations: On Haunted Writing to serve as her dissertation.

Ronell is widely considered "one of the most original, bold and surprising" thinkers "in contemporary academy" and "the foremost thinker of the repressed conditions of knowledge ... with the Nietzschean audacity ... [to] probe the philosophical no-man's land." In 2009, the Centre Pompidou invited her to hold interviews "according to ... Avital Ronell (Selon ... Avital Ronell)" with such artists and thinkers as Werner Herzog, Judith Butler, Dennis Cooper, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Suzanne Doppelt. Her research ranges from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe dictating haunted writing and psychoanalysis, Alexander Graham Bell setting up electronic transmission systems in the early 20th century, the structure of the test in legal, pharmaceutical, artistic, scientific, Zen, and historical domains, to 20th-century literature and philosophy on stupidity, on the disappearance of authority, childhood and a diction of deficiency.

Ronell is a founding editor of the journal Qui Parle and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace. In 1983, she wrote one of the first critical inquiries to theorize the AIDS crisis, and in 1992 a critique of the March 2nd police brutality against Rodney King which Artforum subsequently deemed "the most illuminating essay on TV and video ever written." She received the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Fellowship from 1981 to 1983, the American Cultures Fellowship in 1991, a Research Fellow Award in 1993, and the University of California President's Fellowship from 1995 to '96. She served as Chair to the Division of Philosophy and Literature and to the Division of Comparative Literature at the Modern Language Association from 1993 to 1996, and gave one of two keynote addresses at the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2012.

Biography

Ronell was born in Prague to Israeli diplomats and was a performance artist before entering academia. She emigrated to New York four years later, in 1956. She attended the prestigious Rutgers Preparatory School and graduated in 1970. As a young immigrant, she frequently encountered xenophobia and anti-Semitism. She gained a Bachelor of Arts from Middlebury College, and subsequently studied with Jacob Taubes and Hans-Georg Gadamer at the Hermeneutic Institute at the Free University of Berlin. Ronell received her Doctorate of Philosophy in German studies under the advisement of Stanley Corngold at Princeton University in 1979, and carried "some wounded memories from graduate school" with her close friend and philosopher Laurence Rickels. Pulled along by Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, she met Jacques Derrida at a symposium devoted to Peter Szondi. Derrida recounts the meeting in a letter dated the 23rd of June 1979 from The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond:

On the way out, diverse presentations. "With you, one can no longer present oneself," a young American (I think) woman says to me. She gives me to understand that she has read (before me, therefore, she was just coming from the U.S.) "Moi, la psychanalyse" in which I let play, in English, the so-difficult-to-translate vocabulary of presentation, of presentations, of "introductions," etc. As I was insisting on getting her name (insisting is too strong), she said "Metaphysics," and refused to add a single word. I found this little game rather clever and I felt, through the insignificant frivolity of the exchange, that she had gone rather far (I was told afterward that she was a "Germanist"). I understand that it was you. You have always been "my" metaphysics, the metaphysics of my life, the "verso" of everything I write (my desire, speech, presence, proximity, law, my heart and soul, everything that I love that you know before me)

— "Envois" in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, pg.197

She subsequently studied with Derrida and Hélène Cixous in Paris. Ronell would soon become a close friend of poet and novelist Pierre Alféri, who would later influence Ronell in the titling of several of her major works. A professor at the University of Virginia for a short time period, Ronell claims she was fired because she taught continental philosophy and "went to the gym on a regular basis: [her] colleagues were shocked by this—it didn't correspond to their image of an academic woman!" She joined the comparative literature faculty at the University of California, Riverside and then at University of California, Berkeley where she taught with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy and Judith Butler. She was a close friend of the controversial writer Kathy Acker and identified with Kathy Acker's fiction. She highlights how they wrote "in correspondence" "destined to each other—in need, in any case, of the complementarity that [their] writing invited and indicated." In 1996, she moved to New York University where she then co-taught a course with Jacques Derrida until 2004. In 2009, she began co-teaching courses with Slavoj Žižek who continues to hold the position of visiting professor at NYU's Department of Germanic Languages and Literature. In 2010, François Noudelmann also co-taught with her, and co-curated the Walls and Bridges program with her in 2011. In addition to her own writing, she introduced Jacques Derrida to American audiences by translating his reading of Kafka's "Before the Law," his essay on the law of gender/genre, and his lectures on Nietzsche's relation to biography, among many other translations.

Overview of works

Avital Ronell argues for the necessity of the unintelligible, the flaw and breakdown. She has supported her argument for the necessity of the unintelligible by saying, "If we could communicate, we wouldn't need to communicate." She also recounts in her work on the police brutality against Rodney King that the idiom of the "perfectly clear" recurrently serves as a code for the white lie. Ronell frequently refers to her authorship over texts in terms of another "signatory," "operator," or "television," and not in terms of her proper name as author over previously published work. In addition, she makes an important part of her work the focus upon thinkers who clean up after other thinkers and how "sanitation departments" undermine the very work they mean to accomplish because they offer an altogether different experience of reading and writing from that of the thinkers they try to clean up. Thus to paraphrase Ronell's texts is not a simple or clearly achievable task. Unmentioned in this page, is her book "Scum manifesto", since the writings here have a certain slant towards one set of ideals.

Dictations: On Haunted Writing (1986)

Ronell investigates Goethe's dictations to the future. In particular, she examines how Goethe did not write one of his most influential works, Conversations with Eckermann, but instead dictated the work to his young schizoid companion, Johannes Peter Eckermann. Heralded by Nietzsche as "the best German book," Conversations with Eckermann contains Goethe's last thoughts about art, poetry, politics, religion and a host of concerns for the fate of German literature and philosophy. Ronell thus reads Conversations with Eckermann as the return from beyond the grave of the great master of German literary and scientific works.

Ronell begins her investigation in Goethe's scientific writings and explores Goethe's focus on "a certain domain of immateriality—the nonsubstantializable apparitions … [of] weather forecasting … ghosts, dreams, and some forms of hidden, telepathic transmissions." Ronell renames the Goethe-effect what she calls "killer texts" and describes the effect as the textual machination destructive of values, of the "worthier (Werther, from The Sorrows of Young Werther)." The first part opens on Freud's debt to Goethe and reprints the frontispiece of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Ronell names Goethe the "secret councilor (Geheimrat)" of Freud and already anticipates her work on the Rat Man in the third footnote where she alludes to the "suppository logic, inserting the vital element into the narrative of the other." In the first section Ronell aims to "attune [her] ears to the telepathic orders that Goethe's phantom transmitted to Freud by a remote control system.

In general, Dictations: On Haunted Writing traces the closure without end of influence's computation. Ronell's task entails a reading practice where the analysis of a text must investigate the endless movement towards closure in dictation. Ronell thus practices what is called anasemic reading, a practice developed by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, in which the psychoanalyst traces the textual metaphors, rhetorical structures, and linguistic associations of a writer/patient.

"Part Two" presents a case of literary parasitism between Eckermann and Goethe, and opens at the scene of Goethe's table in Weimar "the eleventh of September 1828, at two o'clock." In other words, Ronell re-imagines the scene that Eckermann illustrates at the beginning and ending of Conversations with Eckermann. Ronell starts to address the fiction of the writer as a particularly admirable human being and argues for the necessary passivity of the writer as a human being. Ronell also troubles the notion of a body of work as a totality. Ronell remaps earlier arguments about feminine appropriation in terms of writing, for Eckermann, which "involves recuperating something 'for myself,' for the most part instinctively; it entails repetitive acts of appropriation."

Dictations: On Haunted Writing explores how the work of writing in general adheres to a call dictated from elsewhere, a call formative of desire.

The Telephone Book: Technology — Schizophrenia — Electric Speech (1989)

Ronell questions the operations that such ordinary objects as the telephone and book dictate. She signs the text as the operator of the switchboard alongside Richard Eckersley, operator of design, and Michael Jensen, operator of compositor. Eckersley's design departs from his "typographic subtlety and restraint" towards a computer design, marked by new page-making software programs to interpret the text typographically. Eckersley dislodges the text from presumed conventional settings and shifts the focus of reading with inexplicable gaps, displacements between sentences and paragraphs, mirror imaging of pages facing one another, words blurred to the point of indecipherability, and a regular exaggeration of negative line spacing, spilling sentences over into each other. Pushing the limits of an ordinary "Table of Contents" or "Footnotes," the operators set up a "Directory Assistance," in which chapters appear as reference indexes, and a yellow pages entitled "Classified," in which footnotes appear as soliciting advertisements.

The text begins with "A User's Manual" that warns it "is going to resist you."

Warning: The Telephone Book is going to resist you. Dealing with a logic and topos of the switchboard, it engages the destabilization of the addressee. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to learn how to read with your ears. In addition to listening for the telephone, you are being asked to tune your ears to noise frequencies, to anticoding, to the inflated reserves of random indeterminateness—in a word, you are expected to stay open to the static and interference that will occupy these lines. We have attempted to install a switchboard which, vibrating a continuous current of electricity, also replicates the effects of scrambling. At first you may find the way the book runs to be disturbing, but we have had to break up its logic typographically. Like the electronic impulse, it is flooded with signals. To crack open the closural sovereignty of the Book, we have feigned silence and disconnection, suspending the tranquil cadencing of paragraphs and conventional divisions. At indicated times, schizophrenia lights up, jamming the switchboard, fracturing a latent semantics with multiple calls. You will become sensitive to the switching on and off of interjected voices. Our problem was how to maintain an open switchboard, one that disrupts a normally functioning text equipped with proper shock absorbers. Respond as you would to the telephone, for the call of the telephone is incessant and unremitting. When you hang up, it does not disappear but goes into remission. This constitutes its Dasein. There is no off switch to the technological. Remember: When you're on the telephone, there is always an electronic flow, even when that flow is unmarked. The Telephone Book releases the effect of an electronic-libidinal flow using typography to mark the initiation of utterances. To the extent that you are always on call, you have already learned to endure interruption and the

click.

— "A User's Manual" in The Telephone Book, pg.xv

Following "A User's Manual," the text begins as if the reader answers a call: "And yet, you're saying yes, almost automatically, suddenly, sometimes irreversibly." Ronell makes clear that The Telephone Book is a philosophical project on questions concerning the telephone, the call, and the answering machines: "always incomplete, always unreachable, forever promising at once its essence and its existence, philosophy identifies itself finally with this promise, which is to say, with its own unreachability."

Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (1992)

Ronell takes as her point of departure Nietzsche's articulation that, as long as culture has existed, it has supported and inspired addiction. Often untimely, she develops an argument investigative of the destructive desires that coincide with the war on drugs and with the very addiction to drugs which the war claims to want to vanquish. The result is a text whose performance disturbs simple comprehension and frustrates any reading that wishes to tackle drugs on one side or another of a binary opposition. Ronell appeals to literature as the most advanced testimony to the culture of addiction and closely reads Madame Bovary.

Prior to the title page, Ronell showcases quotes from Martin Heidegger, Gustave Flaubert and Samuel Beckett. The text opens with a series of sixteen "hits" informative of both the structure of doing drugs and of the structure of cultural transmission. The "hits" serve as a series of references which survey the literary and philosophical landscape as relates to drugs. "Toward a Narcoanalysis" consolidates the text's itinerary to an account of the sort of analysis Ronell begins to explore by appealing to Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. "EB on Ice" performs a first-person account where Ronell complicates the certitude with which the reader can identify the first-person narrator as herself, as EB, or being on ice as being in the refrigerator, as being on methamphetamine. "Shame" highlights something like the downsizing of interpretation as it only occupies eight pages and draws the reader's attention to the possibility that the text experiments with the potential indifference between drugs and texts. "Scoring Literature" makes up the largest portion of the text and includes nineteen subsections along with a "Doctor's Report" of E. Bovary. "Cold Turkey: or, The Transcendental Aesthetic to be Eaten" is formatted as three installations, three nano-installations, and two nano-intervals of a theatrical play where Ronell convokes Ernst Jünger, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Marguerite Faust, Marguerite Duras, Freud, Irma, Voice Off, Nietzsche, Saint Theresa, Emma B, Walter Benjamin, chorus, priest, and delusions of a non-addict.

Finitude's Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium (1994)

Research assistant and friend, Shireen R.K. Patell, helped bring Finitude's Score to fruition. Finitude's Score collects a series of reflections on the fragile memory left at the close of the millennium. It looks into the projects responsible for devastating humanity and a thinking of the future. Ronell asks why the twentieth century stakes so much on a diction of deficiency. For Ronell, it says that, "we have been depleted." Ronell traces the relegitimization of war, the philosophical status of the rumor, the questionable force of the police, the test sites of technology, the corporeal policies of disease and a thoroughgoing reconstitution of the subject of law. In sum, Finitude's Score reads the desire to finish once and for all, to be done with issues definitively, as the everlasting legacy of the Western logos.

Stupidity (2002)

Ronell breaks down stupidity. In particular, she unfolds the complex problematic of stupidity as something that baffles knowledge in general, and therefore as something that especially baffles knowledge about itself. Among other considerations, Ronell finds that stupidity often takes the form of mastery and intelligence's doubles. She further goes to show that stupidity does not acquire the status of concept. It only reaches the level of quasi-concept.

The Test Drive (2005)

Inflected in the title and throughout the work is the concept of the Freudian drive as it inheres in the test. At the limit of the test as that which grounds scientific knowledge, Ronell questions the distinction between the literary and human sciences as this distinction depends upon the constitutive limits of fiction and witnessing. Her work thus questions the structure of the test as it functions to legitimate everything from research to love and trauma.

Reception

Many scholars have praised Ronell's work. In 1994, Diacritics offered a special edition "On the Work of Avital Ronell." In the special edition, Jonathan Culler writes: "Over the past decade, 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." At the 11th Annual Oscar Sternbach awards, recipient Judith Butler tipped her hat to Ronell and added that she felt deeply indebted to Ronell for the influence of her work. In 2009, Diane Davis edited a collection of essays entitled Reading Ronell where Butler writes in "Ronell as Gay Scientist": "The different path that Ronell takes is precisely the path of difference: gay, difficult, affirmative, ironic." Davis herself contributes to the volume by writing of the "singular provocation of Ronell's 'remarkable critical oeuvre,'" "the devastating insights, the unprecedented writing style, the relentless destabilizations." In the sixth session of The Beast and the Sovereign on February 6 of 2002, Jacques Derrida devotes special attention to Ronell's Stupidity and commends the untranslatable complexity of her "irony." Ronell has been said to have "achieved a work of thinking at the highest level," to have produced "writing [that] is always astute and imaginative—even witty [...] cogently argued, exceptionally erudite, and stunningly original," and to be "the most interesting scholar in America."

Publications (incomplete)

Books

• (2012) Loser Sons: Politics and Authority (ISBN 0-252-03664-6)
• (2010) Fighting Theory: In Conversation with Anne Dufourmantelle (ISBN 0-252-07623-0) trans. by Catherine Porter from French
• (2010) Lignes de Front (ISBN 223406404X) trans. from English by Daniel Loayza
• (2008) The ÜberReader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell (ISBN 0-252-07311-8) (ed. Diane Davis)
• (2007) Life Extreme: An Illustrated Guide to New Life (ISBN 2-914-56334-5) co-authored by Eduardo Kac
• (2006) American philo: Entretiens avec Anne Dufourmantelle (ISBN 2-234-05840-6)
• (2005) The Test Drive (ISBN 0-252-02950-X)
• (2002) Stupidity (ISBN 0-252-07127-1)
• (1994) Finitude's Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium (ISBN 0-8032-8949-9)
• (1992) Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (ISBN 0-252-07190-5)
• (1989) The Telephone Book: Technology — Schizophrenia — Electric Speech (ISBN 0-8032-8938-3)
• (1986) Dictations: On Haunted Writing (ISBN 0-8032-8945-6)

Articles

• (2013) "Stormy Weather: Blues in Winter" in The New York Times, Feb. 2, 2013 (ISSN 0362-4331)
• (2011) "Flaubert en Amérique" in Europe, N° 983, mars 2011 : Georges Perros (ISBN 2-351-50038-5)
• (2011) "The Tactlessness of an Unending Fadeout" in Writing Death (ISBN 9-081-70910-0) (by Jeremy Fernando)
• (2010) "Postface" in The Field is Lethal (ISBN 1-933-99620-X) (by Suzanne Doppelt, trans. by Cole Swenson)
• (2010) "Have I Been Destroyed? Answering to Authority and the Politics of the Father" in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21, no. 1
• (2009) Contribution in Farimani 2 (Fall 2009)
• (2009) "Nietzsche Loves You: A Media-Technological Start-up" in Discourse 31, No. 1 & 2 (Winter & Spring 2009)
• (2008) "Untread and Untried: Nietzsche Reads Derridemocracy" in diacritics 38, No. 1-2 (Spring-Summer 2008)
• (2007) "Introduction: The Stealth Pulse in Philosophy" in Blind Date: Sex and Philosophy (ISBN 0-252-07488-2) (by Anne Dufourmantelle)
• (2006) "Surrender and the Ethically Binding Signature: On Johnson's Reparative Process" in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 17, no. 3
• (2006) "Kathy Goes to Hell" in Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (ISBN 1-844-67066-X), ed. by Avital Ronell, Carla Harryman, and Amy Scholder
• (2006) "Tombeau pour Kathy Acker" in Fresh Théorie II: Black Album, trans. from English by Aude Tincelin, ed. by Mark Alizart and Christophe Kihm
• (2005) "On the Misery of Theory without Poetry: Heidegger's Reading of Hölderlin's 'Andenken'" in PMLA 120, No. 1 "Special Topic: On Poetry" (Jan., 2005)
• (2005) Contribution to "Forum: The Legacy of Jacques Derrida" in PMLA 120, No. 2 (Mar., 2005)
• (2004) "Deviant Payback: The Aims of Valerie Solanas" in Scum Manifesto (ISBN 1-85984-553-3) (by Valerie Solanas)
• (2004) "Cutting Remarks" in Artforum international and as supplement to Bookforum, vol. 11, no. 1 (Spring 2004)
• (2003) "The Experimental Disposition: Nietzsche's Discovery of America (Or, Why the Present Administration Sees Everything in Terms of a Test)" in American Literary History 15, No. 3 (Fall 2003)
• (2003) "Proving Grounds: On Nietzsche and the Test Drive" in MLN 118, No. 3, German Issue (Apr., 2003)
• (2002) "Hungry Eye" in Artforum international 40, no. 9 (May 2002), co-authored by Ulrich Baer
• (1995) "The Text Drive" in Deconstruction is/in America: A New Sense of the Political (ISBN 9780814735190), edited by Anselm Haverkamp
• (1995) "Introduction" in Time Capsule: A Concise Encyclopedia by Women Artists (ISBN 1-881616-33-9), co-introduced by Kathy Acker
• (1994) "Finitude's Score" in Thinking Bodies (ISBN 0804723044) ed. by Juliet Flower MacCannell and Laura Zakarin,
• (1994) "Queens of the Night" in ZYZZYVA (Summer 1994)
• (1993) "November 22, 1992" in Assemblage, No. 20 "Violence, Space" (Apr., 1993)
• (1993) "Our Narcotic Modernity" in Rethinking Technologies (ISBN 0-8166-2215-9) ed. by Verena Andermatt Conley
• (1992) "TraumaTV: Twelve Steps Beyond the Pleasure Principle" first published as "Video/television/Rodney King: twelve steps beyond 'The Pleasure Principle'" in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 4, no. 2 (Summer 1992) and subsequently as "Haunted TV: Rodney King/video/trauma" in Artforum international 31, no. 1 (September 1992)
• (1992) "Support Our Tropes: Reading Desert Storm" first published by City Lights, then in Yale Journal of Criticism 5, no. 2 (Spring 1992), and in Rhetorical Republic: Governing Representations in American Politics, edited by F.M. Dolan and T.L. Dumm
• (1991) "Avital Ronell" in Re/Search: Angry Women 13 (ISBN 1-890451-05-3) interview with Andrea Juno
• (1990) "Namely, Eckermann" in Looking after Nietzsche (ISBN 0-7914-0157-X), ed. by Laurence Rickels
• (1990) "Walking Switchboard" in Substance 61
• (1989) "The Worst Neighborhoods of the Real: Philosophy - Telephone - Contamination" in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 1, no. 1
• (1989) "Review: The Differends of Man" in Diacritics 19, No. 3/4, Heidegger: Art and Politics (Autumn - Winter, 1989)
• (1988) "Starting from Scratch: Mastermix" in Socialist Review 88, no. 2
• (1988) "The Sujet Suppositaire: Freud, And/Or, the Obsessional Neurotic Style (Maybe)" in On Puns: The Foundation of Letters (ISBN 0631158944) ed. by Jonathan Culler
• (1988) "On the Way to Lainguage: Heidegger and Schizophrenia" in Qui Parle 2, No. 1, "Paranoia and Schizophrenia" (Spring 1988)
• (1988) "Condensed Article" in Visible Language 22, no. 4 "Instant Theory: 'Making Thinking Popular'" (Autumn 1988)
• (1987) "Doing Kafka in The Castle: A Poetics of Desire" in Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance: Centenary Readings (ISBN 0-253-31709-6) ed. by Alan Udoff
• (1986) "Hitting the Streets: Ecce Fama," Stanford Italian Review VI, no. 1-2 (Fall 1986)
• (1986) "Street Talk" in Benjamin's Ground: New Readings of Walter Benjamin (ISBN 0-8143-2041-4) ed. by Rainer Nägele
• (1985) "Taking it Philosophically: Torquato Tasso's Women as Theorists," MLN 100, no. 3 (April 1985)
• (1985) "MIMUS POLYGLOTTUS" in Ça Parle 1, No. 1, "the representation of otherness" (Fall 1985)
• (1984) "Goethezeit" in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature ed. by Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan
• (1984) "Sutura Goethei; L'articulation Freud-Goethe" in Cahiers confrontation n° 12, originally in French
• (1983) Participant of "[Discussion on Boschenstein]" in boundary 2, Vol. 11, No. 3, "The Criticism of Peter Szondi" (Spring, 1983)
• (1983) "Queens of the Night" in Genre XVI (Winter 1983)
• (1982) "La bouche émissaire" in Cahiers confrontation n° 8, trans. from English by Monique Canto

Translations

• (1991) "'Eating Well,' or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida" in Who Comes After the Subject? (ISBN 0-415-90359-9), interview with Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. by Avital Ronell and Peter Connor, ed. by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy
• (1991) "The Response of Ulysses" in Who Comes After the Subject? (ISBN 0-415-90359-9) trans. by Avital Ronell, by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ed. by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy
• (1989) The Ear of the Other (ISBN 0-8032-6575-1) trans. by Avital Ronell, by Jacques Derrida
• (1988) "A Number of Yes (Nombre de oui)" in Qui Parle 2, No. 2, "Silence and Intervention" (Fall 1988), trans. by Avital Ronell and Brian Holmes, by Jacques Derrida
• (1988) "FLECHSIG/SCHREBER/FREUD: AN INFORMATIONS NETWORK OF 1910" in Qui Parle 2, No. 1, "Paranoia and Schizophrenia" (Spring 1988), trans. by Laurence Rickels, Avital Ronell, David Levin, Adam Bresnick, and Judith Ramme, by Friedrich Kittler
• (1987) "Devant la Loi" in Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance: Centenary Readings (ISBN 0-253-31709-6) trans. by Avital Ronell, by Jacques Derrida, ed. by Alan Udoff
• (1986) Memoires: For Paul de Man (ISBN 0-231-06232-X), trans. by Avital Ronell, Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava, by Jacques Derrida
• (1984) "My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies" in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature trans. by Avital Ronell and Irene Harvey, by Jacques Derrida, ed. by Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan
• (1980) "The Law of Genre" in Critical Inquiry 7, No. 1 "On Narrative" (Autumn, 1980), trans. by Avital Ronell, by Jacques Derrida

Selected honors and awards

• 1995–1996: University of California President's Fellowship
• 1993: Research Fellow Award
• 1991: American Cultures Fellowship
• 1981–1983: Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Fellowship

Further reading

• Ed. Jonathan Culler, Vol. 24, No. 4, "Special Section: On the Work of Avital Ronell," (Winter 1994), The Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Diane Davis, "'Addicted to Love'; Or, Toward an Inessential Solidarity" in JAC 19, No. 4 (Fall 1999)
• Ed. Diane Davis, Reading Ronell, Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009 : ISBN 978-0-252-07647-3
• Ed. Diane Davis, The ÜberReader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell, Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009 : ISBN 0-252-07311-8
• Mina Cheon, Shamanism + Cyberspace, New York: Atropos Press, 2009 : ISBN 0-982-53095-1

External links

• Works by or about Avital Ronell in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Biography – Department of Comparative Literature at New York University
• Biography – Department of Germanic Languages and Literature at New York University
• Brief Biography – Humanities at New York University
• Biography – European Graduate School
• Diane D. Davis. Avital Ronell Center for Digital Discourse and Culture at Virginia Tech
• Alexander Laurence. Interview with Avital Ronell. 1994.
• Examined Life. A 2008 film produced by the National Film Board of Canada that includes Avital Ronell.
• Diane D. Davis. Confessions of an Anacoluthon, Interview With Avital Ronell. 2000.
• Avital Ronell & Werner Herzog at Centre Pompidou, Dec. 2008 / "body no / body" lab : English, German & French.
• Avital Ronell, Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous on YouTube approach the notion of affinity through a discussion of "Disruptive Kinship," co-sponsored by Villa Gillet and the School of Writing at The New School for Public Engagement.
• Article in L'Aisne Nouvelle on Avital Ronell's Master Class at Henri-Martin