Avital Ronell. On Authority - Have I Been Destroyed? 2009 6/11 - Video

Media Studies > Avital Ronell. On Authority - Have I Been Destroyed? 2009 6/11

Posted by egsvideo on September 28, 2009

150 views

http://www.egs.edu/ Avital Ronell speaking about authority, answering to Authority and the politics of the father, the figure of the enemy, justice, judgement, love, judging, archaic sovereignty, trauma, tragedy, morale, mercy, moral directives, human dignity and the destiny of democracy, indifference, brutality, murder, patriarchy, paternal presence, education, violence and power, psychoanalysis, political analysis, Jacques Lacan, Plato, Socrates, Sigmund Freud, Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Judith Butler, Carl Schmitt, Martin Luther, and Alexandre Kojève. Avital Ronell disussing her text Have I Been Destroyed?, authority, an emergency supply in the absence of God, part of an on-going work on authority in a lecture at the European Graduate School EGS, in Saas Fee, Switzerland. Free Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe 2009 Avital Ronell.

Avital Ronell is Professor of German, comparative literature, and English at New York University, where she directs the Research in Trauma and Violence project, and has also written as a literary critic, a feminist, and philosopher. Avital Ronell was born in Prague to Israeli diplomats and was a performance artist before entering academia. She studied with Jacob Taubes at the Hermeneutic Institute at the Free University of Berlin, received her Ph.D. under the advisement of Stanley Corngold at Princeton University in 1979, and then continued her studies with Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous in Paris. Avital Ronell joined the comparative literature faculty at the University of California, Berkeley before moving to NYU. Avital Ronell is also a core faculty member at the European Graduate School. Themes of her work include technology (Test Drive, Telephone Book) and Stupidity/Idiocy. In addition to her own writing, she has produced English translations of Derrida's work.

Avital Ronell's work in The Telephone Book focuses on three themes: technology, schizophrenia and electric speech. The book begins with a sustained examination of Heidegger's involvement with the (Nazi) National Socialist Party of Germany. Early in the book she describes it as a gesture of anti-racist activism. It proceeds through a history of the telephone, looking at the structure of "the call", as in Heidegger's "call of being", and applying that form to various subjects. A close friend of Derrida's, Avital Ronell 's work is heavily informed by the strategy of deconstruction, using close readings and looking at the play of language to find the marginalized group or idea that is pushed out from the center. In this work Ronell demonstrates the complexity of "the call" and its presence throughout contemporary culture including technology, psychology and art. In the book, the rejects the authoritarian position of the author and instead refers to herself as the "operator" of the text.

Crack Wars focuses on Madame Bovary, looking at addiction to literature and comparing it to addiction to drugs. Avital Ronell describes the work as being a political gesture against the hysteria of the "racist" war on drugs. It begins with a wide survey of literary discussions of intoxication, including Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Benjamin and more. The book proceeds by looking closely at Heidegger's descriptions of want, wishing and "being towards". Avital Ronell's The Test Drive examines the underlying logic of contemporary scientific discourses and their ethical and political implications. It does so by focusing on the idea of "the test" as a basis for discovering knowledge.

Avital Ronell is the author of 2008 Pulsión de Prueba: la filosofía puesta a examen. Traducción de Mariano López Seoane. Buenos Aires, Interzona Editora, 2008 2007 The UberReader," ed. Diane Davis 2005 The Test Drive, 2004 Scum Manifesto," by Valeria Solanas, Introduction by Avital Ronell 2001 Stupidity, 1998 Finitude's Score,1993 Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania,1993 Dictations: On Haunted Writing, 1989 Telephone Book, 1989 The Ear of the Other, trans., Jacques Derrida.

Embed: