The ÜberReader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell (review)

In this collection, Diane Davis has assembled eighteen pieces from the oeuvre of Avital Ronell and interspersed parts of a 2002 interview. Davis’ introduction is bracketed with a reproduction of Ronell’s certificate of U.S. citizenship and a “photo album” with captions in Ronell’s handwriting. The works are organized under five headings: “The Call of Technology”; “Freedom and Obligation: Minority Report on Children, Addicts, Outlaws, and Ghosts”; “Psyche-Soma: The Finite Body”; “Danke! et Adieu: On Hookups and Breakups”; and “The Fading Empire of Cognition.” Davis notes, “I do think the headings that survived all the tests and cuts offer a kind of sampling of Ronell’s most celebrated achievements” (xxxi).

The pieces gathered under these headings indeed offer such a sampling. The works cover the dimensions of Ronell’s writing, in terms of time (mid-80s to mid-00s), type (transcribed talks, longer and briefer essays, excerpts from her books), and style (from the informal and sometimes personal to complex critical diction, from fairly allusive writing—with punning and riffing—to structured argument). Davis has avoided a narrative framework, relegating Ronell’s biography to a footnote (xxxii) and providing no bibliography except what can be gleaned from the acknowledgements and some of the endnotes. She notes Ronell “is first of all a Germanist” and that Ronell worked with Derrida (shown in some photos) to translate some of his work, so one not familiar with Ronell may piece together her itineraries and affiliations (xvi). But mainly, Davis lets the writing provide the traces of Ronell’s influences—salient among which are Nietzsche, Heidegger, and most profoundly Levinas—and reflects also Ronell’s experience as a performance artist.

So as the book seems intended, Avital Ronell herself “slips from your appropriative grasp,” to borrow Davis’ depiction of the objects of study focused on by Ronell’s texts (xv). Such objects as addiction, stupidity, friendship, childhood, testing, the telephone, television viewing, and the practices of thinking and writing become simultaneously complex and uncertain under Ronell’s analysis—or in her approach, since analysis is not the only mode she works in and is itself an object of her critique. A term’s meaning becomes uncertain, as does the existence of the object, in the phenomenological bracketing Ronell performs. In “Slow Learner,” for example, as stupidity becomes distinct from absence, ignorance, or forgetting, it merges with thought and into a relationship with intellection where the two become difficult to distinguish. Ronell writes, “stupidity does not allow itself to be opposed to knowledge in any simple way, nor is it the other of thought” (261), albeit that she draws a separation (performing an inversion characteristic of her work) through a narrative and personificatory approach in which “[u]nreserved, stupidity exposes while intelligence hides” (266). Disrupting the naturalization of the object, Ronell turns attention to the functioning of language and observation—to the practices and context in which the object has emerged.

Whether Ronell herself “slips” requires further consideration. A subject does emerge, which is to say interpretation occurs, even for the reader of texts such as Ronell’s or a collection such as this, which both involve, to cite Davis, a suspension of “knowing” such that “thinking and reading can begin” (xv). Such liberatory disruption of assumptions does not erase the possibility of knowledge or action, but rather raises their im/possibility—the difficult simultaneity of blindness and insight that involves what Levinas refers to as “insomnia,” where the “thinking and reading” that may undermine action can nevertheless breed action (including acts of nonviolence). Thinking and reading “begin,” that is; the incessancy of process is key, as Ronell depicts in “Koan Practice or Taking Down the Test.” The work of Ronell, Derrida, and others categorized under the rubric of deconstruction has suffered critique for a supposed paralysis of thought and action. Ronell’s work (and any careful reading of Derrida’s) provides a corrective, as for example one learns to view television much differently and indeed productively...