Stupidity (review)

"There is no sin except stupidity," Oscar Wilde observed. According to Flaubert, "There are three things required for happiness—good health, selfishness, and stupidity—and without stupidity the others are useless." Billy Budd was stupid. So, of course, were Dostoevsky's Idiot and Wordsworth's Idiot Boy. "I don't know what it is," Robert Musil remarked of stupidity. Avital Ronell has tackled a huge, baffling, self-contradictory subject. She does not, to be sure, set out to offer a history, or even a clear definition, of stupidity. Rather, she confronts an arbitrarily chosen group of writers who have themselves commented on the subject and meditates both on their conclusions and on the processes by which they reach them. She follows no comprehensible principle of organization and comes to no conclusions herself, but she has written a smart and provocative, if sometimes irritating, book.

The writers on whom Ronell mainly focuses are Musil, Friedrich von Schlegel, Dostoevsky, and Wordsworth, but she interests herself also in Nietzsche, de Man, Kant, Freud, Heidegger, Kafka, Hegel, and others. As this list suggests, she directs her attention chiefly at Continental work: she does not, for instance, even mention The Dunciad, which might have been expected to take a prominent place in an investigation of stupidity. In a single couplet, as a matter of fact, Pope could define stupidity's power and its danger: "Laborious, heavy, busy, bold, and blind, / She [the goddess Dulness, an avatar of stupidity] rul'd, in native Anarchy, the mind" (1.14-15). Each adjective, as well as the assertion of the second line, indicates the matter of this study's analysis: stupidity's meaningless energy and its fundamental link to the chaotic. Ronell demonstrates how and why the subject of stupidity has preoccupied and baffled many important thinkers, and she uses their thought as a basis for self-reflection as well as for literary analysis.

The importance of stupidity stems from its unconquerableness. Hard to locate, impossible to defeat, it "fatigues knowledge and wears down history" (3). Dependent on the judgment of a community, it necessarily involves politics and ethics. Musil calls attention to its connection to closure; Ronell persuasively interprets this connection as inhering in stupidity's "refusal of undecidability" (70). Every form of intelligence is shadowed by its particular mode of stupidity. (Ronell uses to advantage, in this context, the figure of the professor, the brilliant cogitator forever shackled to an "absent-minded" double.) This observation in itself implies Musil's conclusion that stupidity afflicts us all. It is "what we share" (93).

The previous paragraph may suggest the difficulty of summarizing Ronell's argument. Both her own comments and her exegesis of others, stimulating though they are, tend to break apart into flimsily related utterances. Stupidity appears to inspire epigrams and isolated observations rather than coherent sequences. Ronell finds lines of thought extending, for example, from Schlegel to Bataille and de Man. But those lines never quite delineate stupidity. The Schlegel-de Man sequence concerns unintelligibility and its value—a related issue, but not the same as stupidity, which illustrates its power to disorganize thought even when it serves as an object of contemplation.

When the argument turns to avowedly literary texts—Dostoevsky, Wordsworth, Kafka—it becomes more comprehensibly sequential. Ronell's long account of The Idiot offers brilliant textual analysis and inspired digressions on such matters as the power of illness and the new relations it establishes between self and body or self and society. Prince Myshkin embodies the mystery of illness, the paradox of lucidity ever on the verge of idiocy. Ronell economically articulates the intricacies of his character. "The Idiot has little sense of social shame, no experience of anger, and nowhere does he display a particular investment in the concept or practice of dignity. He suffers indignity with a compassionate smile, almost always siding with the persecutor" (204). Myshkin's world is "wiped clean of surface irony" (209): a crucial fact for...