The UberReader: SELECTED WORKS OF AVITAL RONELL

PART II Freedom and Obligation: Minority Report on Children, Addicts, Outlaws, and Ghosts

Part Two Freedom and Obligation Minority Report on Children, Addicts, Outlaws, and Ghosts verso 98 Q. In the introductory remarks to the interview you did with Andrea Juno in Research: Angry Women, you are referred to as an “ivory-tower terrorist.” Are you comfortable with that label? Does it seem accurate? A. These are questions about naming and location, and in this regard neither term is acceptable. The ivory tower is something that I have never been embraced by, or possibly even seen; it is a phantasm. And “terrorist” would imply a kind of being that is single-minded and fanatically set on a goal. By contrast, I would be too dispersed, self-retracting, and self-annulling in the way I work to be considered a terrorist as such. If anything, I would say that I am a counterterrorist. It is true that I have called for something like an extremist writing. And also I have made hyperbolic attempts to secure the space of academia as a sheltering place of unconditional hospitality for dissidence and insurrection, refutation and undomesticatable explosions of thought. To the extent that the academy is a mausoleum, it tends to expect the reverence due the dead, and my irreverent type of reverence seems to set off, in those describing what I do, some explosive language. But I would also say, in a more general and gendered sense, that very often women who have a somewhat original bent are institutionally psychoticized and isolated. They tend to be structurally positioned as dangerous creatures, so there is always a SWAT team of academic proprietors closing in on them. In this sense, I can see how the “terrorist” appellation might have grown on me or been pinned on me. But it comes from the institutional space and not from me. I was tagged. There’s also this: While I was at Berkeley, I was close friends with Kathy Acker and Andrea Juno. Mondo 2000 recto 99 declared us the “deviant boss girls of a new scene,” models of subversion, and so on. That little community may have provoked some politicized assertions, marking the way the three of us would stage ourselves publicly and “kick ass” in a certain way. In this regard, I think one would want to look more closely at the possibility or impossibility of friendship in academia, and what it implies . Who are your friends? How does friendship set up (or subvert) a transmission system for the kind of work you do and read? One is often judged by one’s public friendships. I was friends with Kathy and A.J. And I think there was something scary about this little girl gang of troublemaker writers. Certainly, publishing with Angry Women did do momentary damage; it dented my career a bit—though it is laughable to offer up an imago of my career as a smooth surface to be dented. It was never not dented: one originary dent. Q. What kind of damage did it do? A. Well, I think colleagues were a little shocked to see me involved with performance artists, recontextualized and reformatted in the space of very angry, very outrageous, shit-covered, dildo-wielding, multisexual women. I think there was a gender-genre crossing that probably seemed a little excessive. Q. Did you have tenure yet? A. Yes I did. From “Confessions of an Anacoluthon” (248–49). ...