(Re)Viewing Stupidity

Avital Ronell, Stupidity. University of Illinois Press 2002

 

You must become completely stupid.

(Zen Master Seung Sahn)

Avital Ronell's most recent unconventionally sized tome, Stupidity, is a study of a topic that has not received much academic attention. It presents a discursive zone that has been marginalized, deprecated, or simply expelled from post-Enlightenment discourse. “The Other is stupid,” she writes. But while tracing the gesture of marking and excluding, Ronell in no way participates in the smug delineation of values that would result in a simple reversal—in this case, a rehabilitation of stupidity. Indeed, how would it be possible to liberate and embrace the Stupid? Can there be a “good” stupidity? ¹ Can we speak of stupidity without either quarantining it as “the other” or embracing it as a positive quality? Ronell's book engages these difficult questions, conjoining ethics and epistemology with rigorous and inventive readings of literary and philosophical texts from the last several centuries. Stupidity emerges through its treatment by Musil, Schlegel and de Man, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Wordsworth, and Kant. While these proper names mark out thematic zones of Stupidity, they only begin to hint at the impressive range, the erudition, and the—dare one say it?—intelligence of its author. Stupidity is remarkable in its ability to connect and co-articulate questions of Western literature and philosophy in a language that is original, moving, and exact. Through the coursing of the letter in countless wordplays and ingenious conjunctions as well as roller-coaster-like dips and dives into autobiography, altering typefaces, and graphic comets and constellations, Ronell's text is extraordinary in its literary fluency. Flaubert, Jean-Luc Nancy, Nietzsche, Freud, Derrida, Bataille—all are at home in Stupidity. These names all conjure traces of Ronell's previous writing, including Dictations, The Telephone Book, Crack Wars, and Finitude's Score. But Stupidity is perhaps most impressive in its range, its ability to sustain its argument through typographical and generic detour, and its almost comfortable wisdom and compassion that suggest a new note in Ronell's writing. Rather than paraphrase the interesting and intricate readings of the writers already mentioned, I will try instead to give a sense of Ronell's argument and some of the innovative readings it makes possible. I would like to draw attention especially to the chapters on irony (focused on de Man and Schlegel) and on Wordsworth.

Stupidity has long played the role of a disqualifying epithet used to “police the borders” of legitimate knowledge and hegemonic rational discourse. Its power to condemn and discount is immediately and seemingly self-evident, beyond question. In this sense it follows the pattern of “othering” of all maneuvers of exclusion:

there is a historical, if at this point disturbing, truth to the zoning off of the nonconsensorial other into sites of stupidity. The use of the term as invective, accusation, or denunciation with referential impact is relatively recent, and [. . .] compels inquiry. [. . .] When did “stupid” become a denunciation? [. . .] why did we begin to figure the other as stupid? [. . .] What has morphed into seemingly less lacerating assertions of stupidity [. . .] belongs to a sinister history, which in part it repeats, of destroying an alterity. (Stupidity 39)

This ontic stupidity, one might call it, is articulated at one point through an italic typeface and an autobiographical intrusion: “I suddenly remembered, after all these sedimenting years, how stupid I was as a child, certainly as a pupil. I could make compassionate excuses for myself, I suppose, and say I was an immigrant, I didn't understand English [. . .]” (32). Cultural tagging and identifying through testing, also a topic in Finitude's Score, suggest the political and ethical angles of the “invention of stupidity”:

The terms for evaluating the little immigrant are arrestingly incommensurable. Held back by the projected trace of passivity, she cannot pass or partake in the struggle. Her passport is stamped with cognates of debility. Somehow entry into America depends upon a state-administered imaginaire...