Avital Ronell

The Law of Genre

I will not mix genres. I repeat: genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix them. Now suppose I let these utterances resonate all by themselves. Suppose: I abandon them to their fate, I set free their random virtualities and turn them over to my audience-or, rather, to your audience, to your auditory grasp, to whatever mobility they retain and you bestow upon them to engender effects of all kinds without my having to stand behind them. I merely said, and then repeated: genres are not to be mixed; I will not mix them.

On the Misery of Theory without Poetry: Heidegger’s Reading of Hölderlin’s “Andenken”

The article considers the tendency among young theorists to forget or repress poetry. As symptom, the aberrant dissociation of poetry from theory reflects an increasing technicization, not to say impoverishment, of critical language. The theoretical elders, on the other hand, clung to poetic insight with the urgency of hunger. Focusing on tropes of greeting, celebration, and sending, I explore an exemplary instance in the encounter between poetry and thought—when Heidegger met Holderlin. Still, Heidegger’s appropriation of poetry leaves a violent residue, a kind of critical warping that has remained largely uninterrogated. I turn to a moment in the unprecedented testimony of Holderlin’s late thought in which the poet names the modern experience of mourning. While Heidegger’s later work appears to be characterized by a similar tonality of mourning, Holderlin’s thought of finitude is often more joyous and affirmative. I zero in on the figure of “dark-skinned women” in the poem “Andenken” to show how philoso...

The Experimental Disposition: Nietzsche's Discovery of America (Or, Why the Present Administration Sees Everything in Terms of a Test)

We do not always know how to calculate the importance of a work. In some cases, there is nothing even to guarantee that the work will arrive. Some works seem to set an ETA—there is a sense that it will take them years to make their arrangements, overcome the obstacles of an unprotected journey, get past the false reception desks blocking their paths. In the more assured and seductive version, these works follow the itinerary of Walter Benjamin’s secret rendezvous—targeting the geheime Verabredung that a work has made with the singularity of a destination: in the form, perhaps, of a future reader. The reader or receptor from the future assumes the responsibility of being addressed, of signing for the work when it finally arrives, helping it originate. Yet, little tells us how many hits a work will have taken on its way or whether we will be there to receive it. Perhaps the work will be prevented from showing up at the appointed time, but some works barrel toward their destination, causing a lot of trouble for a lot of Daseins. Heidegger once said that it can take 200 years to undo the damage inflicted by certain works—I think he was evaluating Plato. For my part, I cannot tell whether The Gay Science has arrived or even, really, where it was

Proving Grounds: On Nietzsche and the Test Drive

The figure of the test--as something that permeates modern existence but still lacks determination--belongs to what Nietzsche saw as our age of experimentation. Science itself invites us to read the scene of experimentation, its fractured promises and articulated procedures, the historical renewals, stalls or question marks, which the experimental disposition has generated. Often we are encouraged to seek answers, provisional or regulative, in terms that have been traditionally reserved for literary theory or a theory of signification. But there are also conceptual tendencies, largely unchallenged, that seek hermeneutic prodding. Whether we are canvassing the internal seams of scientific grammars or scanning effects of decisive drafts that describe an outer domain of signification, the way science produces hierarchical schemas affects every walk, or stumble, of life. What is it that links the recondite behaviors of lab culture to drug experimentation, experimental theater, thought experiments, political acts, or what Nietzsche floats as the pervasiveness of an experimental disposition?

The Testamentary Whimper

Somewhere between the imperatives of reality testing and the interrogatory title ‘‘What Is Called Thinking?’’ Jean-François Lyotard institutes phrase regimens—events that surpass the holding capacity of a linguistic act. 1 Here, language and proof have met their reciprocal limits. Exploring the failure of speculative thought to supply relief to victims of colossal as well as minute, unclassified historical grief, phrase regimens go to the heart of injurious wrongdoing. They underscore the weakness of evidence and of probative restitutional acts. ‘‘A wrong,’’ writes Lyotard, ‘‘is a damage accompanied by the loss of the means to prove the damage.’’ 2 Prior to the confirmation that a right has been infringed upon, and earlier still than the recognition of the human, Lyotard inquires about the impossibility of human rights. Beyond hypothesis yet in some cases legally short of proof, the desolating ordeal to which Lyotard addresses this inquiry concerns evasive turns of law when called on to perform justice. On the one hand, Lyotard’s work comes to the aid of those who, unable to manipulate the rules of cognitive discourse, are left stranded by speculative thinking; those who phrase according to the rules of other genres are

Ach! The History of a Complaint

Tracing genealogies of theater and philosophy, Avital Ronell demonstrates that the two have been, from the beginning, intimately intertwined—philosophy and theater, both begin with tragedy. With tragedy comes complaint and, here, Ronell, through performance, explicitly links the “personal” with the philosophical by issuing a series of complaints that are at once humorous and deadly serious. The Faustian “Ach!” emerges as the inaugural complaint that is to become the backbone of Ronell’s philosophical work. Informed by Germanist and philosophical cultures, this rich and energetic rant rehabilitates complaining and groaning, suggesting that the Heideggerian Schreiben/Schrei—the cri/ecrit—may, in fact, be the foundation not only for writing, but for philosophizing. Although it sounds neither graceful nor comfortable, complaining is still better than complying.

Philosophical Proving Grounds

Philosophy’s disavowal of performance is taken up as a dominant mode of disciplinary practice in which gendered dimensions take center stage. Responding to the question of philosophy’s paternal residue, Avital Ronell traces a genealogy in which “patriarchy requires speculation” across the history of philosophy that problematizes a straight reading of philosophy’s paternalistic performances as she reminds us the disturbance is always internal to the text. Turning to a consideration of her own professional life and practice, Ronell remarks upon her deployment of performance as a strategy for introducing “a different program of utterance,” as a way of moving beyond the margins. Ronell, the “inventress of the performance-lecture,” discusses both how performance philosophizes and how philosophy performs.

Teacher's Pet

Normally I live and write in dog time. The disadvantages of laggard pacing add up, but the slowdown, I tell myself, permits me to cover Derridean expanses, without cutting too many corners. The gnawing attention to detail, when you live and write in dog time, can be irritating to some Daseins. In my work, I often take my cues from an inherited twofer, Kafka and Derrida; in their manner, I seize on the most miniscule disturbance, going after the mote or speck, the trace or marginal index, avoiding the spectacular, in order to find a loose thread or forgotten clue. Sometimes I luxuriate: I take a hermeneutic victory lap around a problem or grapple with a cluster of philosophemes, chasing down a metaphysical loophole. I have graduated to the point where I can run out the Socratic clock and go overtime, worrying the most minute speck on which our existential and phenomenological destinies appear to hang. Today’s assignment requires me, however, to adopt the temporality of one of Musil’s measly flies — stupid and stupefied, panicked by the hopeless promise of the window pane, it tends to be speeded up by exigency and blindness. I hope nonetheless to get or give a buzz. Let me get to it, then, and, unleashing the dog, shortening my time here, I’ll telescope one or two facets of Derrida’s legacy, what still bears constituting, though his oeuvre merits a larger futural inventory than I can provide in less than some buzzwords or a thousand and one encrypted pages. In a word, Derrida has taught us to be on the lookout for what lies beneath philosophical radars, eludes the phenomenological capture. He had us attentive to evental edges that had no proper home base or accountability in the great systems of