Avital Ronell. On Stupidity. 2000 1/10

http://www.egs.edu/ Avital Ronnell, talking about the book Stupidity, the philosophy of Jean Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Lacan, Freud, the unworthy, minoritized, excluded, the invention of idiocy, irony, disruptions, drugs, crack, powers and Großmächte of the history, economy, violence, studidity. Public open video lecture session given at the European Graduate School, Media and Communication Studies Department Program in 2000. EGS, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Europe. http://www.egs.edu/

Avital Ronell is Professor of German, comparative literature, and English at New York University, where she directs the Research in Trauma and Violence project. She is a member of the faculty of the European Graduate School, interested in Literary and other discourses, feminism, philosophy, technology and media, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, performance art, and has also written as a literary critic, a feminist, and philosopher.

Ronell was born in Prague to Israeli diplomats and was a performance artist before entering academia. She received a B.A. in 1974 from Middlebury, studied with Jacob Taubes at the Hermeneutic Institute at the Free University of Berlin, received her Ph.D. under the advisement of Stanley Corngold at Princeton University in 1979. Avital Ronell taught at the University of California at Berkeley from 1984-1995 and at New York University from 1995 to the present. She served as Chair of the Department of German from Spring 1997 to Spring 2005. She taught an annual seminar in Literature & Philosophy at NYU with Professor Jacques Derrida and has taught with Professor Helene Cixous at Université of Paris VIII. She regularly teaches at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and in Mexico. She was invited by the Humanities Council to offer a seminar at Princeton University in spring 2006.

She has produced English translations of Derrida's work.Her books and works include: The Uber Reader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell Ed. Diane Davis. 2006; 2005 The Test Drive, 2001 Stupidity, 1998 Finitude's Score Essays for the End of the Millennium , 1993 Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania, 1993 Dictations: On Haunted Writing, 1989 Telephone Book Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, 1989 The Ear of the Other, trans., Jacques Derrida, and Dictations: On Haunted Writing 1986.

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• Avital
• Ronell
• irony
• stupidity
• derrida
• language
• philosophy
• law
• kafka
• egs
• european
• graduate
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• saas
• fee
• switzerland

[gbien]

"castrating harlot", "strumpet" !?!?!

you are totally allowed to discount her discourse, but when you use misogynist phrases like the above, it becomes obvious that you are threatened by a woman thinker - thereby completely discrediting any arguements you may ever make

fuck you!

[deadlyvengeance222]

Don't be seduced by the siren song of this Derridean strumpet, her discourse is so much tosh. Beneath it lurks the teeth of a castrating harlot-- The teeth of a Deconstructionist elitist, which only defer the meaning of castration to the point that it agonizes all men into a luxurious and liberating textual suicide

[dendryite]

Why is this called a "talk" when she merely reads?

[TheLungpipes]

@Nusq7 Ironically I think she would have a precisely opposite opinion to you. I interpret this short lecture as labeling individuals stupid, when they believe their choice of language contains a sense of concreteness or responsibility. This actually sets the stage for a more rigorous social discourse on arguments put forth to the public. Making you points with a clearer more concrete language may be more convenient for the general public but that doesn't necessarily mean it will help further..

[Nusq7]

Rubbish babbling... food for those lazy minds who just enjoy deconstructive play with words! no concreteness, no responsibility, total stupidity!

[adaimantus77]

i agree with deadlyvengeance. men who feel threatened by Derridean strumpets or, as happens increasingly frequently, are actually threatened by them, require a vocabulary with which to resist them. once during my years at cornell, three Derridean strumpets cornered me at the dining room table, and in the course of interrogating me, drove me, a strong and proud man, to tears. they raped my mind with groundless accusations that i was a thought criminal. never let them get power over you.

[kchamps]

she is my favorite UNthinker.

[dionnewarpig]

Avital Ronell is absolutely amazing. Thank you for this.

[godwiththelyre]

Where would we be w/out the Falstaffs and Leporellos of the world? Haha

[godwiththelyre]

Yes, it is to our misfortune, isn't it? :) It's also to our benefit! I never really appreciated it before hearing this talk and the one by Jacques Derrida about "bêtise". In his lecture, he seems to conclude that it is part of what it means to be human. I think every great artist has recognized this, too.