Avital Ronell

Ronell is a founding editor of the journal Qui Parle. In 2018 an eleven-month investigation at New York University determined that Ronell had sexually harassed a male graduate student, and the university suspended her without pay for the 2018–2019 academic year.

Avital Ronell studied at Princeton University and Rutgers Preparatory School. The recorded working language is English and German. The field of work recorded is gender studies. Laing is recorded as an influence. Employment is recorded with European Graduate School and New York University.

• Region — Western philosophy • Era — 20th-/21st-century philosophy • Name — Avital Ronell • Born — 15 April 1952 • Birthplace — Prague, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) • Alma Mater — Rutgers Preparatory School Middlebury College Princeton University • School Tradition — Continental philosophy, critical theory, deconstruction, existentialism, hermeneutics, post-structuralism • Main Interests — Addiction, deficiency, dictation, disappearance of authority, disease, drugs, excessive force, ethics, legal subjects, rumor, stupidity, technology, telephony, tests, trauma, war • Notable Ideas — Killer-texts, narcoanalysis • Doctoral Advisor — Stanley Corngold

Avital Ronell was born in Prague to Israeli diplomats and was a performance artist before entering academia. She emigrated to New York in 1956. She attended Rutgers Preparatory School and graduated in 1970. As a young immigrant, Ronell later stated, she frequently encountered xenophobia and antisemitism. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Middlebury College, and subsequently studied with Jacob Taubes and Hans-Georg Gadamer at the Hermeneutic Institute at the Free University of Berlin. She received her doctorate of philosophy in German studies at Princeton University in 1979, where her advisor was Stanley Corngold and her dissertation concerned self-reflection in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Franz Kafka. When she met Jacques Derrida at a symposium and he asked her name, she introduced herself as "Metaphysics", and he later wrote that he "found this little game rather clever." She subsequently studied with Derrida and Hélène Cixous in Paris. She went on to help introduce Derrida to American audiences by translating his essay on Kafka's "Before the Law", his essay on the law of gender/genre, his lectures on Nietzsche's relation to biography, and a number of other works. Ronell became a close friend of poet and novelist Pierre Alféri, Derrida's son, who later influenced Ronell in the titling of several of her major works. Alféri moved in with Ronell as a teenager following the revelation of his father's adultery. A professor at the University of Virginia for a short time period, Ronell claims she was fired because she taught continental philosophy and "went to the gym on a regular basis: [her] colleagues were shocked by this—it didn't correspond to their image of an academic woman!" She joined the comparative literature faculty at the University of California, Riverside and then at University of California, Berkeley where she taught with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy and Judith Butler. She was a close friend of the writer Kathy Acker and identified with Acker's fiction, saying they were "destined to each other." In 1996, she moved to New York University, where she co-taught a course with Jacques Derrida until 2004. In 2009, the Centre Pompidou invited Ronell to hold an interview series with such artists and thinkers as Werner Herzog, Judith Butler, Dennis Cooper, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Suzanne Doppelt. Also in 2009, she began co-teaching courses with Slavoj Žižek. In 2010, François Noudelmann also co-taught with her, and co-curated the Walls and Bridges program with her in 2011. Ronell served as Chair to the Division of Philosophy and Literature and to the Division of Comparative Literature at the Modern Language Association from 1993 to 1996, and gave a keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2012. She identifies as queer.

Ronell argues for "the necessity of the unintelligible." In an account of the 1992 Rodney King beating, Ronell argued that the idiom of the "perfectly clear" recurrently serves as a code for the white lie. Instead of referring to herself as the author of a text, she has sometimes described herself as a "signatory," "operator," or even "television." She sometimes focuses on thinkers who clean up after other thinkers, arguing that what she calls "sanitation departments" sometimes undermine the work they are tidying up after.

Ronell investigates one of Goethe's most influential works, Conversations with Eckermann, which he did not write but instead dictated to a young companion, Johannes Peter Eckermann. Heralded by Nietzsche as "the best German book," Conversations with Eckermann contains Goethe's last thoughts about art, poetry, politics, religion, and the fate of German literature and philosophy. Ronell reads Conversations with Eckermann as a return from beyond the grave of the great master of German literature and science. Ronell starts by exploring Goethe's focus on "a certain domain of immateriality—the nonsubstantializable apparitions... [of] weather forecasting... ghosts, dreams, and some forms of hidden, telepathic transmissions." Ronell renames the Goethe effect what she calls "killer-texts" and describes the effect as the textual machination destructive of values, of the "worthier (Werther, from The Sorrows of Young Werther)." The first part opens on Freud's debt to Goethe and reprints the frontispiece of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Ronell names Goethe the "secret councilor (Geheimrat)" of Freud and already anticipates her work on the Rat Man in the third footnote where she alludes to the "suppository logic, inserting the vital element into the narrative of the other." In the first section Ronell aims to "attune [her] ears to the telepathic orders that Goethe's phantom transmitted to Freud by a remote control system. In general, Dictations: On Haunted Writing traces the closure without end of influence's computation. Ronell's task entails a reading practice where the analysis of a text must investigate the endless movement towards closure in dictation. Ronell thus practices what is called anasemic reading, a practice developed by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, in which the psychoanalyst traces the textual metaphors, rhetorical structures, and linguistic associations of a writer/patient. "Part Two" presents a case of literary parasitism between Eckermann and Goethe, and opens at the scene of Goethe's table in Weimar "the eleventh of September 1828, at two o'clock." In other words, Ronell re-imagines the scene that Eckermann illustrates at the beginning and ending of Conversations with Eckermann. Ronell starts to address the fiction of the writer as a particularly admirable human being and argues for the necessary passivity of the writer as a human being. Ronell also troubles the notion of a body of work as a totality. Ronell remaps earlier arguments about feminine appropriation in terms of writing, for Eckermann, which "involves recuperating something 'for myself,' for the most part instinctively; it entails repetitive acts of appropriation." Dictations: On Haunted Writing explores how the work of writing in general adheres to a call dictated from elsewhere, a call formative of desire.

Ronell questions the operations that such ordinary objects as the telephone and book dictate. She signs the text as the operator of the switchboard alongside Richard Eckersley, operator of design, and Michael Jensen, operator of compositor. Eckersley's design departs from his "typographic subtlety and restraint" towards a computer design, marked by new page-making software programs to interpret the text typographically. Eckersley dislodges the text from presumed conventional settings and shifts the focus of reading with inexplicable gaps, displacements between sentences and paragraphs, mirror imaging of pages facing one another, words blurred to the point of indecipherability, and a regular exaggeration of negative line spacing, spilling sentences over into each other. Pushing the limits of an ordinary "Table of Contents" or "Footnotes," the operators set up a "Directory Assistance," in which chapters appear as reference indexes, and a yellow pages entitled "Classified," in which footnotes appear as soliciting advertisements. Following "A User's Manual," the text begins as if the reader answers a call: "And yet, you're saying yes, almost automatically, suddenly, sometimes irreversibly." Ronell makes clear that The Telephone Book is a philosophical project on questions concerning the telephone, the call, and the answering machines: "always incomplete, always unreachable, forever promising at once its essence and its existence, philosophy identifies itself finally with this promise, which is to say, with its own unreachability."

Research assistant and friend, Shireen R.K. Patell, helped bring Finitude's Score to fruition. Finitude's Score collects a series of reflections on the fragile memory left at the close of the millennium. It looks into the projects responsible for devastating humanity and a thinking of the future. Ronell asks why the twentieth century stakes so much on a diction of deficiency. For Ronell, it says that, "we have been depleted." Ronell traces the relegitimization of war, the philosophical status of the rumor, the questionable force of the police, the test sites of technology, the corporeal policies of disease and a thoroughgoing reconstitution of the subject of law. In sum, Finitude's Score reads the desire to finish once and for all, to be done with issues definitively, as the everlasting legacy of the Western logos.

In September 2017, a student, later identified as her male former graduate student Nimrod Reitman, filed a complaint in New York University's Title IX office accusing Ronell of sexual harassment, sexual assault, stalking, and retaliation over the span of three years, when she served as his doctoral supervisor. In May 2018, the university found Ronell responsible for sexual harassment and suspended her for the 2018–19 academic year. Ronell never admitted to sexual harassment, claiming that both parties' emails contained "exaggerated expressions of tenderness" because they are "both gay," not because she was sexually harassing him. On August 16, 2018, Reitman filed a lawsuit against Ronell and the university, alleging sexual harassment, sexual assault, and stalking. Several major figures in the areas of feminism, queer theory, philosophy, literature, and history, including Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Joan Scott, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others published a letter dated May 11, 2018 to NYU written in defense of Ronell. Additionally, Lisa Duggan and Chris Kraus published blog posts denying Ronell's sexual harassment charges. The letter was subsequently criticized for suggesting that Ronell should be excused on the basis of the significance of her academic contributions and for imputing a "malicious intention" to Reitman. The #MeToo movement came under scrutiny as feminist scholars continued to support Ronell, despite the charges of sexual misconduct. Butler later regretted some wording of the letter and regretted implying "that Ronell’s status and reputation earn her differential treatment of any kind." Žižek argued that Ronell's years long sexual harassment of Reitman was "a series of acts of eccentricity." Duggan called Ronell's emails to Reitman "practices of queer intimacy." Providing historical and institutional context, an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books argued that Ronell's inappropriate conduct was intimately linked to the power that she wields within the humanities as a "theory star." Political scientist Corey Robin noted that "Ronell's largest claims were on his time, on his life, on his attention and energy". Writer and critic Andrea Long Chu in The Chronicle of Higher Education described her experiences as a teaching assistant for Ronell at NYU, which made her "believe her accuser". Noting that Ronell seemed to have felt "persecuted" even while teaching, Andrea Long Chu argued that Ronell's desire for Reitman to make her "feel loved" stemmed not from feeling "entitle[d]" by "status" to "fuck" students, but, on the contrary, because "the relentless misogyny of the university" still seemed present to her: [E]ven when she does have status and power and celebrity, she still thinks of herself as a vulnerable grad student in need of care and protection, ie, she thinks she still is the person Reitman is saying he is. (italics in original) Ronell returned to teaching at NYU in the fall of 2019. Her course, "Unsettled Scores: Theories of Grievance, Stuckness, & Boundary Troubles," was advertised on campus with a flyer asking: "How have we secretly internalized penitentiary structures?" Ronell's return caused protests and frequent demands by student groups for her termination, such as the petition circulated by the graduate-student workers' union, carrying some 600 signatures, which called upon NYU to fire Ronell, a demand that was endorsed by NYU's Student Government general assembly. In February 2020, she took a semester-long leave of absence. As of fall 2023, Ronell continues to teach both undergraduate and graduate courses at NYU.

Avital Ronell is recorded as psychotherapist, philosopher, translator, university teacher and literary critic. Ronell studied at Princeton University and Rutgers Preparatory School.