21 Facts About Avital Ronell

Avital Ronell is an American academic who writes about continental philosophy, literary studies, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and ethics.

Avital Ronell is a professor in the humanities and in the departments of Germanic languages and literature and comparative literature at New York University, where she co-directs the trauma and violence transdisciplinary studies program.

Avital Ronell has written about such topics as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone; the structure of the test in legal, pharmaceutical, artistic, scientific, Zen, and historical domains; stupidity; the disappearance of authority; childhood; and deficiency.

Avital Ronell is a founding editor of the journal Qui Parle.

Avital Ronell was born in Prague to Israeli diplomats and was a performance artist before entering academia.

Avital Ronell attended Rutgers Preparatory School and graduated in 1970.

Avital Ronell 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.

Avital Ronell 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 Holderlin, and Franz Kafka.

Avital Ronell became a close friend of poet and novelist Pierre Alferi, Derrida's son, who later influenced Avital Ronell in the titling of several of her major works.

In 2009, the Centre Pompidou invited Avital Ronell to hold an interview series with such artists and thinkers as Werner Herzog, Judith Butler, Dennis Cooper, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Suzanne Doppelt.

Avital 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.

Avital 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.

Avital Ronell reads Conversations with Eckermann as a return from beyond the grave of the great master of German literature and science.

Avital Ronell's task entails a reading practice where the analysis of a text must investigate the endless movement towards closure in dictation.

Avital 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.

Avital Ronell takes as her point of departure Nietzsche's position that, as long as culture has existed, it has supported and inspired addiction.

Avital Ronell develops an argument investigating destructive desires that coincide with the war on drugs and with the very addiction to drugs which the war claims to want to vanquish.

Avital Ronell asks why the twentieth century stakes so much on a diction of deficiency.

Zeugmatically yoking the slang of pop culture with philosophical analysis, forcing the confrontation of high literature and technology or drug culture, Avital Ronell produces sentences that startle, irritate, illuminate.

The letter was criticized for suggesting that Avital Ronell should be excused on the basis of the significance of her academic contributions and for imputing a "malicious intention" to Reitman.

Avital Ronell returned to teaching at NYU in the fall of 2019.