Avital Ronell

Who is Avital Ronell?

Avital Ronell is an American philosopher who contributes to the fields of continental philosophy, literary studies, psychoanalysis, feminist philosophy, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a University 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. As Jacques Derrida Professor of Philosophy, she teaches regularly at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee. Under the advisement of Stanley Corngold, Ronell received her Doctorate of Philosophy in German Studies from Princeton University in 1979 for a dissertation written on self-reflection in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Franz Kafka, but subsequently disclosed in interviews she had wanted Dictations: On Haunted Writing to serve as her dissertation.

Ronell is widely considered "one of the most original, bold and surprising" thinkers "in contemporary academy" and "the foremost thinker of the repressed conditions of knowledge ... with the Nietzschean audacity ... [to] probe the philosophical no-man's land." In 2009, the Centre Pompidou invited her to hold interviews "according to ... Avital Ronell" with such artists and thinkers as Werner Herzog, Judith Butler, Dennis Cooper, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Suzanne Doppelt. Her research ranges from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe dictating haunted writing and psychoanalysis, Alexander Graham Bell setting up electronic transmission systems in the early 20th century, the structure of the test in legal, pharmaceutical, artistic, scientific, Zen, and historical domains, to 20th-century literature and philosophy on stupidity, on the disappearance of authority, childhood and a diction of deficiency.