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. As a student 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.
Ronell is a founding editor of the journal Qui Parle and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace. In 1983, she wrote one of the first critical inquiries to theorize the AIDS crisis, and in 1992 a critique of the March 2nd police brutality against Rodney King which Artforum subsequently deemed "the most illuminating essay on TV and video ever written." She received the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Fellowship from 1981 to 1983, the American Cultures Fellowship in 1991, a Research Fellow Award in 1993, and the University of California President's Fellowship from 1995 to '96. She 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 one of two keynote addresses at the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2012.
"Kafka's Before the Law: The Law of the Father http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifz0m9PBD9E" (2011) 15:16
"Kafka's Before the Law: The Law of the Father http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifz0m9PBD9E" (2011) 13:10
