Books by Avital Ronell

Draws on current philosophy, literary history, and political events to confront the grim fact that divested boys become terrifying men.

Suspending the distinction between headline news and high theory, this book examines the diverse figures of finitude in our modernity: war, guerrilla video, trauma TV, AIDS, music, divorce, sadism, electronic tagging, rumor.

Considers Goethe as the undead core of German literary and theoretical production, the basis of a poignant code of symptoms that the author tracks and traces.

Culture defines itself, its classes, its power structures, and its economy in terms of how it allows and encourages drugs to circulate. "Madame Bovary" takes up the problems of drugs and addiction in numerous ways. This title unpacks and presents as examples of the safe and unsafe.

In Stupidity Avital Ronell explores the fading empire of cognition, modulating stupidity into idiocy, puerility, and the figure of the ridiculous philosopher instituted by Kant. Drawing on a range of writers including Dostoevsky, Schlegel, Musil, and Wordsworth, Stupidity investigates ignorance, dumbfounded-ness, and the limits of reason.

What do philosophy and literary studies have to learn from each other? How does Ronell place her work within gender studies? What does psychoanalysis have to contribute to contemporary thought? This title is a self-reflection of the worlds and walls against which Avital Ronell crashed.

Deals with the war perpetrated by highly determined reactionary forces on science and research. This work explores the crucial operations of an uncontestable legitimating machine. It offers a tour-de-force reading of legal, pharmaceutical, artistic, scientific, Zen, and historical grids that depend upon different types of testability.