Avital Ronell
Avital Ronell (/ˈɑːvɪtəl roʊˈnɛl/ AH-vit-əl roh-NEL; born 15 April 1952) is an American academic who writes about continental philosophy, literary studies, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and ethics. She 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. As Jacques Derrida Professor of Philosophy, Ronell also teaches at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee.
Avital Ronell | |
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| Born | 15 April 1952 Prague, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) |
| Alma mater | Rutgers Preparatory School Middlebury College Princeton University |
| Era | 20th-/21st-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Continental philosophy, critical theory, deconstruction, existentialism, hermeneutics, post-structuralism |
| Doctoral advisor | Stanley Corngold |
Main interests | Addiction, deficiency, dictation, disappearance of authority, disease, drugs, excessive force, ethics, legal subjects, rumor, stupidity, technology, telephony, tests, trauma, war |
Notable ideas | Allotechnology, "Being-on-drugs," biophony, killer texts, narcoanalysis, supreme-suppression, applied censorship, narcossism, obliterature, toxicogeography |
| Part of a series of articles on |
| Psychoanalysis |
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She 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. Ronell is a founding editor of the journal Qui Parle.
An eleven-month investigation at New York University determined that Ronell sexually harassed a male graduate student, and the university suspended her without pay for the 2018–2019 academic year.