3 Quotes & Sayings By Avital Ronell

Avital Ronell is a professor of German, Comparative Literature, and English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of nine books, including The Telephone Book (which won the PEN/Ralph Manheim Award in 1997), The Telephone Book 2 (the subject of a major retrospective at the Center for Contemporary Art in New York), and Introducing Derrida (co-authored with David Wood); her most recent book is Memoirs of the Future: On the Nature of Memory (with Jonathan Littell). She has also written numerous essays on contemporary German literature. Ronell's work has been translated into ten languages Read more

Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, Interview, Ploughshares, Artforum, The Nation, Modern Painters, and many other publications. She lives in Berkeley, California.

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To make things 'perfectly clear' is reactionary and stupefying. The real is not perfectly clear. Avital Ronell
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Now, what if Others were encapsulated in Things, in a way that Being towards Things were not ontologically severable, in Heidegger's terms, from Being towards Others? What if the mode of Dasein of Others were to dwell in Things, and so forth? In the same light, then, what if the Thing were a Dublette of the Self, and not what is called the Other? Or more radically still, what if the Self were in some fundamental way becoming a Xerox copy, a duplicate, of the Thing in its assumed essence? . Avital Ronell