Avital Ronell

I n e s s e n t I a l s o l I d a r I t y i n t r o d u c t i o n : a r h e ), 1963-Inessential solidarity : rhetoric and foreigner relations / Diane Davis. p. cm. -(Pittsburgh series in composition, literacy, and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8229-6122-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. English language-Rhetoric. 2. Language and culture. 3. Critical theory. I. Title. PE1408.D2384 2010 808' .042-dc22 2010020950 Davis FM ••i-xiv.indd 4 8/30/10 11:55:14 AM To Mom and Dadfor your enduring courage and your gigantic hearts i n t r o d u c t i o n : a r h e

"The Rhetorical Afterlife of Photographic Evidence: Roland Barthes, Avital Ronell, Roni Horn" relates what photographs are to what they’re said to be and to how they’re said to be this what. I argue that photographs are vulnerable to and dependent upon rhetorical constitution, not only for their sense, but also for their reference. But rather than establish the rhetorical life of photography, rather than only show how photographs become what they’re said to be, I also show how photographs reveal the limits of the rhetorical life. In the structure of photographic reference I discover a temporal predicament, one that the rhetorical life neither overcomes nor avoids, but which constitutes its very urgency.

Barthes’ numerous writings on photography, an artwork by Horn entitled Another Water (the River Thames, for Example), and an essay by Ronell on the videotaped beating of Rodney King, “TraumaTV: Twelve Steps Beyond the Pleasure Principle”—these works stage the rhetorical life of photography, but they also make it reveal the temporal structure of the evidentiary as such. Barthes claims that every photograph is irreducibly and essentially evidence of what-has-been because every photograph is, as he says in Camera Lucida, “literally an emanation of the referent.” His own efforts to secure this essence, however, are anything but secure. For Barthes “photography” names a scandal, a trauma, and a crisis of evidence. That there is evidence means that there is time, death, and obliteration; photography says this, reiterates this—while also denying it. Photographs show survival, vividly, while also granting access to my no longer having access to what-has-been. The rhetorical afterlife of photographic evidence refers to the difference between these two times: the time of the evident and the time of evidence: the evident (what I see, what is manifest) withdraws when I see it as evidence, as a trace leading elsewhere.

Further, I argue that whenever Barthes tries to distinguish between oblivion and survival he performs the photographic predicament: he writes of ruin in order to preserve a relation to it, but these preservative efforts remark and engage the force of ruin. The Rhetorical Afterlife of Photographic Evidence… shows how Barthes stages this predicament and shows further how Ronell and Horn, each in her own way, put it to work.

In the summer of 2018 a scandal broke out at New York University concerning the way a senior literary critic, Avital Ronell, had exploited a graduate student, Nimrod Reitman. This paper examines this scandal in the general context of academic literary criticism as it developed in the third quarter of the 20th century, eventuating in the phenomenon of the “star” critic. Ronell is such a star. Stardom is one thing, however, and is specific to the particular conditions of literary criticism. Abuse is a different phenomenon, tied to personal behavior and informal local norms. The paper includes a close analysis of a short article Ronell wrote on the occasion of the death of Jacques Derrida, her teacher and mentor.

Je m’intéresse, dans cette thèse, à la manière dont la nudité féminine participe d'une expérience hégémonique de l'image. Mon postulat est que la nudité féminine occupe dans les productions culturelles contemporaines une place privilégiée, une fonction bien spécifique : elle se présente comme le support d’un désir épistémologique masculin, phallique, blanc, et assure la promotion et le maintien de relations de pouvoir sexistes et racistes. Figure d’aliénation, ruse de la sexualité, elle offre paradoxalement la promesse de la vérité, fait miroiter le fantasme, le secret de la libération par le sexe. La nudité féminine est une image cadrée de telle sorte qu'elle met en jeu le ≪ savoir du sexe ≫, plus précisément le désir de connaître la vérité du sexe de la femme. Admettant ainsi l’usage détourné de la nudité féminine, attendu qu'elle sert d'instrument à une pensée et des pratiques dominantes, cette thèse problématise sa fonction épistémologique et son rôle dans la construction identitaire et ontologique des femmes. En ce sens, cette thèse pose les questions suivantes : Comment opère la domination de l’image? À quel ordre de savoir la nudité féminine profite-t-elle? Quelle pensée cette image permet ou interdit-elle? De quels récits nous détourne-t-elle? Et en quoi concerne-t-elle les femmes? Envisageant la nudité féminine comme une ≪ mise en scène ≫, cette thèse avance en interrogeant, dans un premier temps, la récurrence de cette scène à travers une sélection d’œuvres littéraires et visuelles, et les paramètres qui font de la femme dénudée une image fascinante et une expérience esthétique hégémonique. En accord avec une méthodologie féministe, élaborée depuis les pensées de Catherine Malabou, Rosi Braidotti, Avital Ronell, Judith Butler, Francoise Collin, Anne Dufourmantelle, Zadie Smith et Martine Delvaux, je procède à une lecture critique des travaux de philosophie et de théorie esthétique qui se réclament d’une neutralité quant à la question sexuelle au nom d’un idéal universaliste ou humaniste. Je cherche, dans un second temps, à mettre de l'avant des mises en scène qui répondent d’une exigence à féminiser l’image, à faire entrer en compte la sexualité et le désir des femmes dans l’expérience esthétique. Ainsi, je repère à travers les analyses des œuvres de Marguerite Duras, David Lynch, Kathy Acker, Deana Lawson et Jamaica Kincaid diverses mises en scène et configurations de cadres donnant forme à un espace ou la matérialité de la sexualité féminine peut se penser. Car enfin, l'impératif de sexualiser la pensée et le désir, et d'envisager la pensée comme désir (du) féminin, détermine le trajet de cette thèse.

This article, forthcoming in Das Fremde und Das Eigene (Röhrig Universitätsverlag) addresses the mixing of self and other,  sexuality and philosophy and literature and irony in Early German Romanticism. It concludes with a thesis about the necessity of another approach to what Friedrich Schlegel called the "authentic language" (die reel Sprache), i.e.," error, madness and simpleminded stupidity." In a tradition from Mallarmé to Bataille, Blanchot, Paul de Man to Avital Ronell's recent book 'Stupidity', the article argues for the necessity to take the risk of giving over to the "authentic language", rather than always trying, as the dominant philosophical tradition has always done, to contain and control it, and defend itself against it.

No consideration of Bruce Lee -or indeed of the beyond of Bruce Lee -can overlook his importance as a muse, an inspiration, and an educator. I have followed the likes of Meaghan Morris and Davis Miller before in foregrounding this dimension of Lee's legacies, and want to do so again in this paper, because of the fundamental and perennial significance of this topic for studies of Lee, of martial arts, and indeed of culture tout court. So, in this paper, I return to key examples and instances of Bruce Lee (and) pedagogy, in order to set out and then to move beyond the established ground, and into some vexed debates about philosophy, ideology and cultural translation. So, the paper begins with a discussion of Bruce Lee's philosophy of Jeet Kune Do, before moving into reconsiderations of the relations between film and philosophy, culture and ideology, as well as politics and ethics. It draws Lee's oeuvre and intervention into relations with (other) Western popularisers of Zen, Taoism and Buddhism, as well as with thinkers such as

The desire for certainty has often pushed philosophy and the arts towards a blind acceptance of the superiority of science as a form of knowledge, or to seek some unvarying truth by distinguishing falsehood and error according to the criterion of exactitude. Not only has this constrained their own self-affirmation and diminished the joy of experimentation, but it has led these disciplines down the path of a bad kind of repetition, where expression becomes the means by which to endlessly test identities and prove certainties. But can we not imagine some other kind of pursuit of knowledge and sense, linked instead to uncertainty and to the unknown that allows the emergence of singularity? Perhaps we ought begin to heed the call that comes from some other kind of outside, and that manifests itself as symptoms of pain on our bodies. An act worthy of their violence would be one that takes care of stupidity as the wound that produced it, which will, in its turn, condition the style of writing.

In this interview, conducted by e-mail between December 14 and 22, 2018, Camille
Paglia talks to Gunter Axt about North American intellectual tradition and some of her
main theoretical references, such as media theorist Marshall McLuhan. the American
literary critics Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown, as well as Northrop Frye, Erving
Goffman and Erich Neumann. She also discusses Marxism, Post-structuralism, Simone
de Beauvoir’s and Arnold Hauser’s legacy. The interview also addresses the so-called
Queer Theory, political correctness, and the movement of Free Speech in universities.
She comments about her meeting with Jordan Peterson and her impressions of his ideas.
Finally, Camille talks about her impressions of the recent academic scandal involving
scholars Judith Butler and Avital Ronell, in the United States.

Alejandra Castillo dixit:
En los tiempos de la indexación y la certificación continua, ya no hay más escritura en la Universidad.
Ni siquiera en aquellas disciplinas que tenían en la letra su filiación, herencia y legado.
La filosofía no es excepción. La escritura se ha vuelto transparente para la filosofía. La rapidez de la respuesta exigida por la productividad universitaria hace de la escritura en filosofía un medio que parece no tener importancia a la hora de presentar un tema o exponer un problema.
Más abecedario que escritura, sin duda.
La retirada de la escritura de las humanidades es un síntoma de la cuantificación neoliberal en la Universidad, su formato es el paper y
su circulación busca validación en la evaluación y la competencia. La lógica que acompaña a estas contiendas evaluativas no es otra que una
“tecnología del testeo”. Haríamos mal en olvidar que esta particular tecnología no deja de anudar la violencia —en distintos formatos y diversas dosis— con la búsqueda de la verdad. Expuesto así el vínculo entre verdad y violencia, pareciera ser cierto que todo régimen de saber se instituye a través de una tecnología del testeo.
Entonces, el problema no está en la tecnología en sí, sino en dónde situamos el límite entre lo que ataca a un cuerpo y lo que lo hace vivir.
Nacida en Praga, en 1952, la filósofa estadounidense Avital Ronell ha hecho de ese nexo entre violencia y verdad el lugar donde se incoa su trabajo de escritura. A contrapelo del desierto escriturario que caracteriza el paisaje de las humanidades contemporáneas, Ronell hace de la escritura un cuerpo afectivo desde el que se perturban y alteran los márgenes de la filosofía.
Su escritura, por ello, deja la luminosa transparencia del comando indexado para acercarse más a un tejido que hilo a hilo va tramando diversos archivos, doctos o profanos, que vibran, tocan y afectan.
En un continuo roce de zonas, o barrios simbólicos, la filosofía dice lo que sabe decir.

The following conversation aims to trace the role of gesture and gestural thinking in Rebecca Schneider's work, and to tease out the specific gestural ethics which arises in her writings. In particular, Schneider thinks about the politics of citation and reiteration for an ethics of call and response that emerges in the gesture of the hail. Both predicated upon a fundamentally ethical relationality and susceptible to ideological investment, the hail epitomizes the operations of the " both/and " —a logic of conjunction that structures and punctuates the history of thinking on gesture from the classic Brechtian tactic in which performance both replays and counters conditions of subjugation to Alexander Weheliye's reclamation of this tactic for black and critical ethnic studies. The gesture of the hail will lead us, then, to the gesture of protest in the Black Lives Matter movement. The hands that are held up in the air both replay (and respond to) the standard pose of surrender in the face of police authority and call for a future that might be different. Schneider's ethics of response-ability thus rethinks relationality as something that always already anticipates and perpetually reinaugurates possibilities for response. Lucia Ruprecht: Rebecca, my first question addresses how gestures in your work travel through time, and how these travels are inflected by a spectrum of political agendas. In The Explicit Body in Performance (1997) you write about a 1990 piece by the Native American group Spiderwoman Theater called Reverb-ber-ber-rations. Thinking through this performance's subversive mimicry of

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[Book Review Article]

The Boundaries of the Book: Material and Immatériaux
Kiff Bamford

Spacing Philosophy: Lyotard and the Idea of the Exhibition by Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Berlin: Sternberg, 2019, 252 pp., 4 b. & w. illus. paperback, £16.00

Material Noise: Reading Theory as Artist’s Book by Anne M. Royston, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019, 224 pp., 16 b. & w. illus., hardback, £28.00

This is a preprint of an article accepted for publication in Art History © 2020 Association for Art History.

This chapter reads Luce Irigaray’s critical description of the maternal-feminine and the profoundly vulnerable nature of man’s limits in phallocentrism with Avital Ronell’s analysis of the maternal cartography of the battlefield and the home front in the Gulf War prosecuted by the United States against Iraq in 1992 (Ronell, 1994). For Ronell, perhaps all wars and all forms of paranoid aggression are motivated by a desire to control the space of the maternal body. To overcome paranoid aggression, Ronell calls for a relinquishment of the concept of proper place and an effort to generate an atopical community where the other is genuinely anticipated. In contrast, I draw on Irigaray and Aristotle to argue that the effort to escape the violent conflation of the maternal with space requires a concept of place. Place must be affirmed as the interval (Irigaray, 1993; Aristotle, 1983). This claim is by no means alien to Ronell’s position. Where the space of maternal cartography is construed as present to thought, quantifiable in the phallocentric logic of warfare, national defence and the insecure positing of the subject, the threshold of the interval is a place of open potentiality, a place in which the other is to come.

The basic idea is to connect the philosophical "this is" to a political discourse. Thus I try to embody this gesture of identification by using the figure of the finger (that, among many other things, points), which has a context and a history, a "weight" and a threat of contamination, and also a volume that always compromises its pointing/aim (hence refusing the dimensionless "point" as a "point of departure"). The finger touches, is touched, contaminates and is contaminated, thus implicating it in its objects in an inescapable ethico-political way. It carries with it a blindness, a stupidity, that still calls for responsibility (rather than mere "reduction-to-minimum," systematic ignoring, or persecution). The finger, like stupidity, involves powers of contagion and abjection, and these are the materials with which I suggest to encounter "experience." This is an initial, not very good, attempt at what Gilles Deleuze called for when he coined the phrase "transcendental stupidity."

Nous étions partis -« nous » : des Amis -de ce constat sim il y a de moins en moins de place, en France, pour présenter le ivres de pensée et en débattre publiquement -effective [...] et, si nous traitons principalement de livres, c'est que nou considérons qu'ils sont les chantiers où se trame et se commu nique le travail discret, ardu, têtu, solitaire et solidaire à la fois, de la pensée. [...] Constance, ou disons endurance : la guerre d'escar mouche que l'Agenda a engagée contre la lassitude ne fait, à dire, que commencer. » François JuUn « Le langage des gestes est à l'origine de l'expression hum sous toutes ses formes, y compris rituelles ou cérémonielles. geste est le fait du corps vivant et pensant. » Ph. Bcck «[...] comment s'orienter dans l'avenir pour que la "composition française" dont la France elle-même est issue reste à la fois vivante et accueillante. » Ph. Raynaud « Affirmer qu'aucun accident ne viendra entamer la vie du lettré, t en particulier son corps étendu, du moins tant que la culture de l'écrit se maintiendra, est aussi une forme de hauteur de vue, do distance toute lettrée. » T. Samoyaull 978 2 7056 6983 6 HERMANN Depuis 1876 www.editions-hermann. f r 782705' 669836 HERMANN Depuis 1876

This text is going to investigate how what came to be known as 'deconstruction'2 is intricately linked to a certain kind of 'translation' on the one hand and how this plays out in practices of translation on the
other hand. For this purpose, I am going to outline some historical and systematic entanglements of 'deconstruction' with something that might be called 'translation' at first sight in the first chapter. In the following chapter, I am going to discuss some examples of 'deconstructive translation' in the texts of Derrida and Ronell. Finally, I am glimpsing at the conceptual foundations of 'un/translatability' with special emphasis on how it dislocates any notion of 'translation' over against any notion of
'hermeneutics' whatsoever. In the course of this little adventure, I will argue that
I) Deconstruction can be read as a kind of 'translation.'
II) The kind of 'translation' deconstruction favors and employs can be called 're-performance' or
'manifestation' (with minimal differences between the two).
III) Another kind of 'translation' enabled by 'deconstruction' is a re-appropriative usage of 'source
material.'
IV) Another kind of 'translation' uncovered by 'deconstruction' is a quasi-hermeneutic discourse on the specific appearance of a given term in a given delineated area of time/space/whatever else.
V) As for the foundations of 'translation' we remain torn between two necessities: The auto-aggressive evanescence of 'translatability' vis a vis the necessary possibility of 'untranslatability.' Consequently,
translators remains ghost busters.

I wrote this several  years ago, while spending my sabbatical from Yonsei University at Yale's Department of German―one of those little essays, not exactly academic, that glides from the pen and  then, when it is done, seems too intimate, too embarassing―not that it has anything scandalous, anything ad hominem to reveal―to do anything with. Its present topicality compels me, against my best instincts, to “put it out into the world,” but it should not be understood as an intervention, an amicus curiae in the court of public opinion. It is merely an instance of self-reflection and institutional reflection―the two of which are, in the last instance, one and the same. But perhaps reflection is what is needed more than ever...

New media theorists, performance artists, media culture commentators, and politicians have celebrated life online-the virtual unknown-as shamanic, Eastern, mysterious, transformative, and exotic. SHAMANISM + CYBERSPACE shows that this rhetoric is actually a familiar version of the other, and that imperialism is at its core. This book combines postcolonial, deconstructionist, and performance theory to reread new media theory and shamanism itself, specifically in South Korea. It unravels and reweaves discourses on originary reproduction, confronting the proliferating violence in media and nationalism. Perhaps most radically, it proposes a new theory of "media mourning" to help us see and hear shamanism colliding with contemporary media art worlds, collapsing time and space, upending gender and racial categories, and confounding the boundaries between East and West. Most importantly, the book introduces a new opening toward instigating the impossibility of the other in philosophy while critiquing how shamanism is used to image the other in cyberspace culture.

SHAMANISM + CYBERSPACE (2009) is her first book, adapted from her dissertation, The Shaeman in Cyberspace: Dilemmas of Reproduction (2008), which was completed for her doctoral degree in Philosophy of Media and Communications at the European Graduate School (EGS), Switzerland.

Against our common rush to understand the world in our own, human terms, Béla Tarr’s films give us the opportunity to come in touch with our own stupidity, and through it, with our madness and the becomings it opens up. This essay looks at the current state of the world (disdainful gesture, disgustedly) and with Tarrian eyes, tries to question our speeds, and to see the bottomless abyss that Nietzsche, Deleuze, and others proposed to us as our only living escape.

O estilo espetacular da filósofa americana Avital Ronell, inspirada pelos dispositivos performativos de Derrida, está a serviço de um pensamento filosófico autêntico. Ela procede menos por descons trução da clausura da metafísica ocidental do que por ramificações clandestinas e curtos-circuitos que eletrificam redes de sentidos des percebidos em autores fundamentais, de Platão a Blanchot, passan do por Flaubert, Nietzsche e Heidegger.

Numa sociedade onde as pessoas tendem a ser submissas, subordinadas, sem questionar a autoridade; se levam a cabo algo chamado de revolução, é muito provável que acabem por criar uma outra versão da mesma sociedade com líderes diferentes. Se haverá uma revolução verdadeira nas instituições sociais que tenha um significado, esta será baseada numa concepção diferente de como as pessoas se relacionam, o que significa ser Livre. É o que Rosa Luxemburgo chama de uma revolução espiritual.

Les voix de femmes seront ici regardées, écoutées, depuis cet objet qu’est le téléphone, et la tension qu’il amène avec lui. Le téléphone implique le corps. Les mains, le visage – et, du coup, la bouche, le regard - sont ainsi étrangement rassemblés autour d’un appareil. Les femmes au téléphone s’inquiètent, prennent des nouvelles, insistent.

Irving Cummings' 1939 biopic The Story of Alexander Graham Bell opens with a woman at the pianoforte and three feisty, well-groomed gentlemen cantillating a popular song (Frances Osgood's " Call me pet names "). This scene sets the tone for the entire movie which, time and again, presents its audience with various work songs, Christmas carols, and choral melodies. However, each of these musical inserts seems complemented and uncannily shadowed by a 'tonal event' associated with the pure physicality of sound: the protagonist will make use of his landlady's piano to demonstrate resonance phenomena in vibrating systems; a festive children's chorus will find its equivalent in the disturbing wail of a deaf-mute boy attempting to pronounce his first word. The effect of such couplings is a continuous and elaborate differentiation between music and noise, embodied and spectral sound, presence and reproduction, natural and technical media. Against this backdrop, the paper explores the movie's musical, or rather tonal rendering of the dual nature of the voice – the " voice-effect " as a precarious concurrence of meaning and physical excess (Mladen Dolar) – and also its overtones of spiritism and the supernatural that become audible when the telephone, based on the material mechanics of the human ear, transmits the disembodied singing of a male vocal group from Boston to Salem, thus revealing what Avital Ronell defines as the " ghostly origin " of the apparatus and its connection to " male witchery ". Furthermore, The Story of Alexander Graham Bell appears to link these issues of song, sound, conjuration and manifestation, of listening [horchen] and obeying [gehorchen] to a complex system of Fathers and Sons that pervades the whole narrative. In so doing, the movie opens into the sphere of the political; it restates music/sound as well as their present/absent sources as agents of a spectral 'call' that demands an either submissive or insurgent response … Meanwhile, the telephone might be that utopian machine in which all those vocal, technological, super/natural, political threads intersect and are, for a brief moment, reconciled.

This in interview with Avital Ronell on the French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe explores the theoretical importance of the third, and less-known "musketeer of deconstruction" (Derrida's phrase). In the process Ronell offers a deeply-felt philosophical reminiscence on the "emotion of thought" that ties her to Lacoue-Labarthe, addresses key motifs in his protean oeuvres (rhythm, community, poetry, mimesis) and explains, in her characteristically inimitable style, what distinguishes him from other contemporary thinkers associated with poststructuralism.

"Dopiero ona, kobieta niepełna, zawieszona „pomiędzy”, już odrosła od lalki a nie dorosła do dziecka – ona, to istnienie w każdy sposób niekompletne – unaoczniła autorowi jego własny problem"
Andrzej Falkiewicz
omówienie książki "Podróż Arysty przez Lotaryngię" Mieczysława Piotrowskiego

By examining twenty-first-century negative political advertisements alongside Shakespearean fools and Erasmian folly, we can read attack ads not as barren clichés but as parables about the slippages—between subject and object, villain and hero, insider and outsider—that make possible more-generous appraisals of folly and that offer glimpses of a humanist program based on folly's benevolence. When we read such ads as Erasmian gestures—more than that, when we recognize our entanglements in the foolish maneuverings of our political leaders—we confront the possibility that giving in to the incongruities of folly is more productive than insisting on a knowing, superior sufficiency. To recognize the incapacitating, unconventional properties of folly is to affirm what is alluring, even precious, about rhetorical philosophies that favor not orderly, intelligible communities but profoundly, dramatically—laughably—indistinct ones.

n this paper, I will try to point out the most important notions appearing in her Crack Wars. Literature, Addiction, Mania, including some ideas from the study on Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary. Finally, I would like to ‘narcoanalyse’ the novel Niekochana (Unbeloved) by Adolf Rudnicki.

In A. Street, J. Alliot & M. Pauker (Eds.), Inter Views in Performance Philosophy: Crossings and Conversations. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. (Forthcoming 2017)

Philosophy’s disavowal of performance is taken up as a dominant mode of disciplinary practice in which gendered dimensions take center stage. Responding to the question of philosophy’s paternal residue, Avital Ronell traces a genealogy in which the “patriarchy requires speculation” across the history of philosophy that problematizes a straight reading of philosophy’s paternalistic performances as she reminds us the disturbance is always internal to the text. Turning to a consideration of her own professional life and practice, Ronell remarks upon her deployment of performance as a strategy for introducing “a different program of utterance,” as a way of moving beyond the margins. Ronell, the “inventress of the performance-lecture,” discusses both how performance philosophizes and how philosophy performs.

Deutsches Haus presents: The Telephone Book @ 25 - Friday
Welcoming Remarks:
Joy Connolly, Dean for the Humanities, New York University

Opening Panel:
Emanuela Bianchi, Comparative Literature, New York University
Patricia Clough, Sociology and Women’s Studies, Graduate Center and Queens College, CUNY
Mariano López-Seoane, New York University Buenos Aires
Fred Moten, English, University of California, Riverside
Moderator: Ann Pellegrini, Performance Studies and Social & Cultural Analysis; Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, NYU

Thursday, October 30th, 2014

This two-day event brings together scholars in literary studies, philosophy, new media, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, and performance studies to discuss the ongoing impact of Avital Ronell’s path-breaking The Telephone Book, on the occasion of that book’s 25th anniversary.

This conference was co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality and Deutsches Haus at NYU, with additional support from the NYU Department of Media, Culture & Communication; NYU Department of Performance Studies; the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service); the NYU Office of the Vice-Provost for Faculty, Arts, Humanities and Diversity; and the NYU Office of the Dean for Humanities.

This article pursues an antihermeneutic conception of Socratic irony as a way of troubling the borders between pedagogical authority and humility. As one of the most tenacious ways of troping the teacher-student relation, Socratic irony is often figured as a way for a masterful teacher to exercise authority over a student. This article repositions such irony as an uncontrollability in language itself—one that can humble and humiliate teacher and student alike. Via parallel readings of Plato’s Gorgias and Aristophanes’ Clouds, as well as Bruno Latour’s interpretation of the former, the writer questions how this approach to Socratic irony might re- and unwork the rhetoric teacher’s position of mastery with regard to both students and systematized bodies of knowledge.

A famous and iconic German thinker, Friedrich Kittler passed away in 2011 in Berlin. Some of the obituaries have stated that the German university has lost its last great figure. It is no exaggeration that Friedrich Kittler has singlehandedly revolutionized the humanities. When he declared "The Expulsion of Spirit from the Humanities" ("Die Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften") in one of his early essays, he paved the way for technology and media to enter the study of literature, art, and philosophical thought. A trained philologist and literary scholar, he founded the discipline now known as "Media Theory" and he has contributed significantly to create scientific and humanistic inroads in a number of areas of critical theory and thought. Beyond his exemplary contribution to the thinking organized around technology, scientific inquiry, and medial innovation, Friedrich Kittler always also remained a prolific and subtle literary critic, who inspired students on both sides of the Atlantic with his teaching and his books, many of which have been translated into numerous languages and are taught and studied as essential texts of the Humanities. With this commemorative colloquium, we will honor the work and person of Friedrich Kittler and will celebrate his intellectual legacy together with many outstanding scholars,