Avital Ronell Quotes

Czech Republic, Philosopher
April 15, 1952

Avital Ronell is an American academic who writes about continental philosophy, literary studies, psychoanalysis, feminist philosophy, 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.

Neither a pathology nor an index as such of moral default, stupidity is nonetheless linked to the most dangerous failures of human endeavor.

Avital Ronell
- Human
- Stupidity
- Failures
According to Luther everyone judges everyone. This is because there's an intense desire to be judging. Then those of us on the masochistic side of things want to be judged. Thus we publish. We teach. We learn. We beg to be judged and decimated.

Avital Ronell
- Desire
- Learn
- Judging

For Luther judgment was a real problem, because everyone gets off on judgment, according to Luther. In fact you have to put a restraining order, a gag order, on those, and that's everyone, who want to judge everyone and everything at top speed. So that when you have a rush to judgment, ... it's also the rush of judgment. ... I'd like us to consider the libidinal investment that Luther sees in judgment and legislates against.

Avital Ronell
Giorgio Agamben is possibly the most delicate and probing thinker since Walter Benjamin.

Avital Ronell
- Delicate
- Thinker
Learning to speak is like learning to shoot.

Avital Ronell
- Learning
- Speak
- Shoot
Stupidity exceeds and undercuts materiality, runs loose, wins a few rounds, recedes, gets carried home in a clutch of denial-and returns. Essentially linked to the inexhaustible, stupidity is also that which fatigues knowledge and wears down history.

Avital Ronell
To make things 'perfectly clear' is reactionary and stupefying. The real is not perfectly clear.

Avital Ronell
- Real
- Things
- Clear