Avital Ronell. Walking as a philosophical act. 2014

www.egs.edu/ Avital Ronell, philosopher and author, takes us through some thoughts on walking as a philosophical act. She explores the walker as well as possible accidents or diversions, tumbling and toppling over which may find us or which we may find along the way. Encounters and their counters, interlocutors and those who we come up against, Ronell takes us through literary tracks and typologies of the walker. Through the Reveries of a Solitary Walker of Rousseau as well as Nietzsche, Celan and DeMan, and Heidegger, Ronell expounds on variations of this theme in the opening lecture of the series at the European Graduate School in August 2014.
Avital Ronell, Ph.D., was born in Prague. Her parents were Israeli diplomats who returned to Israel before going to New York. Avital Ronell studied at the Hermeneutics Institute in Berlin with Jacob Taubes, ultimately earned her doctorate at Princeton University, and then worked with Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous in Paris. She was professor of comparative literature and theory at the University of California at Berkeley for several years before eventually returning to New York, where she currently is chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature and teaches German and comparative literature and theory - in addition to her yearly Fall semester seminar about Derrida - and where she continues to churn out a breathtaking range of deconstructive rereadings of everything from technology, the Gulf War, and AIDS, to opera, addiction, and stupidity.
As one of the first translators of Jacques Derrida’s work into English, she in effect introduced his work to the American academy. Avital Ronell has continued the deep reading projects of her former teachers (and friends), focusing her attention on such varied assumptions as the telephone directory, Rodney King, Madame Bovary, Martin Heidegger and schizophrenia. Though often labeled a philosopher (as well as a key player in critical and political theory, cultural and literary criticism), Avital Ronell’s work, thoroughly transdisciplinary, consistently slips the bounds of traditional academic castes, earning her accolades from often disparate spheres of the cultural milieu. Her work is often determined to be deconstructive, Derridian, Heideggerian, post-feministic, post-structuralist, psychoanalytic, and yet her writing continually works beyond these labels remaining utterly singular. In her most infamous book, The Telephone Book, Avital Ronell seems to seek to undermine, or at least 'address' through direct intervention, commonly held views of the addressee and the author. Using fonts and texts that seem to explode from the page and which at times become illegible, Avital Ronell mimics the dislocating and alienating nature of the fractured telephone conversation to question the role of both author and reader. Avital Ronell’s published works include Telephone Book(1989), Dictations: On Haunted Writing (1993), Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (1993), Stupidity (2001), The Test Drive (2005), and recently, in 2007, The Über Reader (ed. Diane Davis).