Authors: Avital Ronell
ISBN-13: 9780803289499, ISBN-10: 0803289499
Format: Paperback
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Date Published: June 1998
Edition: Reprint
Avital Ronell’s books include The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989) and Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (1992), both published by the University of Nebraska Press. She is chair of and professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature and a professor of comparative literature at New York University.
Suspending the distinction between headline news and high theory, Avital Ronell examines the diverse figures of finitude in our modernity: war, guerrilla video, trauma TV, AIDS, music, divorce, sadism, electronic tagging, rumor. Her essays address such questions as, How do rumors kill? How has video become the conscience of TV? How have the police come to be everywhere, even where they are not? Is peace possible? [W]riting to the community of those who have no communityto those who have known the infiniteness of abandonment,” her work explores the possibility, one possibility among many, that this time we have gone too far”: One last word. It is possible that we have gone too far. This possibility has to be considered if we, as a species, as a history, are going to get anywhere at all.”
"''Trauma TV'' is . . . the most illuminating essay on TV and video ever written."
Preface | ||
Acknowledgments | ||
Introduction | 1 | |
Finitude's Score | 19 | |
Queens of the Night | 41 | |
Hitting the Streets: Ecce Fama | 63 | |
Street-Talk | 83 | |
The Sujet Suppositaire: Freud, And/Or, the Obsessional Neurotic Style (Maybe) | 105 | |
Taking it Philosophically: Torquato Tasso's Women as Theorists | 129 | |
Namely, Eckermann | 159 | |
Doing Kafka in The Castle: A Poetics of Desire | 183 | |
Starting from Scratch: Mastermix | 207 | |
The Worst Neighborhoods of the Real: Philosophy - Telephone - Contamination | 219 | |
The Walking Switchboard | 237 | |
The Differends of Man | 255 | |
Support Our Tropes: Reading Desert Storm | 269 | |
Activist Supplement: Papers on the Gulf War | 293 | |
TraumaTV: Twelve Steps Beyond the Pleasure Principle | 305 | |
Notes | 329 | |
Index | 359 |