America: The Troubled Continent of Thought

by Avital Ronell

What position does America occupy in the recent history of Western philosophy?  At once the destination for a series of fantasies and the place from which a new relationship to thought originated, America incarnates a dark continent whose strangeness and singularity has driven thinkers outside of their own philosophical comfort zone – often forcing them to show anger, anxiety or desire towards what they considered a challenge or a threat.

This book provides a mapping of this complex relationship between America and philosophy through a series of examples drawn from a wide range of authors, from Freud and Heidegger to Adorno, Derrida and many others.  It also examines the way American thinkers themselves have imported, used and abused philosophical views coming from Europe, often transforming them into something other than what they were.  Is then philosophy an anti-American discourse, or America an anti-philosophical country? Or is it, rather, that America provokes philosophy from a place where its own history affirms the impossibilities, paradoxes and contradictions of philosophy itself?

At a time when the syntagm “America” has come to crystallize a certain understanding of the world order, interrogating the place that it occupies in our intellectual tradition is also a way to engage critically with the violence attached to it. “America” is a syntagm for violence, but this violence might very well be different than we thought.

Genres: Philosophy

154 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2024

About the author

Avital Ronell is Professor of German, comparative literature, and English at New York University, where she directs the Research in Trauma and Violence project, and has also written as a literary critic, a feminist, and philosopher.

Ronell to Israeli diplomats and was a performance artist before entering academia.

She gained a B.A. from Middlebury College and studied with Jacob Taubes at the Hermeneutic Institute at the Free University of Berlin. She received her Ph.D. under the advisement of Stanley Corngold at Princeton University in 1979, and then continued her studies with Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous in Paris.

She joined the comparative literature faculty at the University of California, Berkeley before moving to NYU. She is also a core faculty member at the European Graduate School.

Reviews

[John-Michael Polnik · Rating 2 out of 5]

Avital Ronnell is something of a local legend for those interested in Continental philosophy. A close affiliation to Derrida, Taubes, Gadamer along with close current ties to Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek make her a very instructive figure as to their inner workings, the communities which form philosophical elites; she has a card to the peak of the ivory tower. This ivory tower is, of course, a very beautreatic and institutional one. She is a tenured professor of German and comparative literature at New York.
This institutionalism applies to the central influences on her work equally. Kant, Hegel, Nieztsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Lacan mark themselves by each of their close ties to the academy. Each of these were professors, Hegel was also an administrator, which of course does not invalidate their thought, but it marks them. It marks them as internal to a world of course criteria, tests, student papers. The academy is of course indispensable for the instruction of the unformed; but in Germany of the eighteenth ninetieth and twentieth centuries the academy had close ties to unsavory political powers. Whether Kaiser or Fuhrer, it is worth paying attention to. Lest we forget, equally, Derrida only taught in California due to a very cushy offer from a university there; and equally that he did not publish his most politically radical work Specters of Marx until after the dawn of Neoliberalism had begun submerging thousands of innocent victims in pools of blood and tears.
This information is equally hard to square with Ronnell's heritage to Israel, with her parents being Israeli diplomats. The present book was published in 2024. Discussion is made of Trump and his impeachment, of MAGA, of George Bush but none of which is easily accepted. She is a Czech daughter of Israeli diplomats; she is thoroughly European as she is well aware. But she is not American. She may be seeking to join classic works by Europeans on America, however a puzzling lack of discussion of Baudrillard's renowned book on us makes for a bizarre exemption.
Lest we forget, she also has very credible accusations of sexual assault and harassment.
All of this makes for an extremely unreliable narrator, especially for the non-American. Despite being published in our century, just a year ago, no discussion is made of my country's invasions and occupations of a vast portion of the world. What of the MOVE bombing? Occupation of Puerto Rico? The murder of George Floyd? Due to being published in 2024 it is possible to imagine an excuse for her silence on the genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza; but I am also able to find zero statements on the subject before or after the publishing of this book.
This leads to a book which is unreviewable. She has a certain materialist heritage (allying herself with Zizek, her reading of Nietzsche) but without a single compulsion to genuine engagement with the demands of materialism. The late and great Fredric Jameson remembered to honor the Irish freedom fighters at the beginning of his essay on James Joyce, it is clearly certain that Ronnell would forget to make a similar reference. She is high up in that ivory tower, seemingly in a locked room in an obscure corner.

[Jeff]

Don't bother. Just read the Stanley Cavell essay discussed ("Finding as Founding") instead, but make sure to ignore all the parts about the Philosophical Investigations as well as Cavell's most trenchant claims about grief, skepticism, and the death of Waldo Emerson (the better to imply he has avoided/is haunted by the uniquely deconstructionist work of mourning). Then ask ChatGPT to compose a word cloud from The Question Concerning Technology, the MAGA movement, and late Derrida. Finally, reflect for a moment on Heidegger's antisemitism. There, you've read it.

[Monique Attrux]

The writing never went anywhere, which the author will conveniently argue is the point of the whole book. After being on the merry-go-round of words that suspiciously seem artificially generated, I look up Avital Ronel's biography...Yikes!...I should have known better...

[Ethan Fusilero · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn’t make it through more than 60 pages, felt unequiped going in. Will return in the future.