The Test Drive

by Avital Ronell

The Test Drive deals with the war perpetrated by highly determined reactionary forces on science and research. How does the government at once promote and prohibit scientific testing and undercut the importance of experimentation? To what extent is testing at the forefront of theoretical and practical concerns today? Addressed to those who are left stranded by speculative thinking and unhinged by cognitive discourse, The Test Drive points to a toxic residue of uninterrogated questions raised by Nietzsche, Husserl and Derrida. Ranging from the scientific probe to modalities of testing that include the limits of friendship or love, this work explores the crucial operations of an uncontestable legitimating machine. Avital Ronell offers a tour-de-force reading of legal, pharmaceutical, artistic, scientific, Zen, and historical grids that depend upon different types of testability, involving among other issues what it means to put oneself to the test.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Science

Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

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

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remarkably testing and always challenging, Ronell's Test Drive was a profoundly personal exploration in what I'd approximate as the ethical approach to the question of the experiment. Evaluating alternate pathways which allow us to move thought forward without the hopeless problems of dialectic muddling best exemplified by Goya's Duel, Ronell establishes the conference bridge with Nietzsche and Heidegger to examine the experiment as a model for the engagement of questioning thought.

Following an extensive examination of the experiment, including a progression through scientific theorist Rheinberger's pivotal work associated with radical breakthroughs in cancer research (necessitated by a conceptual reframing of the experiment), Ronell advances the understanding of the experiment as a paradigmatic catalyst. Near the conclusion of the work, Ronell's party-line call with Husserl illuminates a perspective into her thought (and that of the potentiality pregnant within Husserl, Heidegger and Nietzsche) that is deeper than prior discussions expressed in her written work. The Test Drive finds an opening forward that traces the chalk around what become a useful modality for cautiously progressing forward in the framing of thought-as-experiment.

[Bennjamin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is heavy on philosophy, but is offers a better understanding of the nature of science in particular. And, as with all books from Avital: she is funny in a smart way on almost every page.

[Lynn]

got it on my ipad from kindle. dipping in. her prose is stunning.