The Test Drive

by Avital Ronell

Beginning with Nietzsche's discovery of the "experimental disposition," Ronell explores testing's ascension to truth in modern practice. To know something, and to know that it is true, has never been a simple matter of recognition and assent. Instead, increasing numbers of tests of ever increasing complexity have been established to determine and constitute what is true, probable, or verifiable. _x000B__x000B_Tests are pervasive, and inflect the master-narratives of our historical existence. The Bible dramatically presents tests of Abraham and Job, great works of literature track the tested subject, the vast apparatus of modern science and technology is built upon extraordinarily exacting tests, and the need for truth in times of trial and crisis links state-run testing apparatuses to events of arrest, torture, and death. On the evening of 9-11 the President of the United States said, "We are being being tested."_x000B__x000B_What propels this drive to test? What can satisfy it? What is the subterranean history of its effects? _x000B__x000B_In The Test Drive, internationally acclaimed scholar Avital Ronell explores vast areas of testing in the works of Husserl, Popper, Freud, Lyotard, Derrida, and others, including Zen philosophies. She then proceeds through the major transformations in twentieth-century philosophy and science that have inclined the world toward more and more tests. _x000B__x000B_Higher education is perpetually involved in tests, tests about tests, and in the creation, assessment, refinement, and justification of tests, so much so that some critics argue that education has become obsessed by tests. _x000B__x000B_Ronell shows that the obsession to test is likely more deeply rooted and more broadly exercised. The need to define, the need to know, the need to be sure, and the need to establish rank, are needs that press with the urgency of hunger.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Science

382 pages, Kindle Edition

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.