Avital Ronell is an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, Dictations: On Haunted Writing (1986), treats Goethe's invention of remote control in writing.
"With The Telephone Book, the deconstruction of 'phonocentrism'
takes an unheard-of turn: Heidegger and Derrida are joined by
Alexander Graham ('Ma') Bell in a party line that leaves one's ears
(and eyes) ringing. Working with an advanced form of optical fiber,
Avital Ronell establishes scandalously clear connections between
her long-distance callers, and through them, between the mediatic
and the literary, the technological and the political, the
historical and the philosophical. In the White and Yellow Pages
that result, 'criticism' catches up with the telephone and becomes
rigorously colloquial."—Samuel Weber, International Operator
"To think technology is not to think technology away. Avital Ronell
calls us from afar. She does not think the question concerning
technology by submitting it merely to evaluation, as has been done
so often and so poorly. Rather, she seeks out what 'thinks' in
technology and what is 'technological' in thinking. Her concern is
located not in the instrumentality of technology with its good and
bad points, but in unfolding the presence of technology in
discourse, as discourse, or as the silence hidden within discourse.
For example, when Heidegger refers to a telephone call whose
political stakes are anything but indifferent, how is the 'call' of
'conscience' thereby implicated? The telephone serves here to open
a line of inquiry, producing a series of analyses, eliciting a
totally unprecendented style, whose general rule would be: how
technoogy stimulates metaphorization, how it transports beyond
itself, and gives way to thinking. That in the end it should bear
something of the feminine, or that the mode of transport may itself
be feminine (la télé-phonie), is the message waiting on our
answering maching. Beep. Click. Blurb."—Jean-Luc Nancy, University
of Strasbourg, France
"Avital Ronell installs the telephone in the space of thinking
Heidegger reserves for poetry and art, producing a series of
reflections on philosophy, psychoanalysis and biography that may
come to represent one of the most decisive readings of the
technological since Heidegger."—Substance
"A breakthrough work within the universe of academic
publications."—Warren Lehrer, Designers & Books
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