"There is something about stupidity that is untrackable; it evades our cognitive scanners and turns up as the uncanny double of mastery or intelligence."

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 community—to 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.”

"Everyone has a complaint, but nobody likes a complainer. Rather than making things better a complaint can just make things worse. Often its only relief is the harmless and temporary release of steam. But it can also pose as criticism in one of several seemingly respectable forms. In Complaint, Avital Ronell looks at how complaints and complainers have been treated in literature and philosophy, in feedback loops that pay little attention to injustice and suffering. Beginning with Hamlet, and with open awareness of her own experiences, Ronell proceeds to show how complaining is aggravated, distracted, stifled, and transformed. She looks at exemplary complaints made by Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, and Barbara Johnson. She examines the complaint riven history of deconstruction. Renowned for her courage in taking on painful subjects with candor and wit, Ronell dares to listen to the haunting complaints of the dead"--

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. 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. What propels this drive to test? What can satisfy it? What is the subterranean history of its effects? 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 ph