"These lit-crit essays are at once spoofable and brilliant".-Esquire. "'Trauma TV' is . . . the most illuminating essay on TV and video ever written".-Artforum. "Ronell is one of the few critical theorists of talent who can write her way out of the hermeticism typically associated with the deconstructionism of Derrida, Blanchot, Nancy, or Lacoue-Labarthe. She jumps between the vulgate of television talk shows and the high theoretical jargon of the academy with the adroitness of a speed-fiend switchboard operator . . . [She is] the reigning queen of termino-millenarianism".-Poetics Today. Suspending the distinction between headline news and high theory, Ronell examines diverse figures of finitude in our modern world: war, guerrilla video, trauma TV, AIDS, music, rumor. Her essays address such questions as: How do rumors kill? How has video become the call of conscience of TV? How have the police come to be everywhere, even when they are not? Is peace possible? Ronell writes to "the community of those who have no community-to those who have known the infiniteness of abandonment". Avital Ronell is also the author of The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989) and Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (1992), both published by the University of Nebraska Press. She is a professor in and chair of the Department of German and a professor of comparative literature at New York University.

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