Publication date:  28 October 2000

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They call her the most provocative of all philosophers. She says she is an arena of the class struggle, a "wise-ass girl" from Brooklyn, a "regular professor" and a "sophisticated Parisienne." She is the author of The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech; Crack Wars; Finitude's Score.
Her new book Stupidity is to appear soon.

Rumors
(from Avital Ronell's essay Street-talk)

Rumors are in the air. They are often designed as something going around, essentially coming from a secret source, from a nowhere that is beyond me. They are spoken into ears that function like loudspeakers. The ear canal, like institutional corridors or political vestibules, is traversed by rumors. Insofar as the rumor arrives from nowhere it would be useful to recall Benjamin's undisclosed sense of Shakespeare's sense of news. To this end, let us recall Shakespeare's great rumor text.

The other source, as origin of all rumors, is the ghost, of course. The phantom utterance itself originates from something that resembles the transmission of a rumor text. For we must not forget that Hamlet's father died of a poison that was poured into his ear, and the whole drama recycles this poison, from mouth to ear in a great ring of espionage and infection (separated, like Polonius, only by curtained membrane). Infecting and paralyzing everybody, including the body politic, rumor, whose only paternity is the ghost of paternity (Heidegger: "It's beyond me"), is the very thing that Hamlet wants confirmed. And so the ghost transmits a poisoned paternity to which every ear is open.

The Way to the North

If you go straight, not turning around the mailboxes and not walking away along the slope of invisible deflection, you will quite probably come to a crossing of two corridors and then, setting abruptly for the North, see her office at once. It is recognizable. My grandson presented me with a compass before my departure.

"The most important thing is to find out where the North is, Arkadi. The rest will turn up by itself," Philip said. I shook his hand and promised to try to consider this carefully as soon as I am there. It turned up to be quite simple. The North is where the Empire Building is. In the morning the sky above it resembles the sky of Kherson at 9 a.m. Whereas in the evening, looking into this very sky, you may travel in your thoughts to the Mediterranean: Knossos, Marseille, Olya Florenskaya, some Pelasgians...

There are so many announcements and posters on Avital Ronell's office door that the papers lose every meaning as soon as you glance at them. In a twinkling of an eye they merge into a planetary message, which immediately scatters in Klimt's grainy melancholy. As far as I remember, I first met her in Berkeley in 1994. I was drinking coffee; Avital preferred tea. Kathy Acker was still alive. Smoking in the cafe was already prohibited. The 'drums hour' was approaching on the campus. The word "cyberpunk" was just coming into fashion. We talked about her Telephone Book; I passed her a question from Sasha Sekatsky, who had warmed up and translated the most difficult chapters on Heidegger¹ - does she really think one should philosophize with a hammer? In the Mondo magazine, which published an interview with Western coast boss girls (Kathy Acker, Andrea Juno, Avital Ronell), Avitall is very beautiful. The three Graces of the field thesaurus: Julia Kristeva, Susan Sontag, Avital Ronell.

"No doubt! Nietzsche was mistaken about many things but not about this one, of course."

Nothing Special about the Fall

When I reminded her of that talk in New York on October 12, 2000, she said she had been certainly right, but if you just try today to raise an ordinary stone leave alone a hammer from the ground... Then she threw up her hands and invited me to a seminar of professor J.Derrida, who turned out "to conduct" every Tuesday at 3.30 in the main building. I happened to come across him in the first days of September, in the evening, at the department of arts and sciences. I was looking for a water place; he was searching for an exit.

We had no opportunity to continue our talk as the great march of the university Fall Fest'2000 started from all directions outside the window, about which I'll tell you on an occasion.

The microphone was working as unalterably as a lighthouse. Each time the sound disappeared those who sat in the front rows turned into multihanded Sivas with five pens in each hand.

Each time the sound was back the front rows closed their ears, while the back ones, sitting back in their chairs, as great as all Gatsbies of the world, were writing down nothing at all.

It were the informed ones (the idle ones, as it were) who were sitting at the back.

On Those Who Bring Gifts

On one of his acoustic returns to the informed ones the professor said history was not a process and naturally not a progress, history didn't need time.

To make history, one needs something other than temporality - one needs strength and power. Because history is a disposition of isolated events, and an event can't be produced without strength and without power.

As an example the professor told us about his first encounter in some Parisian museum of natural sciences with a piece of amber inside which there were two insects inwrought with each other - they had stayed there since the end of Pompeii. "Yes, one of these creatures was sucking the other's blood," rumbled the professor (that is, rumbled for some and just moved his lips for others), "yes, this sexual act hasn't arrived at the climax but still it is an event although it happened 250 million years ago."

And, to conclude with, history is neither a thread nor a carpet, history is just isolated events of power.

However, they didn't speak so much of history at the seminar as of Paul de Man. And not so much of Paul de Man as of Rousseau, namely of the pearl-red scarf about the loss of which Jean-Jacques had no regret. They spoke of the verity of confession, of the fact that the confession machine was always associated with the "writing" machine, and that any confession was in fact an attempt to beg for forgiveness. Or beg a pardon at least. However, as one conveys that in a writing, the "natural" and "secret" request is immediately transferred into the channel of the writing, into the channel of the event. Which, by definition, can't be a confession itself, because writing and subjectivity are inherently different things.

After the seminar I asked the professor why he hadn't mentioned Kafka's In the Penal Colony as an example, in which the machine of needle inscription in a human body turns into the machine of confession and simultaneous inscription in the one who created it.

"May be," he said, "Kafka gives us so many gifts... But as is known, every gift is just an attempt of appropriating the one who takes this gift."

The Secret

"Well, isn't he a monster?" Avital asked on the next day.

"He's an absolute monster, he's just unterrestrial!" Avital said on the next day.

"He lectured for three hours!" I said on the next day, sitting in her office behind the door, on which the posters were losing their meaning, acquiring the charm of Klimt from some topsy-turvy collection.

"Oh yes, he could have read for three more hours but tomorrow he flies back to Chicago, and then back to New York, and on the weekend he's flying to Paris to read several lectures and conduct a seminar."

"I am just ashamed," I said.

"Do you think we all here aren't?" Avital asked on the next day.

Such was the next day: it was fine. In fact it isn't as fine at daytime as in the morning. Morning is like a cemetery. You come and you remember.

I dropped in on Avital again. A student was almost spelling out the subject of the work on 'deconstruction' he was going to write.

My reader, I pray! Let's not tell anyone the secret; let's not tell anyone what deconstruction is. Although that no longer seems to be a secret. Everything is as easy as pie, they say - to see, to read, to perceive and then suddenly to see it all at once as new.

But maybe it isn't that easy and I'll get hold of the secret on the night of October 27, at the Celebrating Deconstruction ball (this is what the invitation ticket says). Besides the words, the tiny red card contains an image of either Parisian triumphal arch or the arch from Washington... park, garden, square if you wish.

To Write

I say, "Avital, they called you the terrorist of the ivory tower when The Telephone Book appeared, didn't they?"

And she says it's just a matter of designation and place. The ivory tower is nothing but a phantasm. As regards terrorism, she is rather an antiterrorist.

"Everyone knows what I am after. I want universities to become the most hospitable shelter for all otherwise-minded and rebellious, a place where the thought seeks every possible way to blow itself up..."

"But you are not only a professor and not only a philosopher..."

"Writer, yes. What this means to me - that's a different question. Writing never stops dying. Perhaps that is the continuous ending of writing, composition and literature. Psychoanalysis is kind of dead, isn't it? So is deconstruction.

In Freud's Totem and Taboo brothers get together to kill the father and take his power. They finally kill him, and what do they feel? Utter emptiness and sorrow. For having died, the father acquired still more power over them.

As for me, I can compare myself with Holderlin's Diotima. When philosopher Empedocles jumped in the crater she started 'reading' his sandals, that is, she started interpreting what was left of him. She became the reader of his most secret traces, the traces left from his touch of the ground.

However, when they ask me if I am a writer, I don't know what to say... Writer is a man, which means writer owns, wishes, controls...

No. Of course not, I rather see myself as a secretary of some ghost."

Translated from Russian by Olga Yurchenko
Pictures were taken by the author

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