http://egs.edu/
Avital Ronell &
Anne Dufourmantelle giving a shared seminar on fighting theory and douceur or sweetness, discussing with students. Other subjects discussed include friendship, time, the other,
peace, violence, hospitality, and courage. Thinkers discussed include
Nietzsche,
Heidegger,
Derrida,
Socrates,
Muhammed Ali,
Kant,
Freud,
Aristotle.
Seminar for the students of the
European Graduate School EGS Media and
Communication Studies department program
Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe 2012 Avital Ronell and Anne Dufourmantelle.
Avital Ronell,
Ph.D., was born in
Prague. Her parents were
Israeli diplomats who returned to
Israel before going to
New York. Avital Ronell studied at the Hermeneutics
Institute in
Berlin with
Jacob Taubes, ultimately earned her doctorate at
Princeton University, and then worked with
Jacques Derrida andHélène
Cixous in
Paris. She was professor of comparative literature and theory at the
University of California at Berkeley for several years before eventually returning to New York, where she currently is chair of the
Department of
Germanic Languages and Literature and teaches
German and comparative literature and theory -- in addition to her yearly
Fall semester seminar about Derrida -- and where she continues to churn out a breathtaking range of deconstructive rereadings of everything from technology, the Gulf War, and
AIDS, to opera, addiction, and stupidity.
As one of the first translators of Jacques Derrida's work into
English, she in effect introduced his work to the
American academy. Avital Ronell has continued the deep reading projects of her former teachers (and friends), focusing her attention on such varied assumptions as the telephone directory,
Rodney King,
Madame Bovary,
Martin Heidegger and schizophrenia. Though often labeled a philosopher (as well as a key player in critical and political theory, cultural and literary criticism), Avital Ronell's work, thoroughly transdisciplinary, consistently slips the bounds of traditional academic castes, earning her accolades from often disparate spheres of the cultural milieu. Her work is often determined to be deconstructive, Derridian,
Heideggerian, post-feministic, post-structuralist, psychoanalytic, and yet her writing continually works beyond these labels remaining utterly singular. In her most infamous book,
The Telephone Book, Avital Ronell seems to seek to undermine, or at least 'address' through direct intervention, commonly held views of the addressee and the author. Using fonts and texts that seem to explode from the page and which at times become illegible, Avital Ronell mimics the dislocating and alienating nature of the fractured telephone conversation to question the role of both author and reader. Avital Ronell's published works include
Telephone Book (
1989), Dictations: On
Haunted Writing (
1993),
Crack Wars: Literature,
Addiction,
Mania (1993),
Stupidity (
2001),
The Test Drive (
2005), and recently, in
2007, The
Über Reader(ed.
Diane Davis).
Anne Dufourmantelle, Ph.D., is a
French psychoanalyst, philosopher and author. Anne was born in Paris in 1964, from an English/
Swiss father and a French mother. As a child, Anne spent some years in
Spain and later, in
Central America, which turned
Spanish into the language of her heart.
These starting points have given Anne an inclination towards literature of exile and thinkers who could trespass frontiers of a different kind. Anne's past contributes to her uniquely non-strict "French" way of thinking.
Anne Dufourmantelle studied in Paris. Receiving a
20/20 grade on her baccalauréat exams made her change her mind from earlier dreams of studying medicine towards philosophy as well. Anne studied medicine and philosophy for two years. Anne completed her doctorate (
Ph.D) at Paris-IV university (
Sorbonne). Her thesis was entitled : La vocation prophétique de la philosophie(The Prophetic
Vocation of
Philosophy) with studies on
Soeren Kierkegaard,
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Emmanuel Levinas and Patocka. It was published some years later by les éditions du Cerf, in the same collection which publishedEmmanuel Levinas ("La nuit surveillée"), and received the
Academie Française for philosophy.
- published: 21 Oct 2013
- views: 860