More Fantasies About Avital Ronell
"As a provisional object--for we have yet to define it in its finitude--the telephone is at once lesser and greater than itself." --Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book
I stumbled across, or rather, was recommeneded Avial Ronell's The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, because I mentioned to an e-colleague I was writing a book on speech as a ghost. But of course you've found Ronell's book helpful, he said. I thought he meant Dictations, a book on Goethe, haunted writing, and the author-as-function. I have read parts of that, but I had trouble getting snared by the problematic. No, he meant The Telephone Book, with pages oblong and difficult to copy, and text deliberatley splattered and squeezed and arranged in resistant ways--that is, ways resistant to reading. This tome is hard to keep open in your lap because of its irritating binding, too.
I suppose I am pleased, like a reader online who said Ronell's text resists him so much that he has fantasies about her--aided by the fact that in the public eye she always appears wearing something "severe" (that would be black). I found her appearance in the new documentary about her friend and mentor, Derria, charming. All three of us, men, two doubles of themselves as someone "like" me struggling with a text that says "no," me, as someone who can presumably understand this material in a way that is teachable, get hot over smart women in severe clothing (but here, in pastels). Another PP, the father, mentoring brother, once said of a lost opportunity: "you don't need to be associated with all those self-important theorists wearking black clothes."
So, in a moment of (masculinist) reflection, I need to ask why my longing to be called by someone like her is a longing at all (and why I identify my attraction to the objet a of SEVERITY). This is not merely a simply double-standarding of the author: women writing difficult prose are too transgressive. Rather, this is a question: "What is a father?"
Associations with bodies aside (or rather, I think on some uber-genius level that is the point: the telephone reminds of of an ontological split), she makes a strained analogy between the telephone and the unconscious, since the telephone as mechanical/technology is always already "on the side of death" as a prothesis, like the PP ("pleasure principle," part-object, penis, Freud), and through its passing through we are reminded of a place where we cannot go (the navel)--the chord disappears into the wall. But I do want to read this like I read some of Joyce; it is at once deathly serious and simultaneouly an obscene phone call. The phone is the referentless object at some level, after all: now mobile as an accessory that you are important.
So my problem is that I have assigned this text for others to read, and I do not know what it is saying beyond the obvious self/alterity problematic. No shall I pretend to undestand what is at stake--other than deconstruction and subject of her lastest book, Stupidity.
No one likes to feel stupid. Then again, I've learned that coming to terms with "not quite getting it" is the only way to be a happy academic. At least, it's the only way to be an academic that is not always so "severe" (even if I do admit my own wardrobe is monochromatic). On the other hand, I worry about the kind of anti-intellectualism that greets difficult prose and thought as well. That sort of thing will not too. It's always about finding the middle, isn't it?