- Hardcover: 360 pages
- Publisher: University of Illinois Press (Nov 21 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0252026136
- ISBN-13: 978-0252026133
- Product Dimensions: 24.1 x 14.5 x 2.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 599 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,808,014 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
"The foremost thinker of the repressed conditions of knowledge, Avital Ronell, with the Nietzschean audacity characteristic of her thought, probes the philosophical no-man's land of stupidity." -- Jean-Luc Nancy, author of The Sense of the World "[An] energetic book ... [Ronell's] fifth and perhaps most accomplished... Stupidity as Ronell understands it is a kind of black hole devouring the light of rationality itself." -- Jonathan Re, Times Literary Supplement "In the face of the Enlightenment, stupidity disrupts, disturbs, or dissents... Disrupt, disturb, and dissent -- that is just what Ronell means to do in this book." -- Edward Rothstein, New York Times "[Ronell] proves herself yet again to be one of the most original and exciting of contemporary critics... If you at all suspect that you might be intelligent, do not avoid Stupidity -- embrace it." -- Choice "Stupidity is remarkable in its ability to connect and co-articulate questions of Western literature and philosophy in a language that is original, moving, and exact." --differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Book Description
"There are three things required for happiness: good health, selfishness, and stupidity, and without stupidity the others are useless." -- Gustave Flaubert
There is something about stupidity that is untrackable; it evades our cognitive scanners and turns up as the uncanny double of mastery or intelligence.
The political and social implications of stupidity have been articulated by Marx, Nietzsche, Deleuze, among others. Urgent yet recalcitrant, stupidity provokes a crisis in our understanding of politics, ethics, and psychoanalysis. The dilemma posed by the limited subject involves national identity, masochism and sexual politics, as well as the relation of poetic utterance to the stammer in which it originates. Essentially linked to the philosophical primal scene of stupor, stupidity also points to what has been historically inappropriable, as when Hannah Arendt considers Eichmann in terms not only of the banality but also the stupidity of evil.
Avital Ronell's work studies the fading empire of cognition, modulating stupidity into idiocy, puerility, and the figure of the ridiculous philosopher instituted by Kant. Investigating ignorance, dumbfoundedness, and the limits of reason, Stupidity probes the pervasive practice of theory-bashing and related forms of paranoid aggression. A section on prolonged and debilitating illness pushes the text to an edge of a corporeal hermeneutics, "at the limits of what the body knows and tells."
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
IT IS UNDOUBTEDLY someone's responsibility to name that which is stupid. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
IT IS UNDOUBTEDLY someone's responsibility to name that which is stupid. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mark, A reader,
By Mark (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Stupidity (Hardcover)
A good read; a book that ought to be read and read again.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Pretentious to the point of being, well... stupid,
By A Customer
This review is from: Stupidity (Hardcover)
I am sorry, but there is something about a book about titled "Stupidity" which contains page after page of sentences like:"From the culture that has been inscribed by Marx and Nietzsche as being inextricably involved with stupidity - German "culture" has brought us Simplicius Simplicissimus, the Taugenichts, Eulenspiegel, the schlemiel, and other literary cognates of historical dumbing - we also have, owing to Robert Musil, a number of intense reflections on what constitutes stupidity, its figural status and serial developments as something of a concept." I kept reading waiting for the other shoe to drop. For the self-irony to be acknowledged. For the book to become interesting and readable; humorous. It never happened, and I came to the horrible realization that this was, in fact, a dead serious, completely impenetrable, unreadable book on the subject of stupidity. As such, I can only deem it stupid. Not only that, but it is full of jargon and obscure jargon and unexplained literary references, an example of academia at its most loathsome and most removed from the real world. It reminds me of the words of a much better commentator on foolishness, John Ralston Saul (whose books I all recommend most highly), regarding the degredation of language by philosophers and other specialists. "The example of philosophy actually verges on comedy. Socrates, Descartes, Bacon, Locke and Voltaire did not write in a specialized dialect. They wrote in basic Greek, French and English and they wrote for the general reader of the day. Their language is clear, eloquent and often both moving and amusing. The contemporary philosopher does not write in the basic language of our day. He is not acceptable to the public. . . . This means that almost anyone with a precent pre-university level education can still pick up Bacon or Descartes, Voltaire or Locke and read them with both ease and pleasure. Yet even a university graduate is hard pressed to make his way through interpretations of these same thinkers by leading contemporary intellectuals..." Somewhere in the process of reading about and buying this book I saw Avital Ronell described as something along the lines of a leading contemporary intellectual. This book certainly establishes that in my mind...
5.0 out of 5 stars
Try it,
By A Customer
This review is from: Stupidity (Hardcover)
Read this book like a science fiction--then you will enjoy it.
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