Lignes de front

ON THE FRONT LINES
Avital Ronell
October 2010, 180 pages

Under option in: Italy

Rights reserved for English language.

As a committed philosopher, Avital Ronell constantly thinks about the symptoms of our time as a vanguard on the front line. This collection brings together four important texts with a previously unpublished foreword to accompany the French translation.

Support Our Tropes. In this pamphlet-article, Avital Ronell scrutinizes the mechanism of a murderous warring logic. She ends the discussion with a re-reading of Immanuel Kant's Project for Perpetual Peace.
Deviant Payback. The republication in several languages of a radical feminist text, SCUM, by Valérie Solanas provides Avital Ronell with an opportunity to extract its kernel of anger and revolt, and to revisit the question of the battle of the sexes.
The Sacred Alien. Bordeaux, 1802. Friedrich Hölderin is a private tutor for the consul in Hamburg. His time there inspires him to write Andenken ("Memories"), one of his greatest achievements as a poet. Closely following the philosopher's commentary but also the traces
of the "sacred alien" in Hölderin's work, Avital Ronell explores the modern experience of grieving, as the poet called it.
The Tactlessness of a Fadeout... How do you leave a friend, without sharing in their acute distress? With this moving homage to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's blues, Avital Ronell puts together a portrait of the philosopher, one that also serves as a self-portrait of an author
struggling loss.

Avital Ronell est professeur de philosophie et de littérature comparée (anglaise/allemande) à l’université de New York (NYU), elle dirige également la chaire d’études germaniques. Elle est l’auteur, notamment pour les traductions françaises de Stupidity (Stock, 2007), Telephone Book (Bayard, 2007), American philo (Stock, entretiens avec Anne Dufourmantelle, 2007).