Stupidity

Ronell confronts the philosophical, psychological, and political effects of stupidity through readings of a host of writers---Dostoyevsky, Heidegger, Kant, Deleuze, Arendt, and Paul de Man In Stupidity Avital Ronell explores the fading empire of cognition, modulating stupidity into idiocy, puerility, and the figure of the ridiculous philosopher instituted by Kant. Drawing on a range of writers including Dostoevsky, Schlegel, Musil, and Wordsworth, Stupidity investigates ignorance, dumbfounded-ness, and the limits of reason.

Nietzsche, Einstein and Deleuze agree: the question of stupidity, its unremitting sway, needs to be dealt with.

This book explores the urgency of stupidity, its hiding places as well as its everyday public appearances. It maps areas of thought in which stupidity has been traditionally concealed or repressed and tunes into stupidity's static in the realms of literature, philosophy and politics. Neither a moral default nor a pathology, stupidity has no duty to truth yet nonetheless bears ethical consequences. At the same time there is something about stupidity--what Musil and Deleuze locate as "transcendental stupidity"--that is untrackable; it evades our cognitive scanners and turns up as the uncanny double of mastery or intelligence. A major phobia in the lexicon of learning, stupidity opens up new unintelligibilities, as Schlegel might have said--an unexpected range of explosive stammers--marking at times a new beginning, the philosophical primal scene of stupor.

Stupidity points to what has been historically inappropriable--the banality and stupidity of evil, as Hannah Arendt says of Eichmann.

On some level stupidity is a "feminine" problem, or has been evicted from philosophical premises to occupy what is marked as feminine incertitude. Still, poets such as Hölderlin and Rilke claimed the predicament of stupidity (or sheer idiocy) as reflecting the true nature of poetic origination. The work studies the modulation of stupidity into idiocy, puerility, and the figure of the ridiculous philosopher, instituted by Kant. Investigating ignorance, dumb-foundedness, and the limits of reason, it probes the pervasive practice of theory-bashing in supposedly intelligent social sectors. A section on prolonged and debilitating illness pushes the text to an edge of corporeal understanding, "at the limits of what the body knows and tells."

"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 of not only the banality but also the stupidity of evil." "In Stupidity Avital Ronell explores the fading empire of cognition, modulating stupidity into idiocy, puerility, and the figure of the ridiculous philosopher instituted by Kant. Drawing on a range of writers including Dostoevsky, Schlegel, Musil, and Wordsworth, Stupidity investigates ignorance, dumbfoundedness, and the limits of reason, while probing the pervasive practice of theory-bashing and related forms of paranoid aggression. A section on prolonged and debilitating illness pushes the text to the edge of a corporeal hermeneutics, "at the limits of what the body knows and tells.""--BOOK JACKET "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 of not only 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."" --Book Jacket 1. The question of stupidity : why we remain in the provinces -- -- 2. The politics of stupidity : Musil, Dasein, the attack on women, and my fatigue -- -- 3. The rhetoric of testing -- Kierkegaard satellite -- -- 4. The disappearance and returns of the idiot -- -- t Wordsworth satellite : "The idiot boy."