Stupidity [Hardcover]

Avital Ronell is one of the most provocative, street-savvy, and theoretically sophisticated thinkers of this age. If you've not yet encountered her explosive work (her other books: Dictations, The Telephone Book, Crack Wars, Finitude's Score), Stupidity will most definitely blow you away. And if you are already a die-hard Ronell fan, Stupidity will ... blow you away. (No amount of prep will brace you sufficiently.) Like Ronell's other works, Stupidity offers a kind of post-critical or nonrepresentational analysis, going after a seemingly recognizable and knowable signifier (stupidity) but tracking it so closely that it quickly becomes unrecognizable, exceeding its object-status, overflowing itself as a concept. Explicitly breaking with scholarly tradition, a tradition that over-values mastery and certitude, Ronell engages her "object" of study at the level of its radical singularity, tracking it through poets, novelists, philosophers, literary/critical theorists, and preschoolers. But the closer she brings us to it, each time, the less knowable it appears--and (so) the less representable.

With her trademark wit and style, Ronell prepares us for this post-critical critique right up front: "Stupidity exceeds and undercuts materiality, runs loose, wins a few rounds, recedes, gets carried home in a clutch of denial-and returns. Essentially linked to the inexhaustible, stupidity is also that which fatigues knowledge and wears down history." And more, still from the very first page: "I hesitate to say here what stupidity is because, eluding descriptive analysis, it switches and regroups, turns around and even fascinates.... While stupidity is 'what is there,' it cannot be simply located or evenly scored." Right at the beginning stupidity is both linked to "the most dangerous failures of human endeavor" and also associated (via Nietzsche) with the promotion of "life and growth"--it's linked both to error (where philosophy would like to keep it) and to sheer thought (the near stupor and extreme surrender involved in the poetic act).

There are sections in the work that are explicitly political, where Ronell zeros in on the "secret beneficiaries of stupidity's hegemony," examining, for example, the invention of the word moron, a label meaning "a little below average," which routinely has been slapped on immigrant children to justify holding them back. But Stupidity makes a larger (less explicitly and more astonishingly) political gesture: it exposes a kind of "transcendental stupidity" that appears to operate structurally, at and as the very ground of our being and of our being-with. Though stupidity is usually something that is loaded up and pointed at others, in the name of truth or morals or whatever, Ronell brings it home, redescribing it--to switch metaphors--as a kind of over-arching dome within which all claims to knowledge and intelligence take place. The ethical implications of this observation are profound. Though an imperative to understand does and must remain operative, one is not capable finally of *having understood* (fully). Indeed, Ronell suggests that the only possible ethical position may be: "I am stupid before the other."

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...

This book is much better than any explanation can convey. The topic itself, STUPIDITY, defies any subtitle that could limit this consideration to any particular time and place, but the handling which it receives from Avital Ronell contains all the elements necessary to illustrate how thoroughly modern and "unparalleled disruption of meaning extends well into the twentysomething century." (p. 148). I might have been paying close attention because this was near the end of a paragraph on writers who "fortifying philosophical reflection with pornographic poses, will never be forgiven for the way they introduced the unintelligible . . ." (p. 148). Published by the University of Illinois Press in 2002, STUPIDITY demonstrates that the intellectual foundation for a field of knowledge on this topic currently exists, and that most of its investigations are likely to exceed the level of fun that might be discovered in competing fields. If politics is considered one of those fields, how apt is it that the only page listed in the index of this book for Ronald Reagan directs the reader to the thought:

". . . that Ronald Reagan and subsequent replicants are now said to have had a personality, that you have to watch your weight, that they got away with it, . . ." (pp. 72-73) ?

The single page of Contents has short titles for an Introduction and four regular chapters, with a drawing and three italicized titles for deconstructive subsections: Kierkegaard Satellite, Wordsworth Satellite: "The Idiot Boy" and Kant Satellite: The Figure of the Ridiculous Philosopher; or, Why I Am So Popular. Notes on pages 313-351 often contain lengthy comments. The Introduction on pages 3-29 has 56 notes. Though a number of philosophers show up in this book, Nietzsche, one of my favorites, gets major credit right at the start. `While stupidity is "what is there," it cannot be simply located or evenly scored. Not since Nietzsche pulled the switch and got the powerful forces of alternative valences going.' (p. 3). `Raising it, he more or less forgets stupidity, like an umbrella.' (p. 4). Nietzsche can be quoted on "successfully posing as more stupid than one is--which in everyday life is often as desirable as an umbrella--is called enthusiasm." (p. 4, from BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, section 288).

The index has numerous entries for Nietzsche, but did not direct readers to note 27 on page 323 in which Avital Ronell mentions her previous effort:

I have explored the logic and valuations of immunodeficiency in Nietzsche in "Queens of the Night," FINITUDE'S SCORE: ESSAYS FOR THE END OF THE MILLENNIUM (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 41-61.

A few philosophical themes appear more often than I expected, as you might guess from the first entry in the index:

Abraham, 211, 266; Derrida on, 351n; Kafka on, 13-14, 280, 287-294, 306-310; Kant on, 280, 284, 287, 297, 300, 302; Kierkegaard on, 280, 289, 349n; Lacan on, 351n; Spiegel on, 351n

The three notes on page 351 are all about Abraham. As one starts, "Take still another Abraham, one who stages a collusion . . ." to bring about Lacan's function of the superego.

There are 23 lines in the index for Friedrich von Schlegel, and his LUCINDE is a major topic between pages 132 and 166. There are eighteen lines in the index for Robert Musil, who is quoted at the beginning of chapter 2:

Is this lady stupid? (Ist diese Dame dumm?). . . But politeness as well as justice demand the concession that she is not absolutely and always stupid. -- Robert Musil, "On Stupidity" (p. 62).

First pictured in this book at an early stage:

If stupidity were that simple--if stupidity were that stupid--it would not have traded depths for the pits and acted as such a terror for Roland Barthes or Robert Musil or preschoolers. (The little ones receive their first interdictory instruction when told that they musn't call anyone "stupid"--the ur-curse, the renunciation of which primes socialization in this culture.) (p. 10).

Musil is listed in the index for seventeen topics, such as:

on intellectuals vs. women, 22, 53, 72, 76, 78, 79-81;

and Musil also appears on a page labeled Infotag: EXPOSITORY PROSE

"That Kant writes like a pig is stated repeatedly by Jean Paul, by Heine, by Nietzsche, by Musil, and by other beautiful writers, mostly ironists, but first of all by Kant himself: Kant's inability to write wounds and embarrasses the philosopher. . . . He couldn't help it, and it wasn't his fault. Philosophy cannot present itself directly; it is fragile, . . ." (p. 282).

The more you learn about this field, the more stupidity becomes a topic that is a lot of fun. It might even reach further than you think:

"At this point, rather suddenly, Dostoevsky makes an attempt to purify the air around idiocy, if only by clearing the way for stupidity and ordinariness. As it turns out, that way has already been cleared and its name is Gogol, who can be credited with having brought to the fore the inescapable power and range of sheer stupidity." (p. 217).