Avital Ronell

Stupidity.

University of Illinois Press, 2002. First edition. 0252026136 366 pages.

Volume, measuring approximately 6" x 9.75", is bound in black cloth, with stamped white lettering to spine. Book is like new. Dust jacket displays light shelfwear, with sunning to spine. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.

""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."