This is a very good piece by a very serious scholar; an excerpt:
In discussing the Ronell case, every article I’ve seen from The New York Times to The New Yorker takes as a given that Ronell is indeed, in the words of the Times, “one of the very few philosopher-stars of this world.” The designation has puzzled me from the start because in my own circles (Modernist and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics as well as Viennese Culture of World War I and Wittgenstein, on whom I’ve written a book and many essays), most people have never so much as heard of Avital Ronell. I myself have never met her: I did read The Telephone Book when it was published in 1991, and found it very clever but almost parodically deconstructionist, and somehow I had no desire to read those later books with titles like Crack Wars and Stupidity. I may be revealing only my own intellectual limitations here, but I would say that in our own eclectic moment, Ronell, whose Telephone Book did get a lot of attention in the early ’90s, is no longer a star in the late 2010s....
The media, whether sympathetic or not to Ronell’s case, have, in any case, accepted her self-definition as a fact. World-class star, lesbian, and Ronell is also regularly referred to as a philosopher, evidently because she is a disciple of the philosopher Jacques Derrida. But the fact is that in the US, she and her fellow deconstructionists perform their theory studies under the auspices of Comparative Literature; philosophy departments, including my own at Stanford, tend to focus on analytic philosophy and would never hire a literary theorist like Avital Ronell (or, for that matter, a Derrida). This may be a small detail, but it is important vis-à-vis the larger public’s understanding of fields of study in the Humanities and what they designate.
The media have ignored these issues because they have of necessity relied on Ronell’s friends and supporters and especially on members of Ronell’s very particular Deconstructionist circle. I say “of necessity” because in the current climate, the others — the large bulk of our profession — are understandably reluctant to get involved. Of the 50 “prominent” academics who signed the notorious Butler letter, only 11 are under 60 and another 11 are over 70! The signatories, in other words, are indeed, like Ronell herself, older Establishment figures: they hold the endowed Comp Lit, German, and French chairs in the institutions of which they are often so critical. As such, they have a vested interest in preserving what they consider the status quo: deconstructionist theory with a feminist/lesbian cast. There are of course signatories who don’t fit into this mold and no doubt signed the letter just to be collegial and supportive, but the large majority are members of the in-circle, whether in the US or in France or Germany, and except for two signatories, Manthia Diawara and Gayatri Spivak, all are white — a fact no one has mentioned but which surely tells us something....
From the perspective of other university departments or the medical school or law school, from the perspective of those who work in publishing or the TV industry or in Silicon Valley, the professor’s behavior must seem simply unbelievable. Many universities now have laws against faculty-student relationships, at least while the student is actively working with the professor in question. But more important, from the perspective, say, of a medical student or engineer: how do these Comparative Lit stars have such endless time on their hands? In one email, about two years into the relationship, Avital tells Nimrod she is available from Thursday through the entire weekend: he need merely say the word. When, outsiders ask, do these people actually do any work? Grade papers? Teach their classes? And how can knowledge in our field be so subjective and tenuous that a professor who begins by praising a given student so extravagantly then turns on him and declares that his dissertation had no solid argument?
I should only add that Ronell is a non-entity in scholarly circles devoted to the post-Kantian Continental traditions in philosophy as well, not just in analytic philosophy. When Michael Rosen and I edited the Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy more than a decade ago, her name never came up. In Nietzsche studies, she is unknown. Professor Perloff is right that it does a disservice to the other humanities to foist this character on all of them.
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