The Sunday Times article is behind a paywall, but I had put the reporter in touch with Prof. Bernd Huppauf [the 'u' should have an umlaut, but I can't add that in this software), the former Chair of German at NYU who hired Avital Ronell, and whose own article is forthcoming this week; Professor Huppauf shared the piece with the reporter, who includes a first excerpt in this article:
The row continues to spill out across the academic world. In an extraordinary intervention, Professor Bernd Huppauf, who hired Ronell at NYU before clashing with her, has written a excoriating feature for a German periodical that will be published soon. In the piece, which has been shown to The Sunday Times, Huppauf describes how Ronell has “sadistic tendencies” and sought to “discredit me” and “destroy me as a person”, at one point claiming that she had publicly labelled him an anti-semite.
Of Ronell’s time in the department, he writes: “Contradiction was heresy and heretics were rebuked or excluded — not always with a smile, often ironic, mocking, sardonic.”
He adds: “Even if one is familiar with the closed world of the university, it is hard to believe how many years had to pass before this abuse of power could reach the public and the sexualisation of her teaching was even mentioned."
Meanwhile, from Salon:
It’s well known that Ronell was a student and acolyte of Jacques Derrida...But their relationship takes on a different coloration in Benoît Peeters’ authoritative biography “Derrida,” which reports that Ronell began an affair with Derrida’s son Pierre while she was staying with the family for the Christmas holidays in 1979, when she was 27 and Pierre was 16. They moved in together the following year (after Pierre's graduation from high school), living for a time in a Paris apartment borrowed from one of Derrida’s colleagues. Her relationship with Pierre, Ronell told Peeters, “was a way of becoming part of the family. … For me, those years in Paris correspond to a really lovely dream.”
That liaison may look slightly unsavory in the rear-view mirror, but it was not illegal and was only mildly unconventional at the time — the teenage boy’s love affair with an adult woman is a staple ingredient of French fiction. It reportedly made Derrida père pretty uncomfortable, which may have been the point. But I think we can agree that the whole thing would be deemed off limits today, whatever the genders of the people involved.
Perhaps we perceive a pattern, and not just about a predilection for younger guys: Someone who sleeps with her intellectual mentor’s child in order to gain entry to his family is confusing all kinds of boundaries between work, family life and romantic life, either deliberately or because she can’t help it. She is also making clear that she doesn’t notice or doesn’t care how the outside world perceives her.
One could speculate that Ronell learned early that sexual seduction of younger people could be a tool of power, or that she studied and emulated Derrida’s well-known tendencies, in especially confrontational fashion. In any case, it was a winning career move in late-‘70s Paris, which may be her problem in a nutshell. What played as bohemian daring when she was a young intellectual in that place and time has an entirely different resonance for a tenured professor in 21st-century America....
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