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"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."
From the Inside Flap
"The foremost thinker of the repressed conditions of knowledge, Avital Ronell, with the Nietzschean audacity characteristic of her thought, probes the philosophical no-man's land of stupidity. With dazzling readings of Musil, Schlegel, Dostoevsky, and Wordsworth, Ronell conjures a figure of non-knowledge whose sovereign failures of cognition constitute a radical challenge to the philosophical, political and ethical premises of the discourses of modernity." -- Jean-Luc Nancy, author of The Sense of the World "Avital Ronell has dared to approach a topic that effectively undoes any knowing or analytic posture, even any questioning stance. Advancing in full awareness of her vulnerability (and demonstrating constantly how this vulnerability exceeds awareness), she confronts the philosophical, psychosomatic, and ethico-political effects of her non-object through brilliant readings of a host of writers for whom stupidity (or idiocy) has become a haunting obsession or a kind of ambiguous promise. And throughout this process, she pursues a stunning meditation on the act of writing itself." -- Christopher Fynsk, author of Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and other Scenes of Origin
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