Finitude's score: essays for the end of the millennium

Avital Ronell

U of Nebraska Press, 1994 - Social Science - 368 pages

"These lit-crit essays are at once spoofable and brilliant".-Esquire. "'Trauma TV' is . . . the most illuminating essay on TV and video ever written".-Artforum. "Ronell is one of the few critical theorists of talent who can write her way out of the hermeticism typically associated with the deconstructionism of Derrida, Blanchot, Nancy, or Lacoue-Labarthe. She jumps between the vulgate of television talk shows and the high theoretical jargon of the academy with the adroitness of a speed-fiend switchboard operator . . . [She is] the reigning queen of termino-millenarianism".-Poetics Today. Suspending the distinction between headline news and high theory, Ronell examines diverse figures of finitude in our modern world: war, guerrilla video, trauma TV, AIDS, music, rumor. Her essays address such questions as: How do rumors kill? How has video become the call of conscience of TV? How have the police come to be everywhere, even when they are not? Is peace possible? Ronell writes to "the community of those who have no community-to those who have known the infiniteness of abandonment". Avital Ronell is also the author of The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989) and Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (1992), both published by the University of Nebraska Press. She is a professor in and chair of the Department of German and a professor of comparative literature at New York University.

Contents

• Finitudes Score: 19
• Queens of the Night: 41
• Ecce Fama: 63
• StreetTalk: 83
• Namely Eckermann: 159
• The Walking Switchboard: 237
• The Differends of Man: 255
• Notes: 329
• Index: 359

About the author

Avital Ronell’s books include The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989) and Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (1992), both published by the University of Nebraska Press. She is chair of and professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature and a professor of comparative literature at New York University.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Finitude's score: essays for the end of the millennium; Bison books; Volume 8 of Texts and Contexts, Vol 8
• Author: Avital Ronell
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: U of Nebraska Press, 1994
• ISBN: 0803289499, 9780803289499
• Length: 368 pages
• Subjects: Literary Collections / Essays; Social Science / Popular Culture