Finitude's Score

Essays for the End of the Millenium

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by Avital Ronell

University of Nebraska Press

Due/Published June 1998, 381 pages, paper

ISBN 0803289499

"'Trauma TV' is...the most illuminating essay on TV and video ever written."--Artforum

And what did Poetics Today have to say ?

"Ronell is one of the few critical theorists of talent who can write her way out of hermeticism typically associated with the deconstruction 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."New in paper!

Suspending the distinction between headline news and high theory, Ronell examines diverse figures of finitude in our modern world: war, guerilla 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? Nebraska tells us that Ronell, "writes to 'the community of those who have no community--to those who have known the infiniteness of abandonment.'"

Review

“This work offers a discursive sampler that reveals, if it reveals anything at all, an obsessive meditation on...well, I was going to say the persecuted, the culpabilized, but it would have been equally true to say on music, dissimulation, pleasure, and then I realized that, all told, this work is simply an obsessive meditation.”

Ronell’s essays explore a variety of subjects from the banality of television to Kafka’s Castle to the increasing surveillance of the police. Ronell is also very much concerned with the growing influence (often malign in nature) of technology seen through the technopolice state of contemporary Los Angeles to the video game weapons of the Persian Gulf War. Ronell’s elegant yet aggressive style is also seen in her essays on AIDS, music, rumor, and guerilla video.

In a review of her work Poetics Today wrote, “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 switch-board operator...[She is] the reigning queen of termino-millenarianism.”