Ronell Quotes & Sayings

Soar for your Encore! — Adrienna Turner

French with Madame Fine is reduce to a long series of technical exercises whether we're doing grammar or reading texts. With her it's as if a text was written so that we can identify the characters, the narrator, the setting, the plot, the time of the story, and so on. I don't think it has ever occurred to her that a text is written above all to be read and to arouse emotions in the reader. Can you imagine, she has never even asked us the question: Did you like this book? — Muriel Barbery

To make things 'perfectly clear' is reactionary and stupefying. The real is not perfectly clear. — Avital Ronell

Neither a pathology nor an index as such of moral default, stupidity is nonetheless linked to the most dangerous failures of human endeavor. — Avital Ronell

The lotus reminds you to remain centered in pure awareness, connected to your central channel or core, even as chaos and complexity unfold around you. Staying centered helps you keep connected with Source in the most direct way, without getting pulled off track by all the events blossoming around you. — Anodea Judith

Whenever you should doubt your self-worth, remember the lotus flower. Even though it plunges to life from beneath the mud, it does not allow the dirt that surrounds it to affect its growth or beauty. — Suzy Kassem

Stupidity exceeds and undercuts materiality, runs loose, wins a few rounds, recedes, gets carried home in a clutch of denial-and returns. Essentially linked to the inexhaustible, stupidity is also that which fatigues knowledge and wears down history. — Avital Ronell

If you wait for inspiration you'll be standing on the corner after the parade is a mile down the street. — Ben Nicholas

The world is so round, friendship may encircle it. — Peirre Teilhard De Chardin

Learning to speak is like learning to shoot. — Avital Ronell

Giorgio Agamben is possibly the most delicate and probing thinker since Walter Benjamin. — Avital Ronell

Now, what if Others were encapsulated in Things, in a way that Being towards Things were not ontologically severable, in Heidegger's terms, from Being towards Others? What if the mode of Dasein of Others were to dwell in Things, and so forth? In the same light, then, what if the Thing were a Dublette of the Self, and not what is called the Other? Or more radically still, what if the Self were in some fundamental way becoming a Xerox copy, a duplicate, of the Thing in its assumed essence? — Avital Ronell

Exemplary friendship embraces, in a resolutely unrequited way, an unwearied capacity for loving generously without being loved back. Marking the limit of possibility - the friend need not be there - this structure recapitulates in fact the Aristotelian values according to which acts and states of loving are preferred to the condition of being-loved, which depends for its vigor on a mere potentiality. Being loved by your friend just pins you to passivity. For Aristotle, loving on the contrary, constitutes an act. To the extent that loving is moved by a kind of disclosive energy, it puts itself out there, shows up for the other, even where the other proves to be a rigorous no-show. Among other things, loving has to be declared and known, and thus involves an element of risk for the one who loves and who, abandoning any guarantee of reciprocity, braves the consequences when naming that love. — Avital Ronell