About the Author

Avital Ronell is an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, Dictations: On Haunted Writing (1986), treats Goethe's invention of remote control in writing.

Reviews

"With The Telephone Book, the deconstruction of 'phonocentrism' takes an unheard-of turn: Heidegger and Derrida are joined by Alexander Graham ('Ma') Bell in a party line that leaves one's ears (and eyes) ringing. Working with an advanced form of optical fiber, Avital Ronell establishes scandalously clear connections between her long-distance callers, and through them, between the mediatic and the literary, the technological and the political, the historical and the philosophical. In the White and Yellow Pages that result, 'criticism' catches up with the telephone and becomes rigorously colloquial."—Samuel Weber, International Operator

"To think technology is not to think technology away. Avital Ronell calls us from afar. She does not think the question concerning technology by submitting it merely to evaluation, as has been done so often and so poorly. Rather, she seeks out what 'thinks' in technology and what is 'technological' in thinking. Her concern is located not in the instrumentality of technology with its good and bad points, but in unfolding the presence of technology in discourse, as discourse, or as the silence hidden within discourse. For example, when Heidegger refers to a telephone call whose political stakes are anything but indifferent, how is the 'call' of 'conscience' thereby implicated? The telephone serves here to open a line of inquiry, producing a series of analyses, eliciting a totally unprecendented style, whose general rule would be: how technoogy stimulates metaphorization, how it transports beyond itself, and gives way to thinking. That in the end it should bear something of the feminine, or that the mode of transport may itself be feminine (la télé-phonie), is the message waiting on our answering maching. Beep. Click. Blurb."—Jean-Luc Nancy, University of Strasbourg, France

"Avital Ronell installs the telephone in the space of thinking Heidegger reserves for poetry and art, producing a series of reflections on philosophy, psychoanalysis and biography that may come to represent one of the most decisive readings of the technological since Heidegger."—Substance

"A breakthrough work within the universe of academic publications."—Warren Lehrer, Designers & Books