Avital Ronell - Career

Career

Ronell was born in Prague to Israeli diplomats and was a performance artist before entering academia. She graduated from Rutgers Preparatory School in 1970. She gained a B.A. from Middlebury College and studied with Jacob Taubes, as well as Hans-Georg Gadamer, at the Hermeneutic Institute at the Free University of Berlin. She received her Ph.D. in German under the advisement of Stanley Corngold at Princeton University in 1979, alongside her close friend and philosopher Laurence Rickels, and then continued her studies with Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous in Paris. At that time, she became romantically involved with Jacques Derrida's first son, Pierre Alféri. She was also a very close friend of the controversial experimental writer Kathy Acker and adopted numerous techniques for her writing through the example of Kathy Acker's fiction. She joined the comparative literature faculty at the University of California, Berkeley where she taught with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy and Judith Butler. She moved to New York University in 1995 where she then co-taught a course with Jacques Derrida until 2004. In 2009, she began co-teaching courses with Slavoj Žižek who continues to hold the position of visiting professor at NYU's Department of Germanic Languages and Literature. In 2010, François Noudelmann also co-taught with her, and co-curated the Walls & Bridges program with her in 2011. She is a core faculty member at the European Graduate School. Themes of her work include marginalized subjects such as ghost writing, addiction, technology, stupidity, testing and the position of the son in authority. In addition to her own writing, she has produced English translations of Derrida's work.