This book is revolutionary. If you've ever wondered what an artist (Avital Ronnell is a former performance artist) might be capable of coming up with if they became an academic (a professor) but were still devoted to the idea of performance, this is the answer. Think Kitaj and how his paintings is a form of interpretation of other artists' work in referencing them in the theme of his own work. In other words, Avital Ronnel's "Crack Wars" and its "analysis" of Madame Bovary is possible because it is from a field of study that is unique in that it is devoted to the study of an artform (literary arts) while itself operating in the same medium as that artform (words). The creativity exhibited in "Crack Wars", which is its most powerful proposition, shows that an interpretive "analysis" can be offered on a work of art ("Madame Bovery") without even wanting to answer the question, "What does is mean?". Much of the creative thrust seems to come from the way in which Ronnell re-metaphorizes certain elements or metaphors related to (current) drug use and applies them in the exploration of other facets of society that alters or simulates (ex. taking a "hit" or "scoring" of literature). What this does is to expand the reading of "Madame Bovery" to a whole crop of metaphors and their current exploration whose consideration in language may not have been in circulation at the time of its writing. And though this work may be on the edge of "literary studies", Ronnell is by no means a marginal figure. As head of NYU's dept of Germanic Languages, Ronnell co-lectured a graduate seminar last fall with Derrida (she is in the "Derrida" documentary with multi-colored bobby-pins relaying an interaction with Derrida's mother). Consider the language of the extensive quote below.

"Madame Bovary I daresay is about bad drugs. Equally, it is about thinking we have properly understood them. But if the novel matches its reputation for rendering its epoch- our modernity - intelligible, then we would do well to recall that epoch also means interruption, arrest, suspension and, above all, suspension of judgement. Madame Bovary travels the razor's edge of understanding/reading protocols. In this context understanding is given as something that happens when you are no longer reading. It is not the open-ended Nietzschean echo, "Have I been understood?" but rather the "I understand" that means you have suspended judgement over a chasm of the real. Out of this collapse of judgement no genuine decision can be allowed to emerge. Madame Bovary understood too much; she understood what things were supposed to be like and suffered a series of ethical injuries for this certitude. Her understanding made her legislate closure at every step of the way. She was her own police force, finally turning herself in to the authorities. She understood when the time had come to an end [...] for Madame Bovary opens herself to an altogether different history of intelligibility, in fact, to another suicide pact, cosigned by a world that longer limits its rotting to a singular locality of the unjust."

Ronell's book is a tour-de-force on many levels: for its lucid and startling close-reading of -Madame Bovary-, for the densely glittering energy (and humor) of her prose, and above all for its insight -- never before so comprehensively and convincingly argued -- into addiction as a symptomatic structure of the modern condition. (The addict, she points out, embodies a peculiar challenge for thinking about the inside/outside, mind/body relation. Emma Bovary takes us farther into questions of expenditure and circulation.) This is a must-read not only for those interested in Flaubert's novel, but in the history of subjectivity more generally. Even in its craziest moments, the book is provocative and perceptive.

Avital Ronell examines drugs addiction & mania in this amazingly well written and concisely beautiful book. A book-as-object, containing installations, special sections and poetic-philosophic passages, Crack Wars is sure to please the patient reader. Draws from Flaubert, Heidegger and Derrida...contends that this "culture inspires and supports destructive play only to punish it." A must read!

Avital Ronell strikes again!! With this marvellous book of essays she forays where so few critical thinkers venture: the precise confluence between low&high-brow thinking. Smoothly switching gears from literary to street-wise to philosophical to pop-cultural registers without losing depth, force or velocity, this author encourages the kind of radical thinking that virally invests itself into consciousness, producing more of the same. The Experience of reading Ronell is not always encouraging, or "safe". There is a real-time risk taking in terms of what tracks your train of thought will switch on (the text taking nothing from you, still, being so rich you can only follow various threads of its labyrinthine deconstructions @1time). An absolute thrill.

I am sorry, but there is something about a book about titled "Stupidity" which contains page after page of sentences like:

"From the culture that has been inscribed by Marx and Nietzsche as being inextricably involved with stupidity - German "culture" has brought us Simplicius Simplicissimus, the Taugenichts, Eulenspiegel, the schlemiel, and other literary cognates of historical dumbing - we also have, owing to Robert Musil, a number of intense reflections on what constitutes stupidity, its figural status and serial developments as something of a concept."

I kept reading waiting for the other shoe to drop. For the self-irony to be acknowledged. For the book to become interesting and readable; humorous. It never happened, and I came to the horrible realization that this was, in fact, a dead serious, completely impenetrable, unreadable book on the subject of stupidity. As such, I can only deem it stupid.

Not only that, but it is full of jargon and obscure jargon and unexplained literary references, an example of academia at its most loathsome and most removed from the real world.

It reminds me of the words of a much better commentator on foolishness, John Ralston Saul (whose books I all recommend most highly), regarding the degredation of language by philosophers and other specialists.

"The example of philosophy actually verges on comedy. Socrates, Descartes, Bacon, Locke and Voltaire did not write in a specialized dialect. They wrote in basic Greek, French and English and they wrote for the general reader of the day. Their language is clear, eloquent and often both moving and amusing. The contemporary philosopher does not write in the basic language of our day. He is not acceptable to the public. . . . This means that almost anyone with a precent pre-university level education can still pick up Bacon or Descartes, Voltaire or Locke and read them with both ease and pleasure. Yet even a university graduate is hard pressed to make his way through interpretations of these same thinkers by leading contemporary intellectuals..."

Somewhere in the process of reading about and buying this book I saw Avital Ronell described as something along the lines of a leading contemporary intellectual. This book certainly establishes that in my mind...

A good read; a book that ought to be read and read again.

Read this book like a science fiction--then you will enjoy it.

It is rare to encounter work so devoid of analysis coupled with boundless arrogance, and, literally, an attack on the reader's intelligence in advance of any argumentation. It's a bad, telling sign that the first words of the volume announce to the reader that the book "is going to resist you": even Miss Ronell knows all too well the weaknesses of the text she has produced! Why not responsibly address critical objections to the substance of the text, which her opening remarks indicate she's obviously had, instead of claiming on an a priori basis intellectual brilliance no dissenting critic could possibly possess? This is a sad inaugural maneuver, one that fails to be masked by even the most elaborate typographical games. "Jarring" is not the word for this book.

Ronell is the new scholarship. Praised be. Her style is innovative and she actually has something new to say about dead white guys. It's high time professors on respirators retired anyway. PS: She's the CHAIR of German Lit., Dr. Geezer.

This book is a playful, yet serious look at technology and its relation to the philosophy that defines our 20th-century thinking and the metaphysical breakdown it embodies. Ronell's writing is often beautiful, and the typeset of the book is highly original and interesting. Addressing Heidegger, Graham Bell, psychoanalytic thinking and other such topics, all via telephonics, this book challenges its readers in a creative, critical way.

Jacques Derrida is the "other" of reason. Actually, he's an inverted Kantian, nothing more. This is the sort of text his alterity-stricken fan club gets excited about. Its conversational style gives the impression that deep insights are waved at because they just never show up. The reader is made to feel that he missed something. And then the game is lost. Intangibility becomes intrinscially virtuous, and so the reader forgives the great Derrida's omissions, who is relieved of the responsibility of answering his own questions. Don't be fooled. He can't answer those questions because the special discourse he reserves for himself prohibits him from doing so in principle. That's the oldest con in the book. Derrida is the "other" of reason.

It's a collection of transcriptions of conversations/debates on various subjects between Derrida and other scholars. Sometimes I laughed out loud at the ridiculous statements and non-sequiturs.

In the book's central essay, Derrida deftly reads a short piece by Nietzsche on the way to reading the subject in the context of autobiography, of words one says about oneself. Those words, of course, return only by way of the ear so that one can locate oneself as the hearing other--hence his essay's title, "Otobiographies." The essay raises again the questions of speech and the voice and of the individual in language--questions that run through all of Derrida's work--as it paves the way for his later writings on the name. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the question of subjectivity that has so engrossed twentieth century philosophy as Derrida's account of the subject and of the way the subject knows about and can speak about itself is original, insightful, and provocative. The volume also includes the transcripts of two roundtable discussions: one on autobiography and one on translation, where Derrida with unusual clarity articulates an accessible version of his thinking on language. Finally there is an interview entitled "Choreographies" in which the editor forces Derrida to consider again the issue of gender and the status of woman. This volume is an often-overlooked but fascinating part of Derrida's corpus that will intrigue both the specialist and someone coming to Derrida's writings for the first time.