Questions of Practice

Questions of Practice: Avital Ronell on the Philosophy of Movement

“Philosophy’s severance from performance is a myth,” says eminent philosopher Avital Ronell, reflecting on the relationship between thought and bodily motion. “It is a story that philosophers tell themselves to get away from the artifice, and the fictional and performative angles of the origin of philosophy.”

In the following excerpt from Ronell’s June 2014 talk at The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, she proposes a conceptual pas de deux between two unlikely partners. She counters the prevailing notion of truth “as associated with impeded movement,” and instead begins to examine the generative potential of such tropes as the stroll, the jump, the trip, and the slip.

Watch an excerpt of Ronell’s talk below, or visit the Center’s Vimeo page to view the talk in its entirety (running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes).

Avital Ronell delivers her talk, “One Can Also Fall Upwards,” filmed at The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage on June 2, 2014.

“One Can Also Fall Upwards” with Avital Ronell took place at the Center on June 2, 2014.

Avital Ronell is University Professor of the Humanities and a professor of German, English, and comparative literature at New York University (NYU), and the Jacques Derrida Professor of Media and Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. Prior to her appointment at NYU, she taught at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of numerous substantial works, including Dictations (1986), The Telephone Book (1989), Crack Wars (1992), Stupidity (2001), The Test Drive (2005), and, most recently, Loser Sons: Politics and Authority (2012). Her writing, motored by exasperation, going after an infinitely postponed justice, investigating the repressed conditions of knowledge, has made her one of the major forces in contemporary literary criticism and philosophy.