Responsible Stupidity

Abstract

Responsible Stupidity Diane Davis (bio) Review of: Ronell, Avital. Stupidity. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001. It takes a lot of courage to write a book about stupidity. And to call that book simply Stupidity, not even bothering to frame the term in a way that signals your own quite intelligent mastery of it—this really takes guts. But Avital Ronell’s remarkable oeuvre is nothing if not gutsy, and Stupidity makes a strong addition to her formidable corpus. It’s a timely addition, too, given that the events of the last few years have testified, yet again, to history’s “brutal regressions” (44), shattering the serene delusion that “progress” and “understanding” have been attained along the way. Those who before 9/11 still held out hope for Enlightenment values, who still, despite everything, insisted that equivalences might be drawn “between education and decency, humanism and justice” (24), may today be more ready to leave the so-called “unfinished project of modernity” unfinished. As if in anticipation of the violent tragedy that hit while Stupidity was in press, as well as of the terrifying “war on terrorism” that has since ensued, Ronell suggests that it is time to admit it’s not possible to “train thought to detach from stupidity” (23). Indeed, she proposes that the violence to which the world routinely succumbs “is of understanding: understanding itself is at issue” (24). History’s “brutal regressions,” according to Ronell, are to some degree the effect of an understanding that no longer doubts or questions itself. The “dominant form of stupidity,” she says, which is also the most dangerous form, shows up as an unflinching certitude that “doesn’t allow for questions about the world,” or language, or the relations between the two (43). Stupidity remains always open to such questions, acknowledging that being able to point to various manifestations of stupidity in no way indicates that one has a handle on it as such, as if it were simply knowable, as if it could be pinned (or penned) down and definitively understood. Stupidity is an issue precisely because it evades our grasp, and with her signature style and wit, Ronell affirms its elusive nature right up front: “I hesitate to say here what stupidity is because, eluding descriptive analysis, it switches and regroups, turns around and even fascinates [...]. While stupidity is ‘what is there,’ it cannot be simply located or evenly scored” (3). Right away, stupidity is associated both with error, where philosophy scrambles to keep it, and with sheer thought, the near stupor and extreme surrender involved in the poetic act. It is linked both to “the most dangerous failures of human endeavor” and also (via Nietzsche) to the promotion of “life and growth” (3). Stupidity is the ur-curse: “nothing keeps you down like the mark of stupidity” (27). Yet, Baudelaire figures it as a kind of wrinkle cream that preserves youth and beauty (88–89). And Ronell, being Ronell, won’t ignore the fact that sometimes, “in some areas of life, it is [also] what lets you get by” (27), that “sometimes ducking into stupidity offers the most expedient strategy for survival” (43). Among other things, stupidity’s refusal to come clean, to submit to the movement of comprehension, Ronell observes, also throws into question “the knowledge we think we have about knowledge.” Because, she remarks, “as long as I don’t know what stupidity is, what I know about knowing remains uncertain, even forbidding” (4–5). Given that Ronell names certitude as a basis for horrific acts of violence and terror, this statement may offer an ethical access code to reading Stupidity, which takes the form of a post-critical critique or a nonrepresentational analysis—a Ronell trademark. Rather than closing in on stupidity, attempting to fix and represent its meaning, she traces and amplifies its proliferations in meaning, struggling to hold the work itself in meaning’s open-ing. Rigorously interrogating the conceptual “object” that goes by the name stupidity, she moves you in so close to it that it overflows its object-status, it dis-figures, leaving a radical and inassimilable singularity in its tracks. Ronell engages it in all its singularity, tailing it...