The Time of My Life

Avital Ronell

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 26, Number 2,
December 2017, pp. 249-269 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/689582

[ Access provided at 25 May 2020 17:03 GMT from University Of New Mexico ]
The Time of My Life

avital ronell

. . . A period of mourning has kept me away from music, so my head

fills with static bombs instead. I usually like to work with some sort
of sonic signature. A subtle incentive laying down a basic beat, mu-
sical accompaniment allows me to pummel at a stubborn knot in
life. In his work on cryptonymy, Laurence Rickels has claimed that
background music rings a death knell. That may be so. I’m always
hitching a ride on the death drive—the flex of my drivenness—a
sure fire way to language. Doing without the rhythmic support
that music supplies has presented complications in the mostly mo-
nogamous relation to writing. Ach! Despite my willingness to inte-
grate silence and random noise into phrasal regimes, I become a bit
sissyish when drafts recede so that nothing on the order of language
assertion comes my way. Plunk, plunk. OK, so I’m still learning. As
panic shivers through me: muteness happens.
In some sectors the mute burble constitutes an upgrade in the
grapple with the poeticity of being. But, let’s face it, regressive sput-
tering rarely scores points on my beat. At most, I can make some-
thing of “muttering”—or, with ears tuned to the German language,
“mothering”—and stick it onto the subphenomena that constitute

qui parle Vol. 26, No. 2, December 2017

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250 qui parle december 2017 vol. 26 no. 2

speech at its lowest capacity to say or mean. I am thinking of the reg-

istry of innovative sighs and groans, the low yowl that Friedrich Kit-
tler locates as the start-up of German literature. Even here I invent,
haplessly, for Kittler sees literary articulation originating only in the
Seufzer, the sigh: Ach!1 But, still. What is the sigh but a feminine ac-
cent placed near or on language’s spareness? In Richard II the sigh
and groan duke it out in a dance of sexual difference. Men groan,
women sigh—signaling different letdowns in the poetry of speech-
lessness. Elsewhere, famously, “the rest is silence.” . . .
When the music lets off, and you’re shifting down to inert being,
you sometimes need a jolt—a someone or something to slap it out of
you, bringing you back to language, even without the sound track.
So I say thank you to the editors of Qui Parle, to Simone, for rousing
me from an overdrawn account of guarded lament. There are times
when we all need our Claudius factor—the sensible portion of a
Shakespearean dose to knock us out of grief, ringing the bell to
stir us into action.
There is no accounting for the schedules that land grief or offer
reprieve from the unrelenting experience of loss. Writing and re-
membrance deliver a momentary flicker, an estranging but welcome
wind tunnel of hope, a kind of expectancy. Who’s speaking, you’ve
asked? I’m not certain that it’s a matter of “who.” The psychic divi-
sion of labor rotates out to rumored relay posts and unmarked
domains that define our way, if unconsciously or with purposeful
abandon.
We went through this years ago, in negotiation over the title of the
journal, on fast spin cycle: do we underscore “who” or stay with the
“what” that speaks? There was Wordsworth’s refrain in the “Idiot
Boy” that went “to-who, to-who,” sending up a flare of noncogni-
tion, sounding out the owl’s nocturnal relay and a collapse of human
subjectivity. Ach! Sometimes I just wanted to howl, Allen Ginsberg
style. At the time we were debating this or that title—asking who or
what speaks—Jean-Luc Nancy came out with the book, edited by
Peter Connor and Eduardo Cadava, with my input and participa-
tion, Who Comes after the Subject? The decision to settle on who
speaks, Qui Parle, resonates with the publication of that volume.2
The fact that the title remained in French, emanating from Berkeley,
 Ronell: The Time of My Life 251

in itself framed somewhat of a defiant pose that was not lost on the
early readership. By contrast, Representations seemed staunchly
Anglo-American, well-manicured and historicist, our adversarial al-
terity. I’ll return to the posited standoff momentarily.
. . . Ach! I am too often seized by a spectral broadcast system that
makes me say and commit to things I barely comprehend. Some
checkpoint in me redirects ancient grievances or stubborn parasites,
some of which are commensal, so we get along, we rumble. Interrup-
tion shapes the way. Every day I report to the internal secretariat
several fade-outs, different rhythms that suspend the work; a pal-
pitation. Smack, smack, smack. These days an interruptive force
unsays and capsizes the paragraphs that form in my head, or wher-
ever. (Nietzsche places thought in the stomach, and I do host a pit
there.) I mostly reflect on the intrusive quality of the past months,
a blur of punctuation marks. Celan, in the Meridan speech, said,
“It speaks”—a flex of the original title of the journal, Qui Parle.3
In the beginning, to be clear, it bore the name, Ça Parle, which turned
out, we thought, to indicate bias in the direction of Lacan. Smack,
smack, smack. By midmorning voices from the bleachers call out,
reoriginating in me: “I can handle this, I can woman-up.” We were
all on some level of the signifier Lacanians in those days, but we
didn’t want to hand the future of the journal’s legacy to his corpus.
We were also irrevocably compelled by Derrida and caught up in his
fascinating itineraries. In fact, Derrida supported us strongly and,
with his customary generosity, delivered manuscripts to our door.
Wait. I’m having trouble focusing. The newsfeed that has accrued to
the past months, overburdening this period of mourning, hit home.
Like so many others, I succumbed to a supplementary curl of events,
by no means located merely on the margins of our collective exis-
tence, such as it is; nor was the shocking detail of the 2016 elec-
tions readjusted by acts of asserted overcoming, pushing through.
The destruction of America, its imaginary capaciousness, has seemed
irremediable, despite strong indications of resistance. It’s as if Henry
Miller’s descriptions in Tropic of Capricorn linking obscenity to
America (“America is pacifist and cannibalistic”)4 were coming
back four-fold. Ach, ach! In class I track violent surges in the history
252 qui parle december 2017 vol. 26 no. 2

of the philosopheme “America”; I sit on broad fictions, mining their

referential temptation, and try to hold the name to its promise.
In my own past, for the duration of the Berkeley chapter, things
seemed different. I was phasing out of my immortal claims but con-
vinced that the world could be changed. I was hopping mad. Into the
streets, onto the page. On the phone, in the classroom, I was attuned
to the exigencies of moment, on your case, in your face. Hitching a
ride with the Weltgeist, I was pumped, attuned. With Act Up and
other insurrections modeling the way, we strengthened defiantly
on power pills of righteousness—sometimes to the point of ethical
overkill. I’ll dial it down; still, the urgency of those swollen days
should not be undermined or in any way forgotten. The overreach,
though never enough to my way of thinking, was dictated by a sense
of necessity. In matters of rebelliousness, one should overshoot one’s
goal, part of me thinks. (I learned about the merits of overshooting
from Bataille’s interpretative handle on Manet.) We needed to score
points, maintain our resolve. Now there’s a strain of trepidation fla-
voring the relation to world, a fraught hesitation detectable at least
from my quarters, coming from a stomach-sinking dread. Or is the
loom of historical dread just an accommodation, part of my newly
set limitations? Perhaps it is just I who feels she can’t guarantee
another round of resolute pushback? Then, without discernible
prompting, I suddenly become battle-ready, locked and loaded. It
goes back and forth, the encroaching sense of defeat and the retort,
“They don’t know whom they’re messing with: watch out, asshats!”
Cratered by the recent election, I am surely not the only one to feel
existentially benched much of the time. In the throttled stagnation of
disappointment, I sit in anticipatory bereavement of the next years.
Trying to rouse, I set about looking for energy surges and the stores
of public language that let me coalesce with other citizens of rage.
Like a schizo sprung from Deleuze’s pages, I am running, for the
most part, to the count of stationary mobility. I guess that’s OK in
the end, if your job compels you to run without stabilizing a desti-
nation, and you’re just a tracker of minoritized traces—in other
words, a writer.
Our work, for the most part off the table as concerns ratings
sweeps on any side of the political spectrum, must still go on as
 Ronell: The Time of My Life 253

we hope for favorable headwinds. You can surveil rhetorical mis-

steps and referential destructions, go after the vanishing specter of
authority, scale subterranean redirection, all the while contesting
dominating tropes and archaic sovereignties. Maybe something will
spill over and produce historical stains or trackable stops one day.
You can’t be sure what the outcome might be of a kind of dogged
“purposiveness without purpose” (Kant). But the sure aim of the
other side is what we’re up against: even hesitation is an affront
to the stupidly assured aims of murderous hatred. Our little drips
and drops, the homeopathic language dispensers and noncanonic
utterances—the sighs and groans, the howling, bitching, and moan-
ing without an off switch—maybe these determined microinterven-
tions will succeed one day in effecting a subtle shift in the force of a
nihilistic disclosure that stares us down. In our numbing and dumb-
ing days, will this get anyone very far, make an ethical dent, I won-
der? Is it OK to keep pitching language into the emptiness? . . . Did
you know that OK came from army language, meaning “0 killings,
zero killings”? The acronym SNAFU comes from the “militerary”
zone as well, I tell myself, in the works of Kleist that carry unfigur-
able intrusion, the transcendental SNAFU: “Situation Normal All
Fucked Up.” Despair, rage, impotence, without accompaniment.
These are the kinds of prods that, despite it all, make one want to
shake off the dust and get to the writing desk if you’re an offspring
of Benjamin and Kraus’s “rights of nerves”: When things rile you
up—or lay you out—you spring to, report for duty no matter how
messed up you feel. You’re pushed, or ejected, from inert distress by
a force coiled up in Heidegger’s notion of Stoß, yes: a prod. You’re
prodded, pushed around, violated/caressed, poked at, and stoked.
Stoked, prodded, locked and loaded: That must have been how
Qui Parle started up, in my Berkeley days. Peter Connor (who
now teaches French and comparative literature at Barnard)—Peter
and I decided to launch a journal, group together graduate students
and their celebrity mentors, our teachers whom we read and revered,
putting them in print. In jubilant imitation of the Athenaeum, or
maybe it was Acéphale, we wanted to break through, create commu-
nity with or without communion, as Bataille imagined. The Schlegels
and their group created a scandal with their journal, the Athenaeum,
254 qui parle december 2017 vol. 26 no. 2

by putting out a call for submissions, the first such call in a fit of

democratic openness. Henceforth, anyone could submit a paper,
which would be judged whether or not you were a heavy hitter, with-
out regard for how much authority your signature carried. Wait.
What?!? In the end, a sort of overdemocratization pushed us out,
and a new team took over. We had not protected ourselves very
shrewdly but invited everyone in, given away voting powers, and
so forth. Thus, when our ideas became too wild or whatever for
an increasingly politically correct climate, we were shown the
door—a door of our own making! I think one of us fell into a depres-
sion at that point and threshhold.
Stationed in Berkeley, we had craved community. We hung out
among our various groupuscules: we worked round the clock, teach-
ing, writing, shivering with anxiety over this or that futural flash in
the bucket, but we still put out a demand for community. Building up
a journal, singular in its outlook and expectations, seemed to be the
way to go, fanning out in so many ways, trying to establish a unique-
ly irreverent yet serious profile. We were determined to make our
mark, change the menu of Berkeley’s theoretical assumptions and
predilections. As disdaining spitfires, we set about rivaling those
gathered around the aforementioned Representations, an uptown
well-behaved and polished publication, should those urban maps
work here. We—we were different, deviant upstarts, new in the
neighborhood, demanding a recount, filing down a different angle
and a consistently maverick POV. It helped to cut up the neighbor-
hood in that obstinate way, taking our positions with exaggerated
clarity. The antimimetic rivalry increased the efficiency of the prod
that put us to work in the wee hours of the night.
But this is now. The anniversary that is being marked in this issue,
so many years later, touches me and has made me scroll down to the
days when I was in conversation with Ann Smock, Marie-Hélène
Huet, Denis Hollier, Pierre Alferi, Ann Banfield, T. J. Clark, Anne
Wagner, Fred Dolan, David Cohen, Marianne Constable, Howard
Bloch, Stephen Greenblatt, and so many others who held my esteem,
shared a glass of wine, and, to a large extent, continue to stay on the
line. Still, the very fact of flagging an anniversary gives an uneasy
tug. Not that I want to sponsor that part of me bent on being a
 Ronell: The Time of My Life 255

killjoy, but—full disclosure—anniversaries tend to bring me down.

Of course, I am hardly the only one who must power through dark-
ness, allow for mourning, in order to arrive at the celebratory affect
associated with anniversary. Nothing could be more common than
to shun such a marker, and want to fold shop. I might as well surren-
der to that nearly instinctual pull: for a provisional screening, I can
examine the underside of anniversary before making claims about
having the strength to receive such returns and their freeze-dried
implications! So. Let me consider those that haunt and hound me,
how to get around the anniversarial bend, if only to lean into the
emptiness of recurrence, its inescapable undertow. At least if you’re
living/dying, somehow living on, in my head, you’ll need to go dark
before anything else happens.
(I’ll say something else, in an aside or off the internal wall: writing
to or for Berkeley disturbs my sense of address and provisional di-
rectionality, gives me a jolt as I face an unmasterable past, ach! . . .)
  

Ach, ach! It’s das Man’s world, I tell myself.5 There are some anni-
versaries worth celebrating, like the launch of Qui Parle. Other ob-
servances hold you hostage, as if they were prevented from recurring
but stick in your side day in, day out. Despite what has happened or
has failed to happen owing to the commemorated day, some spin-off
anniversaries still bear and sustain momentum; others hit the pause
button in a free fall of psychic standstill. If I may be permitted to take
the off-ramp now, let me recount one such debilitating anniversary
that in a disturbing way returned recently—or has never left. I know
that my approach is staggered, delayed, that there is static on the
line. . . . Let me move on this nonetheless. . . .
January 20, noted indelibly by the great poet Paul Celan, ended
our ability to tell time.6 It was a catastrophic date. According to the
poet, the unique date haunts our relation to temporality and marks
the stoppage of history. Time ceased on January 20, a marker of the
shadow of time, announcing the vanishing of Enlightenment buoys
that carry historically prized notions on which discerning folks tend
to count and existentially float—in good or bad times, in the warp of
time, even when one is out of time or in the tunnel of untimeliness,
256 qui parle december 2017 vol. 26 no. 2

one straps oneself to notions pumped by a touch of transcendence

such as “progress,” “perfectibility,” “the end of prejudice,” “human
dignity,” “the relinquishment of superstition,” and so forth. Celan’s
date announces and voids these hopeful levers. As in Blanchot’s es-
say, “The Indestructible,” the poet’s language states that something
has happened on the order of the human capacity to destroy, reveal-
ing to us man’s delivery to his own destruction, completing a run of
unstoppable impairment.
On this date—the hollow of which returns every year to hit us in
some unconscious place of troubled receptivity—on this date, in
1942, senior Nazi officials and SS officers were convened at Wann-
see, a suburb of Berlin, to engineer “The Final Solution to the Jewish
Question.” Celan’s taut reflections on January 20 prompted Derrida
to think about signature and date, what it means to sign off with a
date, even one that stalls any advance, including the simplest return
of a given date, in terms of calendrical time.7 The term, a termina-
tion, is penciled in every year again, reappearing faintly, yet as a per-
manent lesion that cannot be removed from the remotest horizon
of historical becoming. Even the notion of “horizon,” as basis and
background—as supporting field and limit, hermeneutically set—
was shattered by the zero hour. January 20: a date to end all dates,
the final date, charged with finality, determining the phantasm and
implementation of the depraved idea of a final solution, the destruc-
tion of a neighbor, a friend, a civic alterity, my lover.
  

The German American Donald Trump does not measure up to the

unprecedented insolence, the event that decided Jewish extermi-
nation. Yet, something pernicious keeps returning, and civic prohi-
bitions, after so much reparative straitening, have been lifted. The
unsayables are mouthed by the obscene broadcast system named
“Trump”—the type of name that Thomas Mann, or Flaubert before
him, would write into a narrative that seeks to capture mediocrity
and a promiscuous capacity for unrelenting wreckage. How did
this come about on our watch, at the time allotted here and now
for inhabiting this earth, attended by a particular stopwatch check-
ing being and nihilism, when fundamental values are upended?
 Ronell: The Time of My Life 257

To the degree that we are still related to the possibility of advent,

counting in our largely hapless ways on the future, marked inwardly
by dates that recur or continue to disturb and cease historical hum-
ming, the revenant and breach of the time, the date January 20, must
be accounted for. The obsession with a date’s return is not a flex
of science fiction or mystical anticipation but part of a congruency
that bears reflection, calls up ethical responsiveness and a sense of
haunted time, already written up, on the rebound and off the rails.
At once unprecedented in terms of arrogance of office and overreach,
the era of Trump also brandishes a series of regressive collapses,
backsliding to racist grammars, reigniting, in terms of sanctioned
public discourse, the nearly snuffed-out inflammation of white su-
premacist mania, misogynist blowback, and archaic bordering sys-
tems. Infantile modes of aggression motor the polluters of the good
breast, to speak with Melanie Klein’s analysis of the greedy predator.
Since Kafka made it a point to open the gates of our penitentiary
culture—always near and intrusive, if underground or relocated to a
border island, unconsciously encroaching—our bodies have been
seen as exposed to retaliatory write-ups, strapped into historical
writing machines that stamp and date us, leaking archival inscrip-
tion. January 20: the date and what it stands for may seem remote,
yet figures of Nazism keep returning, as if on automatic replay, citing
the traumatism of a historical repetition compulsion. As distant as
the imaginary field of reception must seem at times, its tireless reach
is awesome, spills into the way we move or stagger through dark-
ened fields of political comprehension. . . .
Ach! I am calling our teachers. Events turning on time still hit you
in the gut and make your immune system give way, not only because
of this or that decimating decree or violent dispatch. Nietzsche, first
philosopher to put his body on the line, warned against the way po-
litical events and recurring destructions would disturb your organs,
making you want to puke. Retching and shuttered down by mi-
graines, Friedrich Nietzsche has also taught us to dance, to take mea-
sure and calibrate steps as we engage the necessity, when something
hits home, of Dis-Tanz, dance of distance.
When darkness threatens to drown out my ability to push back,
throw that punch, shout out in fist-shaking fury, I remember the way
258 qui parle december 2017 vol. 26 no. 2

Nietzsche has filled my dance card, sometimes taking me for a soli-

tary spin; other times, by opening and inventing a new lexicon of
rage, the last philosopher, as he was called, scripted a world-class
swirl around futural sites of calamity. In the darkest night, Nietzsche
threw himself into the rhythm and possibilities of music and its ec-
static flare. Nietzsche, graduate of Bayreuth, knows all about Wood-
stock nation and the spirit of music to get us up. I wonder, my
friends (I understand the temptation to sit this out, to freeze in stu-
pefied ignominy, even when we send holograms out to the streets of
protest): Can I still have this dance, can I ask you to unclench suffi-
ciently, or just a little bit, so that language can happen upon us and
thought, tuned to our mournful disordering of sense, might return?
(This is not the place, but when he goes wild on us and Diony-
sian, “throwing up” in the Nietzschean vocabulary is a good thing—
signaling not only part of the heave of cleansing but also a way to
reverse dialectics. But this is another story. Or is it? Can Hegel and
analytic philosophers dance their way out of the knob of history?)
  

Given the grave appointment of moment—it was in the cards to col-

late the January 20s—the report of the not-my-president’s actions re-
mains taped to the dates of calamity checked off by Celan and Der-
rida. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, which falls a week after
January 20 (though Werner Hamacher has argued that there is no
“after” the Holocaust, for time has stilled in an unreadable frozen
pose)—a week later, according to ontic calendars (materially indif-
ferent, mechanically turning around the blighted sun)—the success-
ful miscreant, whose narcissism demands of him a turnout of crass
acts of power, issues a decree to shut out Muslims of seven nation-
states. Severed of its Abrahamic brother, the world takes a hit and
opens to the fallout of the unbound. In more Arendtian terms, he
has cut into existence, developing repressive disavowals of world-
binding relations. Even though time has stopped, even though some-
thing keeps ticking, its shadow progression offers dates to check off:
there is something like a January 21 that lines up, presenting itself,
though without matching the mood of triumphal bragging rights or
the fantasy of overcoming the wounding pinch of the precedent date.
 Ronell: The Time of My Life 259

There is little hope for moving beyond what Celan and Derrida
signed off as “January 20.” But this is what we’ve got, this is what
I’ll take, with the understanding that January 20 and 21 are ever-
more toggled together, if only for an ambiguous flash or lurch for-
ward. January 21 limps along, wanting to make time return along
an axis of viability. A surge, a remembrance of uprising and the pow-
er punch of protest, still pulsing without certitude of outcome, still
straining despite the strong turnouts, January 21, 2017, delivered
a response to the dispiriting call relayed from January 20 on our
shared timetable of wounded acknowledgment. . . .
For a moment, there was a January 21.
Nearly unexpected, cued up by the call of a newly keyed rhetoric
of destruction, a licensed throw-down of hatred, a January 21 turned
up the sound system of Echo to drown out, if momentarily, a dam-
aged national Narcissus. However minoritized Echo may be in myth
and susbsidiary narratives that surround her, she, in the end, may
just have the upper hand, the righteous stance of a first responder
that knows no gag order. In terms of adding a date to the time sus-
pension of January 20, a different relation may start to rouse in
terms of harm done in and by time, a harm that remains irreversible.
The second and secondary appointment may not overtake the de-
structive propensities of January 20 but shifts ground enough for
something different to rise up, if not the fresh, new sun. The adjusted
date, January 21, does not cancel out the injurious date that it must
somehow succeed, but it tends to its wounds.
  

I would like to examine the consideration due to a grieving citizenry

and the anxiety of nonaddress. Let us move to the second day, if we
can push on the sense of that week, according to a nonlinear flight
plan, knowing that January 20 will not budge. The 2017 Women’s
March—massive, elegant, to the point—invites us to look into the
nature of protest, the way we file by sites of inequity or are filed
down by disturbing flare-outs of injustice. My principal focus in re-
cent work is on civic grievances. How do we understand the form
of address constituted by complaint or the grievances that weigh
in or hang back? The march of January 21, at once exalted and
260 qui parle december 2017 vol. 26 no. 2

dispiriting—we hit a wall, it wasn’t Mexico—made every one of

us level with the way civic grievances are bound to be diverted by
those addressed. Sometimes messages may arrive, but no one has
demonstrated mastery over their itineraries. Missiles and missives
can be disarmed or reassigned at any point of their trajectory. Yes:
sometimes, something arrives, against all odds, and lands near pro-
grammed routes.
Laced with grief, profiling the solemnity of a grieving citizenry, the
Women’s March of January 21 was strengthened by its very sense of
deflation and the anxiety of nonaddress. We were in a swirl of Mit-
sein, bulked up by a momentary epiphany of collective determina-
tion. But we also held to the abyssal sense of indeterminacy, making
points that will not stick with those wielding executive power. Our
contestatory field was not level, was on the side of decimated being,
glacial sobriety. Am I exaggerating—or, as my students might say,
“overexaggerating” my point? I’m not sure that I am, given the pro-
tofascist cut of destiny that I’m looking at. The language was spare
on January 21. On the downside of exuberance, posters were home-
made and fabulously quirky. We were set on a kind of Bataillean
march: forming a community without communion, we remained un-
convinced of our substantiality, yet moved by a kind of resolve, a
nearly Heideggerian Ent-schlossenheit. The tightening of resolve
came down on the other side of Heidegger, the one granted by Reiner
Schürmann, astonishing philosopher who succumbed to AIDS, ca-
pable of drawing the work into its anarchic freedom zones, turning
it against the murky intentionalities of its signatory. Resolve contains
the capacity for exposure. It also sheds light on the response for
which a terrifying disclosure calls. Tensed by civic disappointment,
alert to the gravity of the call to responsibility, a crowd of duty-
bound responders went out on the streets, showing up in the face
of loss. As oddball as this may seem in our day of urgent political
collapse, an overall grasp of Derridian codes of delivery alongside
the concern the French philosopher articulated with misdirected mis-
sives will help orient our sense of “destinerring” intelligence, a sys-
tem of envois left unprotected by any reliable logic of cognition or
recognizable political system.
 Ronell: The Time of My Life 261

Let me bring back my friend, Werner Hamacher, who was Ger-

many’s contemporary version of Hegel. Werner has warned that pro-
test as form and tactical maneuver may not suffice in the face of this
calamity; we must look to something that functions along the lines of
ostracization in the Athenian polis. Donald Trump and his destruc-
tive horde must be ostracized, with violent precision and unrelenting
determination.
  

The sense of betrayal was so colossal and multiappointed in Novem-

ber 2016 that I don’t know whether I, for one, will rock out of my
hellhole any time soon. Still, every other day I am determined to send
out a hologram to rally the troops and tropes that might revive a
numbed and medicated body politic that feels and looks like road-
kill. I go into my obsessive loop, mulling over details of note. What
the hell happened here? Is the ascension of Trump a matter, largely,
of misogynist apprehension, white masculinist payback, homopho-
bic overflow—just when we thought that gay marriage and divorce
equality had settled in, cozy and nauseatingly equalized to straight
normativity?
Go ahead: give me another smack of misogyny, the way it fastens
onto the imaginary body of a maternal shape and shadow. I analyze
the lethal prompts of a maternal empire that gets swooped down on
according to the logic and habits of military aggression. One could
say that the field of anal-sadistic military aggression was my special-
ty, part of my critical arsenal as I probed the arse-upward maneuvers
inherent to my designated “militerary” domains and invested sites
of psychoanalytic mappings. I take it as rigorously necessary that
Trump’s mouth hole be the flapping aperture to funnel floods of
radically unleashed aggression, the toxic spill of excrementalized
language, part of his recourse to a crucial intersection where twitter-
ature meets shiterature—a language that Freud has seen as part
of the expression of sheer pleasure, puerile and adolescent, involved
in an unrestrained propensity to leak language, ugly language, re-
leasing the overjoyed slosh of smut.
Pierre Alferi has recently written about various texts of brevity,
micrograms in which twitterature figures prominently (or, rather,
262 qui parle december 2017 vol. 26 no. 2

minutely, nanotechnologically signaling); shiterature is mine, how-

ever, part of my contemplation of the “Kaka céleste” series where
I dwell, for example, on the common locution—sacred, primal,
moving—“holy shit!” But that is another story, another narrative
pump, even if it can be seen to drip into our political body and de-
liver an offensive rhetoric of elimination. . . .
Still, in my frisky worlds, America was meant to gather us up in
our tattered clothing, pointing us to a certain, if risky, horizon of
promise, allowing us to dream according to outrageous protocols
of becoming. The shutdown marked by Trump has thrown an axe
into my imaginaire, momentarily congealed as a frozen sea, to speak
with Kafka. BTW, I always speak with Kafka, and I must now revert
to his recast of the Statue of Liberty, who was called “Miss Liberty”
in my immigrant childhood. She was my first real crush, a full-
figured, book-holding mastress that I looked up to. In Kafka’s Amer-
ika, the Statue of Liberty, legendary welcoming committee to the
destitute, holds a dagger in her clenched fist.
  

Many analyses have rushed in to cover the wound and wonder of the
degradation bearing the name of Trump. Had I the time and stami-
na, if I were not one of those felled by national fatigue syndrome, I
would now want to turn to texts of those who were tempted by cer-
tain aspects of totalitarianism, the betrayer’s notebooks, the freedom
fighters and writers, to try to understand what German American
Trump repeats, revises, consciously drags in, unconsciously over-
hauls. The task, in outline, requires those of us trained to stay with
the congested flow, to go about identifying how the fascistoid temp-
tation works out unresolved prior catastrophes that are on the re-
bound at this time. What is being disclosed now, and why?
This historical moment, stripped of grace, propelled by cynical ex-
cess and caged in a relentless calculative grid, represents a crushing
death rattle of fading political grammars and ethical failures, if that’s
what we are called to witness and stare down. In the meanwhile, he is
grabbing some phantom of the feminine “by” the pussy. Grammati-
cally straying, semantically off-center, the Trumpian assertion comes
about as a “tell.” Whatever kind of strip poker his boasting engages,
 Ronell: The Time of My Life 263

he is at once chillingly on point about sexualizable yields of power

and off target, disavowing the very “thing” his phrase seeks to estab-
lish. The broken locution attests to the spectacle of disavowal, which
is served up to a world that must witness the deportation of all that is
construed as foreign, alien, in breach of an imaginary wholeness. If
America must be made “great again,” this in part is owing to a sense
of default, an aggravated state that the imaginary lesion locates in
the offending phrase. Perhaps, given the urgency of the moment,
one does not want to dwell in the increasingly unsheltered precincts
of thought and its intellectual branches, family trees, and academic
affiliations. It is sometimes dispiriting to stay behind, among those
who must desist when it comes to providing pragmatic byways
and immediately legible directives. Oh, I have a boatload of instruc-
tions to dispense at this time! Still, we cannot afford to abandon
thought in an age of increasing violence against intellectual pursuit,
poetic saying, and artistic redescription.
Language usage, no matter where it’s coming from or which hell
it’s going to, contains lethal potency. Even when diminished and bare-
ly literate, micro-events of language usage require attentive care. The
minute parsing of language calls for steadiness, acuity, and stubborn
analysis—and willed slowdown—all of which carries its own type of
pragmatic insistence. For now, one can look to those studies that re-
view aggression, shades of bullying, tropologies of familialism, and
other indices that rely on a thoroughgoing analysis of power. My
own work tries to isolate instances of force in the absence of author-
ity. True authority, the kind involved in staving off the authoritarian
onslaught, tags a paradoxical companion: humility. According more
or less to Arendt, Kojève, Marcuse, and others who feared its col-
lapse, authority, a kind of saving power, has been dangerously on
the decline. One dreams of someone or something with enough au-
thority to pull the emergency brakes, putting a stop, by a nearly sub-
phenomenal gesture, to wayward destructiveness. Those who carry
authority do not need to make noises or produce signs of their
authority—the enigmatic downplay of authority’s assertion remains
one big philosophical headache. Let me turn to a less topical, more
untimely, and, perhaps on that account, more telling account of
genealogical consequence. What does literature teach us about
264 qui parle december 2017 vol. 26 no. 2

advocacy? How do we protect the truly vulnerable and

deauthorized—those who are undercut by ruthless acts of exclusion-
ary violence that head them off at any viable pass? Let me patch us
through to a more phantomal call for justice, all the more command-
ing. All the more: Elsinore. I am calling you.
  

Ach! Give me another round, in the name of justice. There is some-

thing that has obsessed me, a kind of recurrent motif, a plaintive cry,
put out in my prequel work, and that seems to be calling for atten-
tion now, again. Embedded in the book on “loser sons” as provision-
al site of ending it all, one will find a sustained political reflection
on late puberty and the phantasm of maturity. Let me ask you
this: Have you ever met a truly mature being (in the sense that
exceeds acknowledging mere checkpoints of aging and the occasion-
al disposition that allows for stepping back, lucidly cooling one’s
engines)? There may be some human states of exception here and
there, but they, too, show a tendency to lapse into immaturity.
Goethe, one of the historically maturest beings according to the tab-
ulations turned in by Nietzsche, fell hard for a teenager when hitting
his seventies. But even Goethe, who transcended first chakra nation-
alisms, regressive familialisms, and all manner of tribal bonding
needs, credited his growth to wiederholter Pubertät, recurring pu-
berty. The oversized writer counted on the returns of puberty to
move on with creative and libidinal abundance, inviting the double
edge of abandon and sovereign trespass. He consistently abandoned
himself to the returns of adolescent exuberance. At the same time, he
was the poet who pressed claims about the correlative intensities of
joy and suffering—puberty consigns the upsurging child to pits
of pain smoothed over only by the tranquilizing boons of so-called
adulthood. Speaking of the West-Eastern Divan, I have seen streams
of immaturity strike even the wisest gurus and sensible teachers who
suddenly go infantile, giggle, play, shriek with laughter. It is not clear
where to situate laughter on the developmental scale or when eval-
uating psychic and somatic outburst, how to account for the spiri-
tual or purifying capacities of laughter and its openness to gender
 Ronell: The Time of My Life 265

reassignment, feminizing the giggler—or even the way it functions as

a gift in Freud and, in terms of disrupting vital registers of signifi-
cance, has left an explosive hole in Bataille and Nancy.
Puberty, perhaps not philosophically mature enough to have be-
come a fully developed concept, sets up a breach, flagging a destruc-
tive passage on the road to majority. The minor hits a snag that may
never entirely resolve but is bound to return and deliver an unexpect-
ed knockout punch. Sparing only a few, puberty comes around the
bend for the second and umpteenth time, to offer faux replenishment
or the bumbled bad news of your finitude, foretelling an imminent
crash. Driven perhaps on the ontic level by metonymies of the newly
flaunted sports car, the unaccountable affair, or freshly minted wife,
a clean store of aggression and ensnaring spree of Selbstbehauptung,
the body bump of untimely self-assertion—ach!—the return of pu-
berty undermines the flattering growth chart that humanity assigns
to itself. As shock and disruption introduced to any concept of
developmentality, puberty is linked, via Lyotard’s political essays,
to Kant’s remarkable statements about immaturity. Perhaps now
more than ever, we need to look into the malefic drag of immature
political behaviors.
Kant sets out from the insight that one wants to remain immature,
bound by an authoritarian tether, kept on a short leash, in an exis-
tential and political comfort zone that stalls growth and seasoned
decision. In the chapter “Was war Aufklärung? / What Was Enlight-
enment? The Turn of the Screwed,” I interrogate such a moment of
faltering self-assumption as the passage through puberty.8 I return to
this passage—through puberty, in my Loser Sons—in order to seize
on an issue that has not received sufficient air play, or heir play, and
can help us move forward, if that is conceivable, with the Hamlet
dilemma, looping a hysterical knot that to this day tightens the noose
around what we continue to incorporate and attach to, often uncon-
sciously, as the political body. As weighty as Hamlet has been in
terms of inheritance and as a gateway to the staple of infrastructur-
ing themes of modernity, the play’s remarkable resilience is also
due to the flaws it exposes, the way it flatlines and plays dumb, trying
to prompt a traumatic truth to speak. A dumb show haunts the
266 qui parle december 2017 vol. 26 no. 2

dramaturgy as it explores the limits of saying and showing, wonder-

ing aloud if it is capable of instigating confession and aligning with
justice. One is throttled and voiceless, dependent on a ghost’s direc-
tives and plaintive insistence for motive and intelligibility.
Hamlet, who no doubt has slimmed down or was considerably
Photoshopped for the portrait we seem to carry of him, wallet- or
poster-sized, started out as a pudgy adolescent. Bulked with body ex-
cess, he faces off with the bodiless inflation of paternal overdrive.
How does Hamlet carry the weight of his heritage? When Lyotard
moves on troubled adolescent awakening, he knowingly dwells at
the limits of philosophical statement and determination, rehearsing
that which may well lie beyond the scope of theoretical reach or in-
vestigation. Maybe the overweight waddle of Prince Hamlet is not a
matter for speculation or the corporeal zoom, part of sizing his por-
tion of indecisive agony. Or, maybe he needed the carriage of young
portliness, a way of taking up space in the kingdom that at once
counted him out and counted on him by drastic turns. What about
the body of the prince? How does it reflect the political body, bloated
with gluttony, morally emaciated according to the transcripts the
prince handles, in contrast to the vanished body of the king?
This line of questioning, its imprudent check on a figure cut by the
prince, seems no doubt out of bounds for philosophical inquiry as
we know it. Philosophy nowadays won’t be starved out, however,
and goes after the most minute triggers of obsession. Adolescence,
the cusp of immaturity, fits only with difficulty into its bodies, pro-
testing all manner of unjust burdening, and philosophy itself has to
be prodded and poked if it is to start reasoning with the unreason-
able. This is where Hamlet pushes Horatio on the point of what can
happen in excess of philosophical dream schemes: like a girl, like a
journal, a philosophy can dream. . . . So.9
  

Let me rewind, pull this together. Maybe I’m coming out of it, ready
to rumble, unsticking from a uniformly frozen pose of Medusoid
petrification. I continue to go in and out of these states of inertia and
hopped-up mobility, locked and loaded. Whatever. I have been a
 Ronell: The Time of My Life 267

total mess. Or rather, I am and remain a reflector of a mess, trans-

mitting in a desert of despair. The American elections of November
2016 threw some of us a mean curve ball. How resolutely we lost—
yet, to whom, to what!? The scope of the loss that must still be
borne—massive, embarrassing, harbinger of bodily harm—pitches
one into a catatonic stall whose shelf life and stealth articulations,
somatic jostles, disturbed sleep patterns, lost trust, rage outbreaks,
unconscious scrapes, decisive breakups, and social suspicion cannot
be fully predicted. Under such circumstances, it is not clear at times
how to maintain the protest engine set in gear, how to keep it viable
and sustainable, something “we can believe in.” The election of a
team supercharged by masculinist pathologies has jolted us as a pro-
test in its own right—in terms of Nietzschean evaluation, as the bad
and decadent side of the very notion of protest. Trump is the sign of a
protest gone bad, very bad, tremendously bad. Folks, it’s very, very
bad. I can’t believe I am imitating his language usage. Ach! This man
can barely read, yet he talks and acts, pokes fun at the vulnerable, oc-
casionally hits a note, then collapses into the lowest rumble of com-
plaining culture. Grievance cuts across different territories, allowing
the worst tendencies and ethical destructions to emerge as blindingly
hurtful complaint. By sounding out the different facets of complaint
that beset our Mitsein, I am opening another dossier that has en-
gaged me for the past years: a reflection on grievance, the way we
complain, keep something going, refusing to mourn civic themes
of loss in which lament encompasses other, finitizing turns. Com-
plaint plants a flag on our contemporary form of distress, covering
over a more originary relation to language and laceration. . . .
The presidential discourse pitched one big complaint. The cam-
paign that preceded the inauguration wore the mask of a life-
affirming imposition, laced with destructive jouissance, while hold-
ing steady on first-chakra intensities that boost familial, tribal,
nation-hugging appropriations, strong but aimed very low, very,
very low. When they went low, we were nearly ko’d. As for me, to-
day, relaying to Berkeley, I await instructions from the community of
warrior-agitators and other highly articulate activists on the ground.
I look to thought shelters, language bearers, those who take their
custodial duties seriously, who see their responsibility as protecting
268 qui parle december 2017 vol. 26 no. 2

the question and staying close to language—I await their ap-

proaches, far and near, introjected and partially disavowed, unrec-
ognizably sounding, in order to see how to move up against the im-
possible. On some mornings I would be listening to music to get
pumped, to Common, to Cranfield and Slade, to Beethoven, and
so many other fist raisers across the charts of musical lament. But,
in this instance, I can’t. So much holds me from returning the
punches in the throttled stagnation of disappointment. I sit in anx-
ious anticipation of the next years, trying to remain vigilant—sizing
the righteous indignant, soothing where I can the defeated whim-
perers, the ones awakening to another logic of complaint, another
daybreak. . . . Ach! A girl can dream.
......................................................
avital ronell is a philosopher, professor of German and of
comparative literature, and University Professor of the Humanities at
New York University as well as Jacques Derrida Chair and professor
of philosophy at the European Graduate School. Her publications
include, most recently, Loser Sons: Politics and Authority (2012). In
2015 Ronell was awarded the insignia of Chevalier of the Order of
Arts and Letters by the French minister of culture. With Peter
Connor, she is a founding editor of Qui Parle.

Notes
1. In Aufschreibesysteme Kittler zeroes in on the ach of Sprache, the
groaned ache embedded in language.
2. Eventually to appear in English in 1991. Cadava, Connor, and Nancy,
Who Comes after the Subject?
3. Celan, “The Meridian,” 48.
4. Miller, Tropic of Capricorn, 39.
5. Vibing off the popular slogan “It’s a man’s world,” I refer here to
Heidegger’s consideration of what he calls in Being and Time “das
Man,” usually translated as “the They,” an inauthentic morph of man.
But you should read the pertinent passages closely to get the full gist of
the import and vapidity of “das Man.” I have more to say with regard
to the return of Germanicity and the politics of immaturity in Ronell,
“BIGLY Mistweated.”
 Ronell: The Time of My Life 269

6. Celan, “The Meridian.”

7. Derrida, “Shibboleth.”
8. Ronell, Loser Sons, 175–80.
9. Passages of the latter part of this article previously appeared in Ro-
nell, “BIGLY Mistweated.”

References
Cadava, Eduardo, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds. Who Comes af-
ter the Subject? London: Routledge, 1999.
Celan, Paul. “The Meridian.” In Collected Prose, translated by Rosmarie
Waldrop, 37–55. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Derrida, Jacques. “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan.” In Sovereignties in Ques-
tion: The Poetics of Paul Celan, 1–64. New York: Fordham University
Press, 2005.
Kittler, Friedrich. Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900. Munich: Fink, 1985.
Miller, Henry. Tropic of Capricorn. London: Flamingo, 1993.
Ronell, Avital. Loser Sons: Politics and Authority. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2012.
⸻. “BIGLY Mistweated: On Civic Grievance.” Media Tropes 6, no. 2
(2016): 63–89.