Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Telephone Book: Technology--Schizophrenia--Electric Speech. by

Avital Ronell
Review by: Akira Mizuta Lippit
Source: MLN, Vol. 104, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1989), pp. 1200-1202
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2905381
Accessed: 27-06-2021 19:40 UTC

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 M L N 1201

history's catastrophe. Immediately, Ronell problematizes this most prob-

lematic of organs, the ear, by bringing to it the telephone receiver. The
telephone, "a synecdoche for technology ... lesser than itself but also the
greater," comes to and accelerates the ear's consumption while simulta-
neously amputating and supplementing the possibility of its anatomical
existence. The ear is no longer innocent, no longer the passive receptor of
orders to obscenity, heartbreak to reconciliation: the telephone extracts an
illicit contract of affirmation from the ear. From this point on, to all tele-
phonic imperatives and suggestion, the ear responds, always, "yes."
Ronell: "What does it mean to answer the telephone, to make oneself an-
swerable to it in a situation whose gestural syntax already means yes, even
if the affirmation should find itself followed by a question mark: yes?"
The first call Ronell forwards is to the troubled estate of Martin Hei-
degger. Rummaging through the philosopher's telephone bills (and Hei-
degger's legacy remains his outstanding Schuld), Ronell discovers one un-
paid charge still accumulating interest. It is, of course, that unsettled and
unsettling account of the conversation between Heidegger and the SA
Storm Trooper Bureau (later transcribed, if not somewhat posthumously,
in the Spiegel interview) that "pulled him into fascism by the strangulating
umbilicus of a telephone cord whose radius he failed to measure." It is
not, however, mere evidence that Ronell uncovers but rather, a thinking
and re-thinking of Heidegger's short-circuiting "housing projects." In
questioning the status of this call ("whether it is not precisely owing to his
theory of technology (Technik) that Heidegger was engaged on the Nazi
Party line") and its further elaboration ("Heidegger answered a call but
never answered to it"), Ronell achieves a reunion between Heidegger and
that other Heidegger "who put himself into circulation after his death."
Neither a condemnation nor persecution, by channelling his haunted
house of being, Ronell forces Heidegger to read himself, to speak to and
answer to his own corpus from which he sought to sever himself via the
disappearances of telephonic "scrambling." The telephone line makes this
connection possible: it "holds together what it separates."
If the case of Heidegger reveals the uncanny contracts of telephonic
communion (he returns home to find messages from himself), then it is
precisely this circuit which Ronell continues to trace. While Heidegger's
"place" marks a notorious and topical convergence of philosophy and state
politics along the telephone lines, The Telephone Book is full of such narra-
tives of electric extension and displacement. Scanning the directory of psy-
choanalytic fatalities, Ronell notices the schizophrenic listed after the SA.
This anti-oedipal subject finds himself re-routed through a complex net-
work of connections and disconnections back to himself-often, by this
point, herself. From this telephone cord slashing into the structures of
schizoid sensitivity ("the fort slashing into the da"), Ronell hears: "The es-
sential not-thereness of the subject as self or Other makes the telephone
possible but also leads the telephone to raise the question of which system

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 1202 REVIEWS

is speaking when the telep

of "schizo-candidates of ... Jung and Laing" along the matrices of Freud,
Inc., Ronell approaches the mimetic point where it is no longer possible to
discern whether the telephone has grafted itself onto the schizophrenic or
the schizophrenic onto the telephone-the desire and dilemma which
characterizes both sides' accusation. The tele-schizophrenic now defines
the cybernetic site of subjectivity; the subtle shift from a psychoanalytics of
mourning to the promise of perennial life that begins with death. When
the call's for you, is it for you? Do you answer to you when the telephone
summons, annexes, restores you to yourself ?
Ronell's most haunting dictation surfaces in her thanatographic account
of the telephone's invention and its inventors. Alexander Graham Bell
and Thomas A. Watson, the conceptive couple of the telephone are shown
to disseminate their affair (already a repetition of numerous past and fu-
ture relations) into the appearance of the apparatus. Intending to "honor
the contract he had signed with his brother" that "whoever departed first
was to contact the survivor through a medium demonstrably superior to
the more traditional channel of spiritualism," Bell falls victim to the desta-
bilizing impact of the telephonic frame. The markers of departure, dis-
tance, and the beyond are sutured by the telephone's "phantasms of im-
mediacy." This auratic confusion affixes itself to the details of the tele-
phone's history. Of Bell and Watson's absorption into the switchboards of
invention, Ronell notes that "the telephone experimented with this
couple, regularly changing their positions, making it difficult to determine
who was the sender, who the recipient-who, in other words, was respon-
sible for its birth." Thus already at the moment of its inception, the tele-
phone was operating, rearranging, reconstructing: "we are inclined to
place the telephone not so much at the origin of some reflection but as a
response, as that which is answering a call."
Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book will resist you: it will resist the tota-
lizing gaze you bring to reading, your desires for genre, gender, and se-
miotic stability. For The Telephone Book performs that which it portrays.
Through a typographic mimetics and punctuation it teaches you "to en-
dure interruption and the click." But it will resist you most because it im-
plicates you in scenes of disaster ("The one who waits in silent receptivity
lends an active, and not reactive, ear."), because you have called it and its
call to you is a response. To this extent you are in it. You will not fail it, for
you-the tele-schizoid reader-will have invoked its response. Yes, you.

The Johns Hopkins University AKIRA MIZUTA LIPPIT

Robert Scholes, Nancy R. Comley, and Gregory L. Ulmer, Text Book: An

Introduction to Literary Language.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. xiv + 295 pages, and x + 76
pages, "Instructor's Manual".

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