A new working paper, title above, link, abstract, contents, and introduction below:
Abstract: In the summer of 2018 a scandal broke out at New York University concerning the way a senior literary critic, Avital Ronell, had exploited a graduate student, Nimrod Reitman. This paper examines this scandal in the general context of academic literary criticism as it developed in the third quarter of the 20th century, eventuating in the phenomenon of the “star” critic. Ronell is such a star. Stardom is one thing, however, and is specific to the particular conditions of literary criticism. Abuse is a different phenomenon, tied to personal behavior and informal local norms. The paper includes a close analysis of a short article Ronell wrote on the occasion of the death of Jacques Derrida, her teacher and mentor.
Contents
Introduction: Sorting things out 2
How did literary criticism come to this foul pass? [#AvitalRonell] 4
Lit crit stars, real or an illusion? 9
The case of Paul de Man 12
Identity, gossip, and the personal 13
The lure of the esoteric 15
Comments on a short text Avital Ronell wrote to honor and remember Derrida 18
Roshomon redux, the case of Avital Ronell, Nimrod Reitman, and NYU 24
Appendix: The triumph of interpretation (aka “reading”) 28
Introduction: Sorting things out
Until several weeks ago Avital Ronell was little more than a name that I associated with Continental thought, I don’t know, maybe I even associated it with deconstruction. Then the scandal broke. I read a tweet Corey Robin posted in mid-August (see p. 4) in which he examined the complaint Reitman had filed against Ronell and NYU. That’s what got me interested in the case. Robin’s point was simple, regardless of what had actually happened between Reitman and Ronell, regardless of Ronell’s star status, it was clear that this relationship took up an enormous amount of Reitman’s time, as though Ronell recognized no boundary between herself and Reitman.
That’s what interested, this lack of boundaries. Why? Because I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about what happened to literary criticism in the 1960s and 1970s. Critics started referring to analytic interpretation as reading, thus eliding a boundary between ordinary reading, which any literate person does, and interpretation, a professional activity normally expressed in written articles or conference papers (see the appendix, p. 28 ff.). Was there some connection here, a connection between boundary loss within critical practice, where interpretation collapses into reading, and in pedagogical practice, where Ronell elided the boundary between herself and her student?
I posed and explored that question in my first post, “How did literary criticism come to this foul pass? [#AvitalRonell]” (pp. 4 ff.), where I also examined a 1997 article David Shumway had published about “stars” in literary theory, which I continued to explore in a second post, “Lit crit stars, real or an illusion?” (pp. 9 ff.). In another post I noted the star status of Paul de Man and the controversy that arose around his anti-semitic journalism during World War II (pp. 12 ff.). A fourth post, “Identity, gossip, and the personal” (pp. 13 ff.) considered the relationship between the critic’s identity and the valence of their critical statements and a fifth looked at the use of often obscure technical terminology, “The lure of the esoteric” (pp. 15 ff.).
The upshot is that, rightly or wrongly, I satisfied myself that there is a relation ship between the collapse of critical interpretation into mere reading in the 1960s and 1970s and the emergence of the literary star in the 1980s and 1990s. We must be careful, however, for, as Shumway was careful to point out, the phenomenon of the star literary critic is a bit different from intellectual prominence in other disciplines. The star critic assumes a status that is, in a way, like that of the canonical authors they study and interpret. The significance of such a critic’s writings is thus dependent on their personal imprimature, their charisma, above and beyond any arguments they may make. Hence the importance of word play and allusion, which have little evidentiary or logical value, but are a vehicle for virtuoso display, for the expression of personal charisma.
And so I undertook an analysis of a short piece by Ronell, “Comments on a short text Avital Ronell wrote to honor and remember Derrida” (pp. 18 ff.). She had been a student of his. In this piece, one of eighteen published in a special section in PMLA in 2005, she rather boldly declares herself to be his intellectual heir and successor. No, she doesn’t say so explicitly, but that is what she DOES, with great virtuosity and wit, and no little vanity, vanity either acceptable to the journal’s editors or simply unrecognized as such.
That leaves us with one more piece, “Roshomon redux, the case of Avital Ronell, Nimrod Reitman, and NYU” (pp. 24 ff.). Here I present statements by six others, without any comment from me: Marjorie Perloff (a senior academic now retired), Andrea Long Chu (a graduate student who had studied with Ronell), William Cheung
(another graduate student), Bernd Hüppauf (a retired academic who had hired her at NYU), Heidi Haitri (an artist and, I assume, a friend), and Corey Robin (an academic political scientist).
What have I learned from this? That’s hard to say. There’s a lingering sadness, and anger, sadness over the pain and suffering at the heart of this story, anger at the institutional conditions that allowed it to happen. By institutional conditions I mean both the evolution of literary and cultural criticism that eventuated in the star phenomenon and the administrative arrangements that gave Ronell the power to exploit Reitman in this way.
I also learned something more specific. When I started this line of exploration I was looking for a connection between the intellectual conditions of literary theory, on the one hand, and Ronell’s treatment of Reitman on the other. I’ve decided that the connection is not so direct as I had set out to discover. Yes, there is a connection between those intellectual conditions and the phenomenon of the lit crit star, and Ronell was certainly such a star. That is one thing.
But lit crit stars do not necessarily exploit graduate students in the way Ronell exploited Reitman. This is a matter both of individual behavior and local informal norms. I certainly don’t have any general knowledge of the relationship between such stars and their students, though I have known a star or two (before they’d become stars), but I have no reason to believe they all comport themselves like this, though some might. On the other hand, there have been a number of cases abuse and exploitation by prominent and influential academics in other fields, fields that never had stardom in this sense. That is the other thing.
So we have stardom on the one hand, exploitation and abuse on the other. They are separate phenomena which happened to be conjoined in this particular case. In retrospect that seems obvious.
In this particular case it seems to me that much of the reaction to this case is closely tied to widespread animus against postmodern, deconstructionist literary criticism (aka theory) of the kind practiced by Ronell (and many of her defenders). Concern for and about Ronell and Reitman, who after all are strangers to most of us, is secondary. I know that assertion would benefit from a kind of argument that I’ve not really made in this paper. But I offer it as an indication of the atmosphere in which I undertook this work. It’s the smoke in that atmosphere, if you will, that I had to cut though in order to arrive at the otherwise obvious conclusion of the previous paragraph.
