http://www.egs.edu Avital Ronell talking about the shock of puberty and the political impact of the call. In this lecture, she reads an excerpt of her latest book, Loser Sons, in which she discusses Jean-François Lyotard's "Emma, Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis", the affective shock of having to submit to a call of submissive readiness, how these affective shocks work themselves into our political narratives, how modern politics depends on teenage mythologies, the brand of hysteria that cuts into puberty, puberty in general, Immanuel Kant, the aporia of the hysteria as an event, "excitation" in speech repression, Jacques Lacan's reading of Sigmund Freud on negation, unconscious judgment, the law, the childhood phrase-affect, Sarah's laughter, choosing immaturity, authority, the terror that resides in the untranslatability of childhood susceptibility into adult articulation, infantile cultures, letting go of Enlightenment fictions, and how childhood for Lyotard is not a historical developmental instance.

Public open lecture for the students and staff of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe 2011 Avital Ronell.

Avital Ronell, Ph.D., is the Jacques Derrida Professor of Media and Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. She is also University Professor of the Humanities and a professor of German, English, and comparative literature at New York University, where she codirects the Trauma and Violence Transdisciplinary Studies program. She churns out a breathtaking range of deconstructive re-readings of everything from technology, the Gulf War, and AIDS, to opera, ad addiction. She is the author of Dictations: On Haunted Writing; The Telephone Book; Crack Wars; Finitude's Score; Stupidity; The Test Drive; Fighting Theory (with Anne Dufourmantelle); and most recently, Loser Sons: Politics and Authority.

Avital Ronell studied at the Hermeneutics Institute in Berlin with Jacob Taubes, ultimately earned her doctorate at Princeton University, and then worked with Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous in Paris. As one of the first translators of Jacques Derrida's work into English, she in effect introduced his work to the American academy. Avital Ronell has continued the deep reading projects of her former teachers (and friends), focusing her attention on such varied assumptions as the telephone directory, Rodney King, Madame Bovary, Martin Heidegger and schizophrenia. Though often labeled a philosopher (as well as a key player in critical and political theory, cultural and literary criticism), Avital Ronell's work, thoroughly transdisciplinary, consistently slips the bounds of traditional academic castes, earning her accolades from often disparate spheres of the cultural milieu. Her work is often determined to be deconstructive, Derridian, Heideggerian, post-feministic, post-structuralist, psychoanalytic, and yet her writing continually works beyond these labels remaining utterly singular.