Ruth Ronen | Tel Aviv University (original) (raw)

Papers by Ruth Ronen

Angelaki, Jan 2, 2022

Abstract Finitude as an affirmative moment is what stands at the center of this paper. While deat... more Abstract Finitude as an affirmative moment is what stands at the center of this paper. While death cannot be represented or conceptualized, it is present in events of death in the life of an individual and of a society. Here we look at formations split between the presencing of death and death’s denial or deferral as ways of symbolizing death as imminently present and certain for those who live. Death is affirmed as what cannot be known, represented, or imagined. Based on the Freudian death drive and its interpretation, I look into poetic and philosophical instances of this idea of affirmation: from Freud’s dreams of dead people who return to the scene of the living, through inventive modes of recounting death in its singular occurrence, to modes of presencing death in war, mourning, melancholia, and tragedy as well as in philosophical ideas regarding the necessary, irreducible presence of death in language or culture. All these work as symbolic formations that enact the presence of death in the form of denial. The disruptive presence of death in the life of a culture and of singular life, the presence of what is necessary yet cannot be known or represented, attests to the irreducible inclination of the human psyche toward its ownmost death.

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, May 16, 2018

Routledge eBooks, Jan 31, 2023

Routledge eBooks, Jan 31, 2023

Lacan with the Philosophers, 2018

Routledge eBooks, Jan 31, 2023

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature

The concept of possible worlds (PW) originated in the metaphysics of Leibnitz and had its greates... more The concept of possible worlds (PW) originated in the metaphysics of Leibnitz and had its greatest impact on philosophy, as well as on other disciplines, through its recurrence as a powerful tool of modal logic in the 1960s. PW were named in order to attribute semantic content to the (modal) difference between necessity, possibility, and impossibility. The concept later wandered into other disciplines, principally into literary theory around the subject of fiction and fictional worlds. The conversion of a strictly analytic tool into an interdisciplinary concept serving literary theorists is striking, especially because this pairing of the idea of PW, as a logical tool, with a primarily literary problem, has proven to be prolific. PW suggest several ideas that account for their interdisciplinary appeal: the acknowledgment of multiple realities, the privileging of one world from a plurality of worlds, and the assigning of truth value to assertions about nonexistents. A possible world,...

Lacan with the Philosophers, 2018

Angelaki, 2022

Socrates’s death: scandalous with regard to Socrates’s virtue and wisdom, as well as his age, thi... more Socrates’s death: scandalous with regard to Socrates’s virtue and wisdom, as well as his age, this death is transfigured into an entry into truth. One can push the psychoanalysis a bit further: a scandalous death is needed to bring to light philosophical death, that is, the death that redeems the scandal of death in general. Redeems it, compensates for it, justifies it, repairs it, or however one wants to say it – but in the end this comes down to recognizing it. (Nancy, this issue 11)

Lacan with the Philosophers, 2018

Angelaki, Jan 2, 2022

Abstract Finitude as an affirmative moment is what stands at the center of this paper. While deat... more Abstract Finitude as an affirmative moment is what stands at the center of this paper. While death cannot be represented or conceptualized, it is present in events of death in the life of an individual and of a society. Here we look at formations split between the presencing of death and death’s denial or deferral as ways of symbolizing death as imminently present and certain for those who live. Death is affirmed as what cannot be known, represented, or imagined. Based on the Freudian death drive and its interpretation, I look into poetic and philosophical instances of this idea of affirmation: from Freud’s dreams of dead people who return to the scene of the living, through inventive modes of recounting death in its singular occurrence, to modes of presencing death in war, mourning, melancholia, and tragedy as well as in philosophical ideas regarding the necessary, irreducible presence of death in language or culture. All these work as symbolic formations that enact the presence of death in the form of denial. The disruptive presence of death in the life of a culture and of singular life, the presence of what is necessary yet cannot be known or represented, attests to the irreducible inclination of the human psyche toward its ownmost death.

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, May 16, 2018

Routledge eBooks, Jan 31, 2023

Routledge eBooks, Jan 31, 2023

Lacan with the Philosophers, 2018

Routledge eBooks, Jan 31, 2023

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature

The concept of possible worlds (PW) originated in the metaphysics of Leibnitz and had its greates... more The concept of possible worlds (PW) originated in the metaphysics of Leibnitz and had its greatest impact on philosophy, as well as on other disciplines, through its recurrence as a powerful tool of modal logic in the 1960s. PW were named in order to attribute semantic content to the (modal) difference between necessity, possibility, and impossibility. The concept later wandered into other disciplines, principally into literary theory around the subject of fiction and fictional worlds. The conversion of a strictly analytic tool into an interdisciplinary concept serving literary theorists is striking, especially because this pairing of the idea of PW, as a logical tool, with a primarily literary problem, has proven to be prolific. PW suggest several ideas that account for their interdisciplinary appeal: the acknowledgment of multiple realities, the privileging of one world from a plurality of worlds, and the assigning of truth value to assertions about nonexistents. A possible world,...

Lacan with the Philosophers, 2018

Angelaki, 2022

Socrates’s death: scandalous with regard to Socrates’s virtue and wisdom, as well as his age, thi... more Socrates’s death: scandalous with regard to Socrates’s virtue and wisdom, as well as his age, this death is transfigured into an entry into truth. One can push the psychoanalysis a bit further: a scandalous death is needed to bring to light philosophical death, that is, the death that redeems the scandal of death in general. Redeems it, compensates for it, justifies it, repairs it, or however one wants to say it – but in the end this comes down to recognizing it. (Nancy, this issue 11)

Lacan with the Philosophers, 2018