The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech
- Oct 23, 2016
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 6
★☆☆☆☆
At 50 pages in, I updated my status on Goodreads, and quipped that I probably had no business reading this book. Other than an introductory philosophy course my freshman year of college, I know little to nothing about the subject (broad though it is). I consider myself an intelligent person, but I found philosophy at the time, to be frank, confusing as hell. Either my mind isn't wired to comprehend what seems to be intentionally dense and impenetrable thought (and writing), or I just didn't beat my head against the wall long enough.
In any event, I finally gave up on page 57 of Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. I had vowed to plow ahead, comprehension be damned, not because I was particularly enjoying myself, but because I held out hope that at some point I would begin to understand what in the hell she was talking about. To say I was being stubborn or foolish—stupid is the right word here, though only in describing the act not the person—is to put the matter lightly. Here's the sentence that finally did me in: "This scene calls forth recognition insofar as it gives access to that more primordial experience—an originary encounter with alterity: Dasein's uncanny experience of its thrown Being-toward-death—hence, having-been-thrown from which originates the call, out of which calls the Other as an anonymous Other—" 'Es' ruft." Two things about that passage: 1) it is by no means less understandable outside the context of the preceding seven pages of its chapter, and 2) it is by no means atypical; on the contrary, it is quite average when compared with anything else in the book.
Whether Ronell ever gets to the promise offered by the book's subtitle, I guess I'll never know. Even if I'd managed to make it to the end, I'm not sure I'd even comprehend if it did. Sure, a greater knowledge of philosophy and its fundamental principles and ideas would help. But without a pretty robust understanding of Martin Heidegger and his work (whose name, not to mention his ideas, is referenced in nearly, if not every, paragraph), I'm not sure anyone would fare much better than I did. That's a shame because the book I imagined would have been so fascinating.
But that's okay. I've been carrying this book around with me for nearly 20 years, entirely because of its graphic design, and while I found the title intriguing, I'd never really given much thought to ever actually reading it. To paraphrase Hall & Oates, "Some things are better left alone." At least, after all these years, I've got an empty spot on the bookcase to fill.
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