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Street Talk, Avital Ronell
Street Talk, Avital Ronell
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This essay investigates the fragile intersection where rumor and a more "authentic" modality of language can be shown to cross over into one another. Treating the relationship of Benjamin, Heidegger and Rousseau to rumoro-logical paranoia, "Street-Talk" interprets the epistemological teetering between the knowing and not-knowing around which Fama articulates her power. All three of these thinkers are shown to be exemplarily afflicted by rumorous utterances and share a drive to create, in their works, a rumor control center. Often these controls take over the features which they attempt to disown; thus the greatest moment of truth-telling appropriates the form of …