[12] She has written about such topics as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone; the structure of the test in legal, pharmaceutical, artistic, scientific, Zen, and historical domains; stupidity; the disappearance of authority; childhood; and deficiency.

[19] She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Middlebury College, and subsequently studied with Jacob Taubes and Hans-Georg Gadamer at the Hermeneutic Institute at the Free University of Berlin.

She received her doctorate of philosophy in German studies at Princeton University in 1979, where her advisor was Stanley Corngold and her dissertation concerned self-reflection in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Franz Kafka.

[24] A professor at the University of Virginia for a short time period, Ronell claims she was fired because she taught continental philosophy and "went to the gym on a regular basis: [her] colleagues were shocked by this—it didn't correspond to their image of an academic woman!

In 2009, the Centre Pompidou invited Ronell to hold an interview series with such artists and thinkers as Werner Herzog, Judith Butler, Dennis Cooper, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Suzanne Doppelt.

"[32] In an account of the 1992 Rodney King beating, Ronell argued that the idiom of the "perfectly clear" recurrently serves as a code for the white lie.

Ronell starts by exploring Goethe's focus on "a certain domain of immateriality—the nonsubstantializable apparitions ... [of] weather forecasting ... ghosts, dreams, and some forms of hidden, telepathic transmissions.

Ronell names Goethe the "secret councilor (Geheimrat)" of Freud and already anticipates her work on the Rat Man in the third footnote where she alludes to the "suppository logic, inserting the vital element into the narrative of the other.

"[47] Ronell traces the relegitimization of war, the philosophical status of the rumor, the questionable force of the police, the test sites of technology, the corporeal policies of disease and a thoroughgoing reconstitution of the subject of law.

"[51] The collection's editor Diane Davis highlighted the "singular provocation of Ronell's 'remarkable critical oeuvre,'" "the devastating insights, the unprecedented writing style, the relentless destabilizations.

"[52] In the sixth session of The Beast and the Sovereign on February 6 of 2002, Jacques Derrida devoted special attention to Ronell's Stupidity and commends the untranslatable complexity of her "irony.

"[54] In a 2002 review of Stupidity for the Times Literary Supplement, philosopher Jonathan Rée said Ronell's "prose reads like a plodding translation of a French version of Heidegger, but there is hardly a sentence that does not try to stop the show to receive an ovation for its cleverness.

"[55] Bernd Hüppauf (former chair of the German department at NYU who hired Ronell but was later replaced by her) similarly described her work as "translating incomprehensibility into pseudo-profundity.

[61] The letter was written and signed by major figures in the areas of feminism, queer theory, philosophy, literature, and history, including Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek,[62] Joan Scott, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others.

"[65] Providing historical and institutional context, an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books argued that Ronell's inappropriate conduct was intimately linked to the power that she wields within the humanities as a "theory star.

[15][71] Writer and critic Andrea Long Chu in The Chronicle of Higher Education described her experiences as a teaching assistant for Ronell at NYU, which made her believe Reitman's allegations.

Noting that Ronell seemed to have felt "persecuted" even while teaching, Andrea Long Chu argued that Ronell's desire for Reitman to make her "feel loved" stemmed not from feeling "entitle[d]" by "status" to "fuck" students, but, on the contrary, because "the relentless misogyny of the university" still seemed present to her: [E]ven when she does have status and power and celebrity, she still thinks of herself as a vulnerable grad student in need of care and protection, ie, she thinks she still is the person Reitman is saying he is.

Her course, "Unsettled Scores: Theories of Grievance, Stuckness, & Boundary Troubles," was advertised on campus with a flyer asking: "How have we secretly internalized penitentiary structures?