Her concern is located not in the instrumentality of technology with its good and bad points, but in unfolding the presence of technology in discourse, as discourse, or as the silence hidden within discourse. Rather, she seeks out what 'thinks' in technology and what is 'technological' in thinking. She does not think the question concerning technology by submitting it merely to evaluation, as has been done so often and so poorly. "To think technology is not to think technology away. And it offers a fresh reading of the American and European addiction to technology in which the telephone emerges as the crucial figure of this age. In many ways a meditation on the technologically constituted state, The Telephone Book opens a new field, becoming the first political deconstruction of technology, state terrorism, and schizophrenia. Watson, his assistant, who used to communicate with spirits, was eager to get the telephone to talk, and thus to link technology with phantoms and phantasms. She traces its historical development from Bell's famous first call: "Watson, come here!" Thomas A. Laing saw it as a powerful new body part. She examines its role in psychoanalysis-Freud said that the unconscious is structured like a telephone, and Jung and R. Ronell also speaks of the appearance of the telephone in the literary works of Duras, Joyce, Kafka, Rilke, and Strindberg. In the Third Reich the telephone became a weapon, a means of state surveillance, "an open accomplice to lies." Heidegger, in Being and Time and elsewhere, elaborates on the significance of "the call." In a tour de force response, Ronell mobilizes the history and terminology of the telephone to explicate his difficult philosophy. The book begins by calling close attention to the importance of the telephone in Nazi organization and propaganda, with special regard to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Her highly original, multifaceted inquiry into the nature of communication in a technological age will excite everyone who listens in. Avital Ronell has done nothing less than consider the impact of the telephone on modern thought. It installs a switchboard that hooks up diverse types of knowledge while rerouting and jamming the codes of the disciplines in daring ways. The Telephone Book, itself organized by a "telephonic logic," fields calls from philosophy, history, literature, and psychoanalysis. To the extent that it always relates us to the absent other, the telephone, and the massive switchboard attending it, plugs into a hermeneutics of mourning. Profoundly changing our concept of long-distance, it is constantly transmitting effects of real and evocative power. Affiliated with discontinuity, alarm, and silence, it raises fundamental questions about the constitution of self and other, the stability of location, systems of transfer, and the destination of speech. The telephone marks the place of an absence.
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