Avital Ronell

Warning: The Telephone Book is going to resist you. Dealing with a logic and topos of the switchboard, it engages the destabilization of the addressee. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to learn how to read with your ears. In addition to listening for the telephone, you are being asked to tune your ears to noise frequencies, to anticoding, to the inflated reserves of random indeterminateness--in a word, you are expected to stay open to the static and interference that will occupy these lines. (excerpt from the introduction to The Telephone Book)|go here