The Test Drive Avital Ronell Addressed to those who are left stranded by speculative thinking and unhinged by cognitive discourse, The Test Drive, organized around Nietzsche's interpretation of physics, points to a toxic residue of uninterrogated policies associated with scientific probes that continue to underscore an experience of permanent dislocation, breakdown, and disruption. A scientific guarantor of paramount importance, testing and its neighboring figures - experimentation, hypothesis, probability, proof - represent a largely unavowed icon of our era. As that which displaces our relation to truth, the provisional logic of the test at once belongs to and undercuts the will to scientific knowledge. Beginning with the fateful Greek conjunction of torture and testing that to this day haunts every material or phantasmatic test site, Avital Ronell investigates technological "thrownness", offering a tour-de-force reading of legal, pharmaceutical, artistic, scientific, Zen, and historical grids that depend upon the paraconcept of the test, including Freud's invention of an outside by means of reality testing. Part of an official rhetoric of state and research, testing formations belong to the crucial operations of an uncontestable legitimating machine. On the eve of 9/11, the White House, scrambling the master codes of biblical and technological exegetics, issued the statement: "Our nation is being tested". Avital Ronell is a professor of German, English, and comparative literature at New York university, where she also chairs the German department. She is the author of Stupidity, Finitude's Score, Crack Wars, and other books.