Avital Ronell", in which Jonathan Culler wrote: "Over the past decade, Ronell has put together what must be one of the most remarkable critical oeuvres of our era ... Zeugmatically yoking the slang of pop culture with philosophical analysis, forcing the confrontation of high literature and technology or drug culture, Avital Ronell produces sentences that startle, irritate, illuminate. At once hilarious and refractory, her books are like no others." Judith Butler has said she feels deeply indebted to Ronell's influence on her work and wrote in an edited collection Reading Ronell: "The different path that Ronell takes is precisely the path of difference: gay, difficult, affirmative, ironic." 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." 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." By contrast, in a 1990 review of The Telephone Book for the New York Times Book Review, novelist Robert Coover appreciated the "visual pyrotechnics" of the book's typography but found "the argument… to be that of a fairly conventional academic paper, recognizably party-lined with fashionable Continental voices like Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida," and found the connection that Ronell tried to establish between Heidegger, schizophrenia, and the telephone "weak." 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." 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." Sexual conduct investigation and suspension In September 2017, a student, later identified as her male former graduate student Nimrod Reitman, filed a complaint in New York University's Title IX office accusing Ronell of sexual harassment, sexual assault, stalking, and retaliation over the span of three years, when she served as his doctoral supervisor. In May 2018, the university found Ronell responsible for sexual harassment and suspended her for the 2018–19 academic year. Ronell never admitted to sexual harassment, claiming that both parties' emails contained "exaggerated expressions of tenderness" because they