By Silke-Maria Weineck
Theories of energy have regularly been intertwined with theories of fatherhood: paternity is the oldest and such a lot chronic metaphor of benign, valid rule. The paternal trope profits its energy from its integration of legislation, physique, and affect--in the affirmative version of fatherhood, the organic father, the criminal father, and the daddy who protects and nurtures his kids are one and an analogous, and in a posh procedure of mutual interdependence, the daddy of the relations is symbolically associated with the paternal gods of monotheism and the paternal ruler of the monarchic nation.
If tragedy is the violent eruption of an important clash among competing, valid claims, The Tragedy of Fatherhood argues that fatherhood is an basically tragic constitution. Silke-Maria Weineck strains either the tensions and diverse options to solve them via a sequence of readings of seminal literary and theoretical texts within the Western cultural culture. In doing so, she demonstrates either the fragility and resilience of fatherhood because the most crucial image of political strength.
A lengthy heritage of fatherhood in literature, philosophy, and political thought, The Tragedy of Fatherhood weaves jointly figures as likely disparate as Aristotle, Freud, Kafka, and Kleist, to provide a beautiful reappraisal of the character of energy within the Western tradition.
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Additional resources for The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West
Example text
The psychoanalytically oriented critics, on the other hand, insist that Laius has always been lurking in the shadows, that the ancient story is the same one as the one they want to tell. In other words, they want us to believe that Laius never was a tragic hero. There is, in those accounts, no reflection on the specifically modern desire that drives their readings, including a very modern heteronormativity that, rather scandalously, far too often fails to distinguish between pedophilia, pederasty, and homosexuality.
This is the story that shapes all comparisons of Laius and Abraham, but it is not the story Aeschylus tells: Indeed I speak of the ancient transgression, now swift in its retribution. It remains even into the third generation, ever since Laius—in defiance of Apollo who, at his Pythian oracle at the earth’s center, said three times that the king would save his city if he died without offspring. Ever since he, overcome by the thoughtlessness of his longing, fathered his own death, the parricide Oedipus, who sowed his mother’s sacred field, where he was nurtured, and endured a bloody crop.
While Freud reads the oedipal plot as a child’s fantasy of patricide, we might be tempted to consider the plot of the subordinate son who displaces his desire in the interest of the patriarchal family as the Laiusian fantasy par excellence. Why else would you choose the six-year-old to embody the Oedipal force? Isn’t that the most reassuring rival a man could have? Unlike the infant, the young child is no longer allied with the mother’s body whose womb and breasts he had usurped (providing her, at least according to Freud himself, with a phallus he in some regards has stolen from the father), and unlike the young adult, he is socially and materially dependent, physically weak, and sexually insignificant.
