Abstract
With a view to paternal power surges in the Kafkan world, the chapter examines how his work keeps pace with other metaphysical dropouts and detectors of withering institutions. Analyses of neighboring thoughts of Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and Heidegger gather up key moments in the patriarchive.
Sections of this paper have appeared in Ronell, Loser Sons: Politics and Authority (2013); published here with permission of the University of Illinois Press.
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Notes
- 1.
See Alexandre Kojève, La notion de l’autorité, Paris: Gallimard, 2004.
- 2.
Keynote lecture for ACLA, New York University, April, 2014.
- 3.
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays. In: Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, tr. James Strachey, ed. Anna Freud et al., 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), XXIII: 3–140, here 118 (edition will be abbreviated SE).
I explore this statement and Kafka’s struggle with Father in Loser Sons: Politics and Authority, Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2012.
- 4.
Franz Kafka, “Letter to Father.” tr. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. In: Kafka, The Sons: The Judgment, The Stoker, The Metamorphosis, and Letter to His Father, tr. Kaiser, Wilkins, et al. (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 113–117.
- 5.
The double and split personality of Father has given Slavoj Zizek a rise in many of his lecture performances At N.Y.U., when he asks why we are so astounded to learn about paternal violators in Austria and elsewhere.
- 6.
For an analysis of the Subject, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “In the Name of…” In: Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy (Eds.), Retreating the Political, tr. Simon Sparks (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 78–99.
- 7.
Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, tr. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. In their introduction to the voluminous tome, Les fins de l’homme: A partir du travail de Jacques Derrida: colloque de Cerisy, 23 juillet-2 août 1980 (Paris: Galilée, 1981), 13, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe write that the destination or Bestimmung of man is no longer “a question among others on the subject of man: it is rather man himself who has become a question. For this fundamental reason. … the thinking of man becomes that of finitude—or, more rigorously, the ontotheology of the Subject sees itself shaken up by an analysis of finitude” (tr. mine).
- 8.
The combination of animal and word (animot) in French is Derrida’s coinage and part of his vast reflection on the place and misplacement of animals in philosophy and other impoverished confinements.
- 9.
Kafka, Letter to the Father/Brief an den Vater: Bilingual Edition, tr. Kaiser and Wilkins, (ser.) The Schocken Kafka Library, New York: Schocken, 2015. The text is cited here from the edition, Kafka, The Sons.
- 10.
I explore the intricacies and micro-folds of the Letter at length in terms of the disappearance of authority and the defeat of politics in Loser Sons.
- 11.
See Giorgio Agamben’s treatment of Walter Benjamin’s “Der Erzähler” in Agamben, Enfance et histoire: Dépérissement de l’expériènce et origine de l’histoire, tr. Yves Hersaut, Paris: Editions Payot, 1989), 19–25, and Laurence Rickels vast treatment of the war undead in his oeuvre.
- 12.
Kafka, “Letter to Father,” 117. Further page numbers are given in the text.
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Ronell, A. (2022). What Is Called Father? (A Fissure in Familialism). In: Weissberg, L. (eds) Psychoanalysis, Fatherhood, and the Modern Family. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82124-1_12
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