The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West by Silke-Maria Weineck (review)

Silke-Maria Weineck’s new book wrestles with the problem of fatherhood after Freud. In particular, she contends that the psychic power with which psychoanalysis invests the figure of the father is the last gasp of a European tradition that links the father to political and theological sovereignty, that is, king and god. Following secularization and the end of absolutism, these metaphorical connections that strengthened the position of the father vanish, but psychoanalysis continues to insist on the vantage point of the oedipalized son. Weineck is trying to break out of the closed epistemology of psychoanalysis, in which the reality of the father is less important than the psychic force he is still supposed to exert, in order to investigate what the father is in the absence of these metaphorical supports—and, perhaps, what he has been all along.

Weineck identifies “the paternal triad” (5) of father, god, and king and examines the relationships among them in literary, philosophical, and political discourses at particular moments of crisis: in fifth- and fourth-century BCE Athens, over the course of the long European eighteenth century, and at the turn of the nineteenth century. These critical moments reveal the fragile construction of the paternal triad insofar as it is always under threat from the disharmony of its parts. In contrast to motherhood, which derives its legitimacy from the maternal body, fatherhood as a master trope is “legitimized by heterogeneous strategies” (107) and “promises to bring body, law, and social affect into alignment as long as fatherhood is simultaneously defined as biological (via sperm or the discourse of shared blood), legal (predominantly, here, as the husband of the mother and highest authority of the oikos), and ethical (as the head of the household whose members are entrusted to the father’s care)” (10). While god and king reinforce the figure of the father, their own legitimacy is borrowed from this constellation of biology, law, and ethics that composes the absolute metaphor of fatherhood. These three claims seldom align for long, however, rendering the subject position of the father not merely mobile but constitutively unstable. This instability then carries over to the figures of god and king, and the competing claims to legitimacy construct the necessarily tragic structure of the paternal triad.

Weineck breaks this argument down into five sections, loosely organized in chronological order. The first section shows how Freud popularized the logic of “filiarchal” culture, in which Oedipus is both “the quintessential subject and quintessential son, whereas the father becomes, alternatively or simultaneously, the symbol of all power and its parody” (3). In the second section, Weineck discusses three cases of tragic fathers: Laius, Oedipus, and Abraham. Each of them embodies the conflict inherent in fatherhood on different levels: Laius and Oedipus have to choose between biological and political fatherhood, whereas Abraham’s story reveals the violence inherent in reconciling the two registers. The third section turns to philosophical considerations of fatherhood with discussions of Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes. Plato and Aristotle emerge from the cultural matrix that produced the tragedies of Laius and Oedipus, and Weineck understands their political theories as attempts to sever the biological and political realms in order to prevent political tragedy. Hobbes inaugurates the early modern revolution in thought by decoupling the paternal triad altogether: “Paternal dominion and political sovereignty no longer share a common reference point in the book of Genesis: they are analogous only, no longer mutually dependent or sentimentally cross-charged” (114). In the fourth section, Weineck looks at the results of Hobbes’s revolution, as embodied in the rise of the son in the works of Lessing and Kleist. Close readings of Emilia Galotti and Nathan der Weise reveal “paternity teetering on the brink of abdication” (143). From close readings of Die Marquise von O., Das Erdbeben in Chili, and Der Findling, she determines that Kleist, while sympathetic to the fraternal rhetoric of the French...