Loser Sons: Politics and Authority

Title Page, Frontispiece, Copyright

Photo on page i: Franz Kafka, Albert Ehrenstein, Otto Pick, and Lise Kaznelson, Vienna, the Prater, 1913 Loser Sons Politics and Authority Avital Ronell University of Illinois Press Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield © 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America C 5 4 3 2 1 ∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ronell, Avital. Loser sons : politics and authority / Avital Ronell. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-252-03664-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-252-09370-8 (ebook) 1. Authority in literature. 2. Authority. 3. Fathers and sons in literature. 4. Fathers and sons. 5. Kafka, Franz, 1883 –1924—Family. 6. Lyotard, Jean-François, 1924 –1998. I. Title. PN56.A87R66 2012 809'.93353—dc23 2011047445 While writing this book, I read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci: A Tragedy in Five Acts. Inescapably I began a long-distance relationship with Beatrice Cenci, the young Roman aristocrat brutalized by her father. Imprisoned in 1599 for conspiring to murder the tyrannical father, Beatrice Cenci and her relatives were tortured. The Rome of Pope Clement VIII was greatly invested in upholding paternal authority, and declined to address the storm of violence —sexual, physical, altogether demolishing—visited upon a tormented family by its patriarch. It has been said that Caravaggio witnessed her execution while putting together his ideas for The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. I would like to dedicate this work to her plight and person, remembering the Beatrices among us. ...