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

Book Reviews Silke-Maria Weineck. The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Pp. 208+x. $29.95. That the trope of “fatherhood” has played an overwhelmingly dominant role in the political, legal, and religious development of Western civiliza­ tion is per se no monumental insight. The visible disjunction between that tropic organization and the existing family structures out ofwhich it arose, however, might signal the exhaustion of a certain way of understanding what that civilization has been and what it might yet become. To under­ stand the vicissitudes and functioning of this trope is the motivating force behind Silke Weineck’s illuminating The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West. In her words: “the father may still function as the figure of the law, but his traditional double function—to protect and prohibit—ha[s] long been absorbed by a state that ceased to re­ semble the family and had become a disembodied system” (4). Ifthe fathertrope is nothing more than an empty ideal, it fails to do justice both to (a) the intellectual possibilities inherent in the institutions of law, politics, and religion and to (b) the actualities inherent in fatherhood (as well as in motherhood). Weineck’s book is, therefore, not so much a critique of“pa­ ternity” (although it is that as well) as it is a genealogical diagnosis of a cru­ cial philosophical, artistic, political, and theological self-understanding of the West. If readers of this journal wonder why this book is being reviewed by a journal specializing in Romanticism, it perhaps suffices to mention the category of “figure.” While the figure of “figure” is as old as Homer and the Hebrew Bible, the concept of figure is given prominence in the 19th century when thinkers both German and English begin to view literary categories—e.g., tragedy—as philosophical problems. Thus, to paraphrase Peter Szondi’s famous remark, Aristotle may have given us a poetics of tragedy, but only with Schelling do we have a philosophy oftragedy. Thus, while Weineck’s perfervid study spans the works of Sophocles, the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Lessing, Kleist, and Freud, the optic she uses is (I believe) clearly one that emerges in the Romantic period. Differently stated, if the content of Weineck’s study traverses multiple historical peri­ ods, its form finds its decisive measure in the 19th century. SiR, 54 (Fall 2015) 429 430 BOOK REVIEWS “One of [the] aspirations [of Tragedy] is to hear the fathers speak, in however mediated a way” (7). While paternity has dominated Western dis­ course, it does not “speak” in the first person (this despite the fact that Oedipus, qua literary character, speaks). Rather, one initially hears it through the voice of the sons: “The absence of the father’s voice as any­ thing but a distorted echo in the writings ofsons . . . has led to a pervasive failure to articulate the place of the father as a subject position” (7). If pa­ ternity rules through the traces or traumatic marks left on the children, then it cannot be other than repressive and defensive. The legal, political, and religious institutions that operate according to its logic amount, there­ fore, to a hollow standard that either bestows or robs legitimacy from con­ crete actors. This situation not only causes repression of these actors, but it also assures (in strict Athenian fashion) that the figure of the father will be­ stow a murderous destiny on his family: “Iffatherhood, as I argue, is at core the always-tenuous incorporation of potentially conflicting . . . claims to legitimacy, then its form is itselftragic” (10). This is true no less for Freud, despite the fact that he changed the terrain on which the father exacts his discipline and/or protection from politics, religion, and family to psycho­ logical fantasy (or, “inner object” [15]). The Sophoclean version of King Laius is given pride of place in Weineck’s study insofar as Laius exemplifies the silent (in fact, always al­ ready dead [29]) father that condemns his offspring to repeat his repressive and morbid constitution. It is Sophocles’ rendition that, in fact, becomes...