Loser Sons

Politics and Authority

Avital Ronell

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780252079696, 9780252036644
• eBook ISBN: 9780252093708
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

There are sons who grow up unhappily believing that no matter what they do, they cannot please their fathers. Often unable to shed their sense of lifelong failure, either they give up and suffer in a permanent sulk, or they try with all their might to prove they are worth something after all. These are the "loser sons," a group of historical men as varied as President George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden, and Mohammed Atta. Their names quickly illustrate that not only are their problems serious, but they also make serious problems for others, expanding to whole nations. When God is conceived and inculcated as an angry and impossible-to-please father, the problems can last for generations.

 

In Loser Sons, Avital Ronell draws on current philosophy, literary history, and political events to confront the grim fact that divested boys become terrifying men. This would be old news if the problem didn't recur so often with such disastrous consequences. Looking beyond our current moment, she interrogates the problems of authority, paternal fantasy, and childhood as they have been explored and exemplified by Franz Kafka, Goethe's Faust, Benjamin Franklin, Jean-François Lyotard, Hannah Arendt, Alexandre Kojève, and Immanuel Kant.

 

Brilliantly weaving these threads into a polyvocal discourse, Ronell shows how, with their arrays of powerful symbols, ideologies of all sorts perpetuate the theme that while childhood represents innocence, adulthood entails responsible cruelty. The need for suffering--preferably somebody else's--has become a widespread assumption, not only justifying abuses of authority, but justifying authority itself. 

 

Shockingly honest, Loser Sons recognizes that focusing on the spectacular catastrophes of modernity might make writer and reader feel they're engaged in something important, while in fact what they are engaged in is still only spectacle. To understand the implications of her insights, Ronell addresses them directly to her readers, challenging them to think through their own notions of authority and their responses to it.

Chapter 1

What Was Authority?

Aggressive coexistence. Neither powered up by a solid sense of (or even desire for) legitimacy, nor a control freak with regard to the possibilities of comprehension, I abide with the weaker neighborhoods of thought, where things do not always work out or offer the narcissistic comfort of landing in the vicinity of secured sense. This time, in order to get a running start on the motif of the loser son, a pervasive world-denting irritant, I am going after authority, a problem that has attracted relatively weak bolsters and, for the most part, only tentative interventions. Yet, the problem before us has preoccupied at least two strongly poised generations whose membership has tried very hard, and in vital ways, to stare down authority, question authority, mime, repel, usurp, diminish, lend, or command authority. I want these types and tendencies to approach the bench. They require and deserve a hearing, whether or not they have proven to be rebellious or in egregious complicity with the outer limits of the authoritarian imposition.

To get a provisional grip on what continues to elude while claiming thought—why is there injustice? what holds authority? where does it hurt?—I like to travel different kinds of reflective zones that share with philosophy a sense of vigorous probing but often, despite all good intentions, come with outdated passes or with papers that appear to be even more de-authorized by current practices than philosophy itself.

A running start. At first glance, every attempt to get ahold of authority’s meaning and historical rootedness in institutional practice seems encumbered by the poverty of means to arrive at its essential qualities or range. Theorists of a modern cast, including Alexandre Kojève and Theodor Adorno, take recourse to scales and charts and other computational hazards in order to get the point across that one remains susceptible to and in need of authority; from Hannah Arendt to Giorgio Agamben, the Roman scaffolding is brought back into view in order to expose what authority almost was, or is still about to be. Descriptions flood the arena and, for the most part, accrue to the column tallying up reasons for the necessity of authority, rating the calamitous consequence of its deceleration or outright extinction. The grandeur of authority, its nearly auratic claims, appears to have held things together, having pushed away from more violent shores of human governance. The collapse of authority, the successive demotions of the “big Other,” God and State and other mostly masculinist idols, put a fracture in being. In consequence, we are still crawling around with the lesions caused by the affronts of a faux authority trailing its miserable representatives. Kojève derives ontic samples of authority from the workable fiction of divine authority. Adorno goes so far as to study the bulk of hives-inducing authoritarian qualities lodged at the very core of American democracy. He demonstrates the dangers posed by high scorers of the F-scale, referring in his study to the fascisoid markers consistently lighting up among more or less normal citizens interviewed, Claude Lanzman–style, by his team of researchers. The gap between the character of authority on the one hand, and the “authoritarian character” on the other, is not so wide as it may seem, yet each player in these constellations has a different investment in the modalities of authority, its inevitable breaches or intractable necessity.

Strangely, yet pertinently, the question of authority—supposing it is still or has ever really been a question—takes us back to earliest childhood, to states of hapless dependency and prepolitical need. No one likes to admit it, yet domination by God-the-Father or dad the father, although in close complicity with maternal runs of interference or, in highly determined chronicled spurts, motherly supersession, continues to pump the machine of still unrelenting effects of authority. Whether or not one autobiographically had a daddy-mommy incubator or the signifier hanging over one’s head, one had a relation from day one to authority. One counted, before being able to count, on the authority of those wrapping one’s tush and filling one’s mouth. According to Melanie Klein’s assessment of the way things were from the get-go, one feared the authority even of the breast; coming at one, it gave a real sense of a persecutory tankage (from the start, one had to work at loving one’s mother, at promoting the “good breast”).

My opening set of questions, simple at this point, harnesses Nietzschean energy: What became of authority’s hold over early childhood (or childhood’s way of holding onto authority), whether well rated or poorly dispatched, whether structuring or debilitating and both? How do we score authority in what looks to be a postpolitical world, where we are faced with the essential finitude of the political? Do we need it, or can authority be disposed of by the purposeful anarchy of questioning? Is it the case that the exercise of authority can stave off tyranny, or does its peculiar stamina, on the contrary, prep the tyrannical stranglehold? But authority does not belong to the class of action or syntax of being that can be “exercised,” that is, in any significant way flexed, handled. It belongs to an entirely different scale of showing and being. In effect, it comes along silently, with minimal fuss and even less melodrama. It asserts itself with few words and low phenomenological maintenance. Still, how does it show up on our scanners and what kind of bite marks does it continue to leave on our political bodies? In what way does authority, which notoriously withdraws from thought and shuns ostentation, allow an approach?

In order to wrestle with archaic sovereignties and specify those more original formations that have led to the stagnation of something like a politically progressivist momentum, it is helpful at times to visit with what passes for defunct or condemned sites of knowing. It may mean putting one’s stakes in recalcitrant areas of thought that come up as irrelevant, difficult, overly problematic, wearying. Who wants to dwell today in sticky marshes that yield so little in a “result”-prodded era? Well, I do. Setting aside the craving for results, rated upwards from business and objectivist concerns, let us stay in the vicinity of this ever-receding shadow of a concept, assuming we have found it.

The literary prompt. Even something as politically inflected and ethically driven as the problem of authority may summon up literature in order to give itself a running start, a wide enough space in which to unfold its many hidden capacities. To the extent that they have felt engaged by the problem, political and sociological theories have by turns considered the parameters and depth of authority’s pervasive but elusive grid. Cognitive approaches have yielded information and given some food for thought, some axioms by which to measure the range and pull of authority and its performative aspects. Still other approaches may involve returning to tranquilized textual instances for the purpose of tapping stores of another type of knowledge, without bringing up the noise of know-it-all discursivities and the voracious paradigms from which they are constituted. Sometimes it becomes necessary to explain again why literature, running according to a different metronome of being and prone to altogether contrasting dependencies, summons us to examine the recesses of political exigency. Literature, in the form of fiction or as poetic surround, always accompanies the thought of political injury and persecuted otherness. This fact, in good and gallant Nietzschean terms, may attract both good and bad valences to the extent that poetry and art have been viciously appropriated to killer historical causes and acts, but at the same time, with Hölderlinian strokes of innocence, they inescapably play against empirical-historical currents. It is important in any case for me not to succumb to the temptation, increasing by the day, to write in step with objectivizing science or to produce clean-cut effects of some sort of descriptive politology or political science. I don’t think that I risk such an identity crossover—yet, we practitioners and shouters and readers, whether coming from the precincts of Wissenschaft or its somewhat edgier outskirts, frequently want the same things, decry the same cognitive distortions. One cannot simply deny the good old-fashioned solidarity that binds us, even where methods clash and turf wars stir in the still of the writing night.

Some of my friends remain nonreaders, solid descriptors. They even claim to cling to transparent utterance, rhetorically uncluttered argument—the hard-and-fast reasoning that overrides the literary snafu. In fact they’re making a comeback, undeterred by the sense that uninterrogated clarity has proven to fuel the forces of mendaciousness. Theoretical toughness has lost in many areas of contiguous reflection its essential verve. I don’t blame anyone, I just strap on my witness consciousness to note that the hard-hitting punch of critical inscription is by the looks of it (though looks can deceive) on the decline. One is beaten down by softer approaches or, rather: a crop of ex-theorists has thrown in the towel, having been in some cases pummeled by the stupefying steadiness of a numbed and dumbing body politic; or, worn down by effects of certain aspects of common technologies, one has given in to the sheer distress of association with a brutal polity. Who has not cringed or cried or lost courage in the face of the American deconstitution, something that continues to erode confidence in the reparability of world? Why should the widespread disregard for complexity, care, and existential holding patterns not intrude upon critical grammars and theoretical practices? On another level my question concerns, as previously recorded, where the political poses problems—a question that takes one beyond thematic deliveries and areas of rhetorical tranquility.

I for my part no longer believe in Kantian intelligibilities (which, I know, had their limits from day one—a cause of Heinrich von Kleist’s nervous breakdown and the direct reason for a slew of historical panic attacks). Now, how does pained existence get soothed or primed and prepared for the battle of existence by the literary intercession? How does authorship, dead or alive, feed the machinery of authority? I’ll suspend this part of the equation provisionally and ask to what extent fiction constellates the unrecognizable advent of that which terrorizes. If I were to say what terror is and fill it up, seal it with content, I would have eluded its unshakable grip, surrendering the essential unknown to determination and cognition. We know a few things that may scare and scar, but such knowledge does not amount to capturing effects of terror. Wanting to get in touch with the particular qualities of a terror base that marks shared being—what Jean-Luc Nancy designates as being-in-common—I was often brought to a halt by the immediacy of the intrusive phenomena toward which I was trying to establish a scholarly distance. Now the government, like the FDA, is telling us how much terror to take and from where, with color-coded signals. What has been packaged as terror can be in fact misleading.

Opening a political crypt. Tyrannical surges coming from left field or from the heart of democratic safety zones have become part of our political experience, even where politics in the classical sense seems to be on the retreat. Tyranny, authority, and injustice each have impressive columns in the history of thought to back them up and hold them together, even as in related but different speculative milieux, they stand apart when they are not frankly fueling one another. Although the themes of tyranny and injustice share some common ground with that of authority, I am inclining toward authority. Why this particular emphasis? Because authority is the most elusive of terms that inform relations, and yet no politics, no family, no pride of accomplishment can exist without it, according to the few thinkers who have donated their efforts to writing about or around it or its mystical foundation. Not even tyranny and injustice can be confronted without a close examination of authority’s sway. Authority slips away as one tries to pin it down. So say Kojève and Arendt; so contended the Romans who instituted its earliest forms as family-bound auctoritas. The Greeks it is said barely had a grip on it but put up, in the works especially of Plato and then Aristotle, something that approximated the modern-day understanding of what is meant by authority. Still, to the very extent that it is crucial to any political rhetoric or practice, authority is also decidedly off the radar, a ghost of itself, gone but spectrally imprinted. For Hannah Arendt, authority is an undeletable term, key to any grasp of politics. At the same time, authority has been on the decline together with religion and tradition even as it remains a primal impulse in the cuing of group formation—one can in any case no longer say what authority is. One can barely say what it is not. For her part, Arendt opens the discussion on authority as if she were in the company of a specter, opening a political crypt. Something that still holds us hostage, authority has for all intents and purposes disappeared; it has even eaten away at her title, “What Is Authority?” “In order to avoid misunderstanding,” she begins her famous essay, “it might have been wiser to ask in the title: What was—and not what is—authority? For it is my contention that we are tempted and entitled to raise this question because authority has vanished from the modern world.”¹ For me, the disappearance of authority functions as a figure for democracy in crisis—a way of describing the panic that prevails within the powerful motifs of sociality, alterity, relation. Elsewhere I have argued that it is democracy’s character to be in perpetual crisis.² The burn-out of authority opens another fold in the thinking of this crisis.

Authority’s disappearance in itself calls for a speculative forensics, particularly since the presumed eclipse of authority is not complete but haunts and hounds human relations, holding things together by nothing more substantial than vague historical memory starts. Arendt’s approach to the vanishing of authority recalls in some instances Heidegger’s thinking of the forgetting of being. Authority’s precarious perch over oblivion endangers existence. Writing of the related loss of tradition, she remarks, “We are in danger of forgetting, and such an oblivion—quite apart from the contents themselves that could be lost—would mean that, humanly speaking, we would deprive ourselves of one dimension, the dimension of depth in human existence.” But here the injunction against forgetting works in a decidely non-Heideggerian fashion to save the human, together with the uninterrogated metaphor of depth on which the human stands. The loss of authority is seen as the final and decisive phase “of a development which for centuries undermined primarily religion and tradition. Of tradition, religion, and authority, … authority has proved to be the most stable element. With the loss of authority, however, the general doubt of the modern age also invaded the political realm. … Only now, as it were after the fact, the loss of tradition and of religion have become political events of the first order” (464). Of inestimable political capital, authority sets up and invests the political; thus, whether viewed as exercising its elusive capacities to the max or in recess, it also belongs to a thinking of the destruction or end of politics. Because authority is slipping, the alarming agitations of planet-struck religion and perished tradition come into view, taking on the quality of prime political events. Kojève, who takes another tack, is quick to point out that while Hegel works out his encounter with the problem in terms of the master/slave dialectic, and the Scholastics in terms of God, Marx completely neglects the trope of authority and therefore comes up short. For Arendt, the problem of authority arises early, close to the origin of Western civilization, when Plato has to bury Socrates in writing. We’ll get to the heart of the story shortly, when we attach to the micrological blips in her argument, which show without saying so how Plato struggled. After the execution of his mentor he was bent on conveying the authority of philosophy in an effort both to memorialize and to exact revenge for the passing of the martyred philosopher.

It is not only the case that authority has been lost to us, but it was called up in the first place as a mark of an irretrievable fadeout, to fill in for a loss. The verdict on Socrates is responsible for the birth of authority as a stratagem—an outburst of philosophical insurgency—and a recovery operation. Reading the history of authority—the history of incessant forfeiture leading to the need for authority—one has the sense that philosophy was shaken to its core by the state murder, by the terse sign of its own fragility for which evermore it had to compensate by inventing the prestige of authority. Authority in this bereaved light becomes the response to state-inflicted terror that acts as an arbitrary authority, primed on brute violence, a kind of ancient video game where the object of relentless pursuit will have been the philosopher. Plato avenges the loss, upgrades the destitute philosopher, turning him into philosopher-king, with the help of the newly fabricated mantel of authority as counter-authority. The elusive paraconcept outbids the strategic finesse of the other offspring of Logos.

I am not going to try either to rehabilitate authority or to tear down bumper stickers that, despite it all, remain firmly in place on what drives the culture of often “liberal” ideals and broad-based interventions: “Question Authority.” Authority, even when it was swarmed by identifiable figures and we thought it exhibited some substantial qualities, always provoked acts of questioning. Unlike neighboring syntagms of power such as those attached to tyranny and injustice, about which examples abound, indeed overflow and cramp, authority is difficult to track, impossible to monitor, discouragingly complicated to talk about. It stares down talk, dismissive of every effort to gain on it. Arendt puts authority on the opposing side of any rhetoric of persuasion. Authority disdains the egalitarian order of persuasion, having little use for the petition of strategically aligned language acts. Standing rigorously on its own, it refuses simple power alliances. Thus it contradicts both coercion by force and persuasion through arguments: you can’t talk to it, submit it to any logic, or talk your way out of the troubled facticity of a standoff with authority. If it didn’t continue to supply the pregivenness of our way of handling private and public spheres of encounter, domestic and foreign affairs—or insist on rendering the most intimate of decisions and determining the mentors we chose—maybe authority, with its receding qualities of disappearance and ghostly effectiveness, would not have to be bothered with. One would breathe a sigh of relief if authority, finally, could be dispensed with, closed down and forgotten. Perhaps, one projects, one could grow out of authority, get over it, and mature like a child who no longer fears the switch (as if childhood did not return with punishing regularity to gag and scar, as Kafka and Lyotard show; presumably adult and ripened, these children consistently crawl out of historical comfort zones into regressive spaces where one remains stunted or is returned to the starting pen in order to face the ongoing torment of worldlessness).

The forgetting of authority, the temptation to confuse its disappearance with a final call or definitive ending of sorts—imagining that the irreversible demise of authority were accomplished—opens the field to the invasion of unmarked terrorism, new forms of disturbance for which no critical apparatus or conceptual framework yet exists. The fear induced by the loss of authority appears to follow a Schmittian pattern: the loss of something often considered as pernicious—in his work, the loss of the enemy—opens up abysses to a radical disfiguration of relations as it unravels threads and impairs boundaries that have kept the world recognizable, even in its grim particulars. Such losses have been tallied in late modernity to great effect. Related to Benjamin’s aura, but less flashy, more perniciously undermining, the disappearance of authority may well supersede Carl Schmitt’s enemy constellation, the vanishing of which spells historical calamity. How does the loss of authority inflect our being? Where do the remainders of authority still dwell and sing out like sirens? On another level altogether, are the mourners of authority masking another loss for which “authority” would be a cover? What about the frankly authoritarian features of some of Arendt’s choices, her reactionary watchwords?

The invention of hell. Plato began to consider the introduction of authority into the exercises of public affairs in the polis: “He knew he was seeking an alternative to the common Greek way of handling domestic affairs, which was persuasion as well as to the common way of handli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface. Wrestling a Bad Object
• Introduction. Tiers of Childhood and the Defeat of Politics
• Chapter 1. What Was Authority?
• Chapter 2. The Household of Authority
• Chapter 3. Archeophilia, Panic, & Authority
• Chapter 4. The Good Loser: Kafka Sends Off a Missive to Father
• Chapter 5. The Battle of Wills: On Being Cheap
• Chapter 6. On the Unrelenting Creepiness of Childhood: Lyotard, Kid-Tested
• Chapter 7. Was war Aufklärung?/What Was Enlightenment? The Turn of the Screwed
• Index