The Tragedy of Fatherhood

King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West

Silke-Maria Weineck

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781628920789
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: Literary Criticism Theory

Winner of the 2014 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, awarded by the Modern Language Association. Theories of power have always been intertwined with theories of fatherhood: paternity is the oldest and most persistent metaphor of benign, legitimate rule. The paternal trope gains its strength from its integration of law, body, and affect-in the affirmative model of fatherhood, the biological father, the legal father, and the father who protects and nurtures his children are one and the same, and in a complex system of mutual interdependence, the father of the family is symbolically linked to the paternal gods of monotheism and the paternal ruler of the monarchic state. If tragedy is the violent eruption of a necessary conflict between competing, legitimate claims, The Tragedy of Fatherhood argues that fatherhood is an essentially tragic structure. Silke-Maria Weineck traces both the tensions and various strategies to resolve them through a series of readings of seminal literary and theoretical texts in the Western cultural tradition. In doing so, she demonstrates both the fragility and resilience of fatherhood as the most important symbol of political power. A long history of fatherhood in literature, philosophy, and political thought, The Tragedy of Fatherhood weaves together figures as seemingly disparate as Aristotle, Freud, Kafka, and Kleist, to produce a stunning reappraisal of the nature of power in the Western tradition.

Section III

The Political Father

Five	Aristotle and the Body of the Father

Here is another difference between the fathers of Jerusalem and the fathers of Athens: in the entire Bible, there is not a single case of paternal uncertainty. Nobody ever wonders who his father is. Nobody ever wonders whether his son is really his son. And instead of dual fathers, we actually find dual mothers: Hagar and Sarah, or the two mothers of Solomon’s circle. This is all the more striking seeing the text’s strong investment in paternal lineage. Or perhaps it is precisely because paternal lineage is so crucial to the larger narrative that even the specter of paternal uncertainty would be a threat? What is certain is that neither prudishness nor a surfeit of virtuous characters can account for the absence of the theme—sexual misbehavior, sexual crimes, and highly sexualized narratives and imagery abound. Fatherhood itself, however—and this I take to be a central message of Abraham’s story—is not confirmed by the sexual relations, which serve merely as its condition, but by a spiritual event commemorated by an inscription into the male flesh. It is, more bluntly, a contract: originally a contract between God and men, afterwards, a contract between men and men, or men and boys.

Athens, by contrast, struggles with the question of sperm, and the nature of the paternal body—or more precisely the question of the somatic component of paternity—is a subject of considerable theoretical concern. We know that the concept of fathering was a contested one, even though, again, we don’t know most of the texts that we know of. We do, however, have Aristotle’s biological writings, or at least a version of them, and they make for fascinating reading—far more fascinating, in fact, than most of the brief summaries one is likely to encounter suggest.

In the introduction to Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben comments on the relationship between the Greek terms zôê and bios as follows:

The Greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the word “life.” They used two terms that, although traceable to a common etymological root, are semantically and morphologically distinct: zo, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group.¹

Later on, Agamben cites Michel Foucault’s assertion that for “millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence.”² Central to both thinkers’ argument is a passage at the beginning of the Politics that expands on the distinctions between various forms of communal living:

men also come together and maintain the political community in view of simple living, because there is probably some kind of good in the mere fact of living itself (kata to zên auto monon). If there is no great difficulty as to the way of life (kata ton bion), clearly most men will tolerate much suffering and hold on to life (zên) as if it were a kind of serenity (euêmeria, beautiful day) and a natural sweetness.³

Agamben argues that in “the classical world,” despite the potential value of life as zôê, “simple natural life is excluded from the polis in the strict sense, and remains confined—as merely reproductive life—to the sphere of the oikos, ‘home’” (2).

Even though the distinction between zôê and bios that Agamben develops here is not quite as consistent in Greek texts (as he himself notes), the Aristotelian passage is indeed suggestive. If political community depends on the transformation of zôê into bios or eu zên (the good, i.e., meaningful life as opposed to mere organic existence), then “bare life” needs to be organized through a process of progressive signification in an ascending hierarchy of communal associations. Politics, as the most meaningful organization of human zôê, is what most clearly distinguishes human life from the life of other animals by surpassing that which they have in common.

While there is zôê without eu zên, however, there can be no human association without either zôê or bios. And even though Agamben is correct in pointing out that Aristotle goes to some length in insisting on the difference between oikos and polis and between the modes of authority that govern either, the latter appears to be far more intimately linked to and dependent on the former than the argument cited above suggests. More importantly, once reproduction is framed by the oikos, reproduction is no longer “mere” reproduction. It is not through the polis but through the oikos that zôê accrues its cultural meaning, and that transformation can no more be “excluded” from the polis than its individual households. When Aristotle, then, begins his enterprise in the Politics with a critique of those who do not see the difference between oikia and polis (more on that in the next chapter), he does not claim that these various forms of beneficial association (koinônia) are distinct realms in every respect. Rather, after announcing that understanding the state will mean to analyze “the elements of which it is composed,” Aristotle continues:

The first coupling together of persons then to which necessity gives rise is that between those who are unable to exist without one another: for instance the union of female and male for the continuance of the species (and this not of deliberate purpose, but with man as with the other animals and with plants there is a natural instinct to desire to leave behind one another being of the same sort as oneself). (Pol. 1252a)

The dynamics of reproduction condition the first constitutive union of the state, and the polis is merely the highest form of koinônia, a term that may have had clear sexual connotations.⁴ There is, in Aristotle, then, a progression from coupling without deliberation (i.e., without proairesis, a term that also connotes specifically political course of action) to the political association of the state, from the urge to procreate which is shared by humans and trees to the specifically human construction of community that begins not in coitus but when male and female join in a union that exceeds sexual congress.

The passage cited above suggests that the first step in the proto-historical transformation of zôê into bios, of bare life into meaningful life, consists in the hierarchic organization of reproduction, an organization that depends first of all on the distinction between male and female, thêlus and arsên, terms that are generic enough to cover biological, grammatical, and metaphorical gender. This does not mean, however, that the oikia is not already a quasi-political space, or that, within it, reproduction could still be seen as “mere” reproduction. The household is comprised of husband, wife, children, and slaves and combines no fewer than three different forms of power relations: husband/wife, father/children, and master/slave. There is a considerable distance between traveling flower pollen and this highly complex social unit, and it is rather striking that so many of Aristotle’s commentators do not see the need to focus on the conceptual leap involved here. While he does not elaborate on it, Aristotle draws attention to the tremendous difference between sexual forms of coupling that are “necessary” for most species to survive and the coupling that is not necessary in that restricted sense,⁵ the one that then gives rise to the institution of the oikia that includes the couple, its children and its slaves, and other private property. It is here, after all, that the zoon becomes politikon, laying claim to a nature of its own.

It goes almost without saying that the gender difference grounds everything to follow. As Aristotle stresses at the very beginning of the Politics, it is exactly the distinction between forms of rule that is at stake in defining the polis against other unions, and although Aristotle condemns as barbaric those who think the male-female relation is analogous to the master-slave relation, the rule of the male is never in question—whereas slaves can in principle be set free and cease to be slaves, women cannot cease to be women. True, the husband-wife relationship is “political” (1259b) and purports to follow the aristocratic model of rule by merit, but merit accrues to the male without fail: while male rule may be either just or unjust, as the specific case may be, it is permanent, and Aristotle does not question it either in principle or practice. A woman can either have the good fortune of being ruled aristocratically or the bad fortune of being ruled oligarchically, oligarchy being to aristocracy what tyranny is to kingship.⁶

The male-female couple, while linked to reproduction, precedes the making of the child, and unlike the father-child relationship, which remains prepolitical (see Chapter 6), male-female relations are political precisely because of their reproductive potential. What is at stake here is the moment in or rather the process by which the nondeliberative coupling of the organic world as a whole—coitus or noncoital modes of reproduction without conscious purpose, sexuality without political meaning—acquires proairesis, that is, futurity, meaning, and telos. And that is nothing less than the invention of fatherhood:

With the advent of the couple, procreation on the part of the male became as universal as it is for the female: the rule, from that point forward, is for all males to generate offspring. In this sense, the birth of human society represents a revolution in the lives and status of males: it marks the beginning of the male’s achievement of a function as an individual.”⁷

In this light, the family is not merely the very foundation of the polis, diachronically and synchronically—in producing the father, it also gives rise to the male citizen qua individual, that is, the political citizen without whom Athenian democracy is unthinkable.

The father is the only figure who simultaneously belongs to both polis and oikos, whereas the son is the only one who can diachronically cross the line dividing them. To be sure, the status of head-of-household implies more than paternity, but it’s worth stressing that Aristotle here, quite casually, declares proairetic reproduction to be both the foundation and the raison d’être of the household. When Davis writes that, “while we may be drawn to the naturalness of the origin of the polis, that is, sex, we cannot help remembering that poleis do not grow like flowers. They are instituted,”⁸ he falls into the old naturalization trap—before the institution of the polis, there is the institution of the oikos, and Aristotle knows it, even if Davis does not. As Peter Simpson points out, “the households enter the city and its rule through the man who is their head, and the citizen is part of the city as a man who heads a household (the man, in other words, is not a citizen as a mere individual, but as representing a household).”⁹ Conversely, and more importantly, it is only the household that makes him a citizen: the institution of fatherhood, as the joint between domestic and public life, is of central importance both to the citizen and to the city. As Eva C. Keuls points out, “Thucydides makes it clear that, in the Athenian conception, citizens without legitimate sons are not full-fledged members of the community … It is even possible that a man without male issue was denied a voice in the Senate.”¹⁰

Athenian fatherhood, however, is indeed only politically relevant to the extent to which it concerns legitimate children, or rather sons—it is not merely the capacity to beget male children that counts, but the act of begetting male children within a particular cultural framework. Fundamentally, of course, fatherhood is always already the result of institutionalization, since, unlike at least one form of maternity (and the one traditionally seen as its dominant denotation), paternity as a physical relation between two bodies does not admit of direct observation. While the physical link between the biological mother and child can be witnessed during birth,¹¹ there is no such obvious link between the male body and the child fathered: not every coupling leads to pregnancy, and few births can be traced back to a specific act of coupling.

If we want to retain Agamben’s terms, fatherhood is the realm where zôê and bios cannot be distinguished, since fatherhood is foremost an effect of signification. Paternity’s biological aspect, while crucial, is nonetheless always asserted in retrospect—when the woman is pregnant or does give birth, the father did beget. His position defines and is defined by social and political relations that designate his body as having been there. Even before paternal certainty can become an issue, the relationship between coitus, pregnancy, and birth itself needs to be constructed. Fatherhood, in other words, needs institutions to legitimize not simply the sons but itself. In other words, it needs a theory.

The most famous and the most influential passages of Aristotle’s Generation of Animals are just that, a theory of reproduction that fabricates the bodily grounding of fatherhood. As Thomas Laqueur has pointed out, “for Aristotle reproductive biology was essen...