Loser Sons: Politics and Authority

by Avital Ronell

There are sons who grow up unhappily believing that no matter what they do, they cannot please their fathers. 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._x000B_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. 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-Francois Lyotard, Hannah Arendt, Alexandre Kojeve, and Immanuel Kant.

Genres: Philosophy

204 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Avital Ronell is Professor of German, comparative literature, and English at New York University, where she directs the Research in Trauma and Violence project, and has also written as a literary critic, a feminist, and philosopher.

Ronell to Israeli diplomats and was a performance artist before entering academia.

She gained a B.A. from Middlebury College and studied with Jacob Taubes at the Hermeneutic Institute at the Free University of Berlin. She received her Ph.D. under the advisement of Stanley Corngold at Princeton University in 1979, and then continued her studies with Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous in Paris.

She joined the comparative literature faculty at the University of California, Berkeley before moving to NYU. She is also a core faculty member at the European Graduate School.

Reviews

[Antony Haws · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ronell is brilliant, and I really like almost all of her books. This book too is worth a read. My only criticism of it is that it was more focused on Kafka than I'd expected. I'd hoped there would be more political analysis or musings on "loser sons" like George W. Bush, which I'd been led to expect from the description; but, this is really a book about Kafka. An interesting book, but not as immediately relevant as I'd hoped.

[Crystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Circular and challenging. A good book for Year ... What year is this? ... of The War On, as well as for thinking through Mighty Wurlitzer-powered inscriptions of domesticated militarized patriarchal femininity in US texts including "Homeland," "Zero Dark Thirty," and "Scandal."