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-Francois Lyotard, Hannah Arendt,
Alexandre Kojeve, 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.
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