Loser Sons

What Is Called Father? 

(A Fissure in Familialism)

Freud at one point wonders about the victory of Patriarchy —  something we still have to contend with, he says. I am contending, but barely. On this point I orient myself toward Kafka’s work, its starting point and endpoint on the crevice of Paternity. 

An unfinished project of Kafka’s, titled “The Sons,” was meant to house the horde of loser sons who could not get up from the incessant destructions suffered at the hands of unwitting fathers. A savored innocence, an unconscious motor, seemed to drive the paternal machine. 

Herein lies a principal quality of tension for Kafka : to a certain extent the fathers he examines, no matter how persecutory, remained impervious to transferential fantasies that saw them as the ruling CEOs of psychic plundering, spoliation, incessant familial and political defrauding. Instead, pushing back tyrannical projections, they managed these fantasies by upgrading themselves to the function of loving and tender sovereign brutes whose practices meant little harm and far less damage than they nonetheless prompted. 

The Kafkan fathers weren’t out to smash their kids or send them to Kingdom come, as may have been the case when the ancient predecessor, Laius, deliberately sought to quell baby Oedipus. 

Kafkan kids were bound over to another set of lethal circumstances, less calibrated by intention or mere power play, less mandated by the so-called instinct for survival. Still, they could not avoid being crushed under the weight of powerful language assaults and the expanding girth of the paternal body, no matter how figurally situated. 

In the Kafka family, sexual difference decided whether or not you would be voided. Some girls got away, were somehow stronger, more rebellious, or more compatibly dependent on family rule. 

The boys were either killed off from the start — Kafka refers to two dead brothers who bailed on him, leaving the young Franz to fight off paternal brutishness on a solitary spin — or they were chronically prone to power failure, as if switched off, suddenly depleted and emptied of being. 

Their fate, though responsive to Father’s sprawling shadow, was by no means planned or designed by the largely hapless creature who came equipped with special effects and liquidating features that were, Kafka contends, for the most part absolved of guilt or any wrongdoing. 

Paternal power surges in the Kafkan world were by some measures inadvertent, offering the only sign of innocence in the material-familial environs. The sons in the world he pulled together thus suffered, among other things, from an exquisite Nietzschean injunction, disallowing any enactment of ressentiment. 

It might have been easier to hate and resent the Persecutor, to push back and mark succession, calling upon finitude’s vindictive edges. But Kafka plays it otherwise. He scores essential points on the outer limits of Freudian ambivalence, subduing the urge to strike back at the ever-encroaching debilitator. These tactics or abolition of tactics serves to keep Father alive and kicking.