A community in splinters: communality in Michael Haneke's Code Unknown

Abstract

In Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (2000), Michael Haneke's cinematographic looking at the state of community delivers a splintering world of life being many against the multiracial/cultural milieu of postcolonial France. Produced in a sociopolitical climate of revived nationalism and social disaffection, the film makes conspicuous an inoperative community, in Jean-Luc Nancy's sense, that links together several stories of life in motion (and collision) through which the fates of its dwellers intersect and dis/connect. The film carves out a site of friction, I argue, that is simultaneously an irreparable rupturing of communalism and a shared space of communication. This paper examines the communicative model of sociality through which a series of untranslatable ‘codes’ of bodily contacts, violent or otherwise, constitutes the internal breakage of collective fusion. The formation of communal existence, as iterated in Haneke's central thesis, therefore, extends beyond the symbolic register of the Self and the Other, and into the material dimension of transcultural and inter-ethno-racial incongruities, fostering a deepened sense of social unease.

Acknowledgement

The author gratefully acknowledges the comments of two anonymous reviewers on earlier versions of the paper.