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Abstract:
This article revisits Michael Haneke's Caché (Hidden, 2005) as a filmic transformation of the traditional bond between sacrificial violence, morality and community building. By drawing mainly on striking correspondences with Jacques Derrida's view of the “mystical” origin of authority and of the limits of moral representation, the article aims to probe into Haneke's strategies of concealment. In so doing, the article proposes a “postsecular” interpretation of the symbolic meaning of the enigmas of the “ghost director” within the film, and of Majid's theatrical self-sacrifice.
Notes
I would like to thank Bogdan George Popa, Russell Kilbourn, Alexandra Popartan, Ivan Pintor, and an anonymous reviewer for comments on a draft of this article.
1 Haneke qtd in Cieutat and Rouyer 149.
2 Haneke qtd in Cieutat 146.
3 Derrida, “Force of Law” 942/943.
4 Habermas, Postnational Constellation 101; idem, Reason and Rationality 166.
5 Bradatan and Ungureanu.
6 See also Kline.
7 This article develops and modifies an argument that I sketched briefly in Ungureanu, “Final Remarks.” Therein I use the term “postsecular” so as to interpret Haneke's relation to Christianity, and to draw a comparison with Bruno Dumont's The Life of Jesus (1997).
8 The formal-cinematic aspects of Haneke's film have been largely discussed, not least by Haneke himself. Haneke's formal choices corroborate my interpretation of his view of the limits of moral representation (see below).
9 I have in mind Benjamin's famous passage:
The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our claim was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. (Benjamin 254)
10 This paradoxical relation to the religious heritage justifies the talk of Haneke's postsecular ethics, namely of an idiom that is different both from conventional religious ethics and from a secular ethics based on an immanent reason. This interpretation differs from the view that the film is a postcolonial “morality tale” (amongst others, see Grossvogel). While the political background of the narration is postcolonial, Haneke's directorial intention is more general (see below).
11 Derrida's use of rhetorical figures (e.g., figures of interruption, obscurity) is not merely formal. Digression, ellipsis, for instance, are used by Derrida to suggest something fundamental about the language and representation, namely the impossibility to have access to presence, as well as the absence of an ultimate frontier between fiction and reality, non-literal and literal meaning. For an example of Derrida's use and reflection of a figure of speech as ellipsis questioning the traditional view of it as merely “formal,” see Derrida, “Ellipsis” 371–77.
12 My analysis is complementary to interpretations emphasizing the ethical import of Haneke's reflections on cinematic representation; see Wheatley, Michael Haneke's Cinema; idem, Caché/Hidden; Brunette. For a congruent reading focused on the relation between representation and memory, see Kilbourn.
13 Habermas uses the language of postsecularism in his late writings. However, morality remains for him within the domain of a self-standing reason and rational representation. In contrast, there is an affinity between Derrida and Haneke in that they retrieve religious language (“mystical,” “sin”) beyond dogma and conventional religion in order to reflect on the limits of moral and/or filmic representation. For a detailed discussion of postsecularism, see Ungureanu, “Uses and Abuses” 1–19.
14 Haneke's formal choices (e.g., the digital texture of the video) contribute to the destabilization of the “immediate control of reality” and of the transparency of (moral) representation. See Haneke qtd in Cieutat and Rouyer 151. Caché interweaves the reflection on cinematic and moral representations and their “mystical” blind spots; therein consists a further correspondence between Haneke and Derrida: they use rhetorical or filmic strategies to question the transparent border between representation, fiction and reality (see below). For a discussion of Haneke's formal-cinematic choices, see, for instance, Romney; Kilbourn.
15 Derrida is well known for reflecting on the way the figure of the ghost – neither alive nor dead – questions the idea of a controllable and transparent border between fiction, representation and reality. See Derrida, Spectres of Marx.
16 An alternative Lacanian–Žižekian interpretation regards the enigma of the ghost director and the irruption of Majid's violence as “manifestations” of the Real appears to be more promising. However, I do not pursue this interpretative path since I am not persuaded that the Lacanian–Žižekian analysis captures Haneke's deep ethical interest and refusal to aestheticize violence (that is, to dissolve the moral problematic of violence into jubilatory sensations). Resorting to some elements of Derrida's reflection on hidden violence, “mystical” and morality have more explicative power, and are more congruent with Haneke's directorial intentions (see below). In contradistinction, see Žižek for a characteristic example of an analysis of religion, revolution and cinema that ends in a suspension of the ethical, and the celebration of revolutionary violence as a flight into the Real. A good critique of Žižek's view is contained in Sharpe and Boucher. For an alternative way of using psychoanalytical insights, see Mamula chapter 5, dedicated to Haneke and Chris Marker.
17 See also Alain Tasma's Nuit noire, 17 octobre 1961 (2005).
18 Haneke qtd in Cieutat and Rouyer 149. See also Wheatley, Michael Haneke's Cinema; idem, Caché/Hidden; Brunette; and for an alternative interpretation focused on the issue of “secrecy,” see Yacowar.
19 With the exception of radical libertarians or individualists, it is generally accepted that imperfect obligations emerge by virtue of membership in a family or community: the admittance of a collective dimension of responsibility (of the Germans towards Jews; of the French towards the victims of the Nuit noire) does not point to unfathomable mysteries.
20 For more details on these events and the origin of Haneke's movie, see Kline.
21 The point of introducing aspects of Derrida's view is not taking Caché either as a mere illustration of an abstract thesis or as advancing a fully fledged philosophical argument; it is to intimate that there are enlightening correspondences between elements of Derrida's conception of the “mystical” and of the absence of an ultimate foundation of representation and Haneke's strategy of concealment of the “director” and origin of moral accusation and representation in Caché. For clarifying methodological reflections on the interactive relation between film and philosophy, see Mulhall.
22 Derrida famously speaks of “religion without religion.” See Derrida and Vattimo.
23 Derrida, “Force of Law” 920–1045.
24 Ibid. 990/991.
25 Ibid. 942/943.
26 Haneke qtd in Cieutat 147.
27 Haneke qtd in Cieutat and Rouyer 149.
28 As I have pointed out, Haneke's reflection on the limits or blind spots of the cinematic and the moral representation go hand in hand. For Haneke, “our perception of the world is naturally fragmented” (Haneke qtd in Cieutat 140); Haneke also speaks of the “impossibility of description” (qtd in Cieutat and Rouyer 152). See also Haneke, “Violence and the Media.”
29 The excluded (like the victims of the Nuit noire) are not sacrificed victims to be inscribed into a sacral history of redemption; they are victims to be mourned. For Derrida and Haneke violence loses both its sacral aura and its positive function in community building: the loss of the victim is irremediable and unredeemable (for a complication of this image with respect to Majid's figure that has an ethical-sacrificial dimension, see below).
30 Here I refer only to those elements of Derrida's conception that help me build an analogy with Haneke's film and which, incidentally, are also convincing to me. Overall, however, Derrida's moral conception is based on an inflationary understanding of sacrifice. The very structure of the concept of duty is, for Derrida, “sacrificial-Abrahamic.” In Derrida's hyperbolic rhetoric:
[a]s soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the gaze, look, request, love, command or call of the other, I know that I can respond only by sacrificing ethics, that is, by sacrificing whatever obliges me to also respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all the others. I offer a gift of death, I betray, I don't need to raise my knife over my son on Mount Moriah for that. Day and night, at every instant, on all Mount Moriahs of this world, I am doing that, raising my knife over what I love and must love, over those to whom I owe absolute fidelity, incommensurably. (Derrida, Gift of Death 68)
31 Andrei Apostol suggested to me this interpretation in a private conversation. By pointing out the ambivalence of the representation of Majid's suicide, my reading goes in a different direction (see below).
32 Baudrillard's name is mentioned at a cocktail party at Anne's publishing firm (Osterweil 38; Kilbourn 187). Osterweil and Frey relate Baudrillard's social theory to Haneke's films, yet in a different sense, with a focus on the theory of image and representation (Osterweil; Frey). However, I think that drawing attention to the “elective affinities” between Derrida and Haneke is more fruitful: as I have pointed out, they are both interested in problematizing the strict opposition between representation, fiction, and reality, while rejecting the view of a totalizing fictionalization.
33 In potlatch, a form of gift-giving found in the northwest of North America and in Melanesia, one leader “offers,” destroys and ostentatiously sacrifices objects, slaves, a banquet, or indeed anything, to a rival leader. The latter is obliged to accept and then to return the gift through exceeding the gifts given to him in the previous exchange. Social relations between individuals, groups and tribes are defined through such escalating and competitive exchanges that can take on violent, spectacular, and excessive forms. See Mauss.
34 I take the phrase “new terrorism” from Baudrillard's Spirit of Terrorism 25.
35 In Baudrillard's work terrorism first emerges as a theme against the background of the Baader-Meinhof and Red Brigade terrorists in the late 1960s and 1970s. See Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange. For more recent analyses, see his Carnival and Cannibal and, most importantly, Spirit of Terrorism.
36 Baudrillard, Spirit of Terrorism 12.
37 Ibid. 17.
38 Charles Taylor accuses Derrida of a celebration or aestheticization of violence beyond its morally problematic character. This is what Taylor calls, in his magnum opus A Secular Age, Derrida's “neo-Nietzschean anti-humanism” (327, 726, 695). But I think that this is a misrepresentation of Derrida's view based on the opposition between justice and violence that follows an academic fashion rather than Derrida's own texts. In contrast, Derrida and Haneke have in common the interruption of the celebration and aestheticization of violence. See also Ungureanu, “Aestheticization of Politics.”
39 Baudrillard, Spirit of Terrorism 9.
40 Ibid. 6.
41 Grossvogel speaks of Haneke's “Brechtian exercise in distancing” (Grossvogel 41).
42 For a suggestive interpretation of the loss of communication in Haneke's film and its relation to Code Unknown, see also Mamula chapter 5.
43 See also Haneke's useful reflections in his “Terror and Utopia of Form.” Note that Kline makes use of René Girard's well-known theory of violence and the sacred in interpreting Haneke's movie, but he does not propose a plausible interpretation as to why the authorship of the videos remains ultimately unknown (Kline). From my perspective, the Girardian reading has the merit of pointing to the centrality of the issue of sacrificial violence in relation to community building, and to a violence that is “hidden” at the origin of community. But Girard's line of argumentation, based on the scapegoat mechanism as concealing the truth of the unlimited original violence, diverges from Haneke's ethical concerns, and does little to explain his strategies of concealment of the ultimate origin or director of the filmic and moral representation: Majid's ethical self-sacrifice is not meant to cover a hidden truth, but to unveil it (see later). A Girardian reading of Majid's sacrifice (not discussed by Kline) may become more convincing if one regards it as a late ethical echo of a Christic self-sacrifice as a way of overcoming the economic circle of violence and sacrifice, but is undermined by the familiar Eurocentric gesture of conferring a world-historical relevance to Christ's sacrifice.
44 The meaning of the final scene that brings together Georges' and Majid's sons is a matter of speculation. It could be read as suggesting either that the next generation inherits the faults and responsibilities of their parents, or that there is the possibility of a dialogue and reconciliation. It is, however, clear that Haneke's film does not provide any warrant of reconciliation or closure of the trauma of violence and counter-violence.
45 Benjamin, Illuminations 257.
46 Ibid. 276.
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