Abstract
The paper studies Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke's most recent film, Caché (2005), as a narrative exploration of cultural tension, anxiety, and social psychology in the post-9/11 world. The paper focuses specifically on this psychological text/context and argues that, in the film, Haneke develops a critique of Western middle-class liberal subject positions through an examination of the crisis that emerges due to the intrusion of the Other and the Other's gaze. In studying the negotiations of a Parisian family with this sudden intrusion of the Other's gaze, I have relied on Lacan's theory of suture as constructing an imaginary defense against the Real of colonial guilt.
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Notes
I thank my anonymous reviewers for bringing this point to my attention.
Although early Lacan often refers to the Real in relation to the imaginary and symbolic, that is, the imaginary and the symbolic as offering a distance from the Real, the “later” Lacan of knots and mathemes reincorporates the Real in the field of signifiers through the function of the drive.
I should clarify that the “−ϕ” as the imaginary phallus is different from the “Φ” that Lacan employs to designate the symbolic function of the phallus. As Bruce Fink explains, “[T]he use of the lowercase form (ϕ) indicates, given Lacan's conventions, that it is imaginary – the image of the penis – and the minus sign indicates that it is the image of the penis as always potentially lost and thus, in a sense, as always already lost; this is why it is negativized” (emphasis in the original) (Fink, 2004, p 136). In a footnote, Fink further clarifies that “Lacan does not situate it [−ϕ] as either purely real (a biological organ) or purely imaginary (an image of the penis); rather, it denotes imaginary castration” (Fink, 2004, p 182, n 9).
Given this subject position, the “want” that slips out of the discourse of suture is essentially that which situates the Other/woman both inside and outside of the phallic function, and men in terms of impossibility. Or, to quote Joel Dor, “for men, the jouissance is always in relation to the jouissance of the Other, which is forbidden (…) but this impossibility does not represent a prohibition [for women]. Hence the possibility of a supplementary jouissance is open to women” (italics in original) (Dor, 2001, p 168).
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Basu Thakur, G. Of Suture and Signifier in Michael Haneke's Caché (2005). Psychoanal Cult Soc 13, 261–278 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2008.13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2008.13