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Of Suture and Signifier in Michael Haneke's Caché (2005)
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2008)
  • Gautam Basu Thakur, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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.
Keywords
  • suture,
  • Haneke,
  • Other and Otherness,
  • post-9/11 societies,
  • Lacan,
  • postcolonial theory
Publication Date
September, 2008
Citation Information
Gautam Basu Thakur. "Of Suture and Signifier in Michael Haneke's Caché (2005)" Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society Vol. 13 Iss. 3 (2008)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/gautam_basu_thakur/1/