Of Suture and Signifier in Michael Haneke's Caché (2005)

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.