Negative ethics: The missed event in the French films of Michael Haneke

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn their engagement with guilt, complicity and the multiple forms of violence, Michael Haneke's films interrogate the ethical implications of violent action. I argue that this cinematic interrogation of violence articulates an ethics of radicality that can be paralleled with Alain Badiou's concept of the event. As opposed to the more conventional definition of ethics as an investigation of moral problems, norms or criteria for the way in which we live, ethics in Badiou suggests a revolutionary radicality, one that posits an alteration in the structure of the symbolic, and in the subject that breaks new territory and shatters past frameworks. Similarly engaged with the interrogation of the ethics of violence, Badiou's concept of the event highlights the way in which Haneke's films articulate an ethical space for interjection. Focusing on the missed events, those ethical encounters with radicality that do not occur, this article argues that Haneke's films suggest a negative utopia by pointing to what could have been.