^aUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

Correspondence: Gautam Basu Thakur, Program in Comparative & World Literature, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 3080, Foreign Languages Building, 707, S. Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. E-mail: gbasuth2@uiuc.edu

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.