Touching Nancy’s ethics: death in Michael Haneke’s Amour

Abstract

In the context of ‘New French Extremity’, Michael Haneke’s films are critically received as brutal and violent. Amour (2012) addresses political and ethical questions of the treatment of the dying within the aesthetics of intimate and provocative cinema. In this article, the author explores the provocative nature of Amour in contact with philosophical questions of death and care. He theorises death using Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on cinema, the body and ethics. Understanding death as a Nancean ‘blind spot’ – a coming to presence that unfolds and intensifies existential finitude – allows the author to centrally position the knowledge of Anne’s death in this expositional realm beyond representation. With the help of Nancy’s work, he fleshes out the evidence of Anne’s death as an intensified shared experience through the film, and analyses her corporeal ‘expeausition’. He positions Amour ontologically as a Nancean ‘transimmanent’ vehicle bringing the embodied immanence of carnal spectatorship and the transcendence of the topic of death in contact. In this reading, the film as ‘exscription’ of Anne’s body, as access proper to her body and skin, enables a sense of ‘being-with’ the images and touches upon ethics, death and the cinematic medium itself.