Loved to Death

Abstract

Some viewers of Michael Haneke’s award-winning film Amour (2012) may read it “simply” as a film about assisted dying. Here, I explore how Haneke attended to the experiences of aging and disability, and how these categories inform intimate relations, in this case that of an aging middle-class heterosexual couple living in Paris. As the deterioration of the body intensifies, what does it mean for love itself to intensify to the point of surrendering to the demand of subjecting the one you love to death. Thinking alongside the work of Sigmund Freud and Kaja Silverman, I ask after what may happen if and when love has the capacity to demand upon one the annihilation of their beloved. How is the beloved remembered, preserved, and forgotten as they age, and what might it mean to see love as not merely a cure but also a thing that has the capacity to kill?