Suchergebnisse

Violence Hates Games? Revolting (against) Violence
in Michael Haneke's Funny Games U.S.
Abstract: This article aims at exploring Haneke's Funny Games U.S. as a protest against violence employed in the mainstream cinema. Satisfying compensatory needs of the spectators, constructing their identities, and even contributing to the biopolitics of neoliberalism, proliferating bloodthirsty fantasies put scholars in a suspicious position of treating them as either purely aesthetical phenomena or exclusively ethical ones. Haneke's film seems to resist such a clear-cut binary; what is more, it contributes immensely to the criticism of mainstream cinematic violence. Misleading with its initial setting of a conventional thriller, Haneke employs absurd brutality in order to overload violence itself. The scenes of ruthless tortures are entangled in the ongoing masquerade, during which swapping roles, theatrical gestures, and temporary identities destabilize seemingly fixed positions of perpetrators and their victims, and tamper with the motives behind the carnage. As I would argue, by confronting its spectators with unbearable cruelty devoid of closing catharsis, Funny Games deconstructs their bloodthirsty desire of retaliation and unmasks them as the very reason for the violence on screen. Following, among others, Jean-Luc Nancy and Henry A. Giroux, I would like to demonstrate how Haneke exhausts the norm of acceptable violence to reinstate such a limit anew.

In the broadest possible terms, this paper aims at exploring the relation between death and insects in Samuel Beckett with a special emphasis put on the fact that it is insects that form one of the most repetitive and complex animal figures in his oeuvre. Surprisingly, his otherwise desolate and bleak spaces – despite the inherent anthropocentric framework they are founded on – are inhabited by the plethora of nonhuman species. Insects are here no exception; Beckett's writings are abundant in references to flies, bees, hornets, wasps, or ants. The paper begins with confronting Alain Badiou's take on Beckett with Rosi Braidotti's and Giorgio Agamben's theories, including the anthropological machine. It is argued that, contrary to the human figures condemned to ceaseless agony and torment deprived of the ultimate horizon of death, insects belong entirely to the realm of death in Beckett; in other words, they struggle to breach through the wall of life. In order to prove that, I discuss the unclear ontological status of Worm in The Unnamable. Moreover, the paper reconstructs Moran's relation to his bees, depicted in Molloy, including his insightful study of the waggle dance and the discovery of their cadavers. Finally, the paper focuses on the logic of a swarm, which Beckett seems to be fascinated with, and the metonymies of insect tropes and technology, whose Thanatic aspects disclose the unsettling connections between humans and nonhumans in Beckett's works.