Continuum

Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

ISSN: 1030-4312 (Print) 1469-3666 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccon20

Caché: Or what the past hides

Susannah Radstone

To cite this article: Susannah Radstone (2010) Caché: Or what the past hides, Continuum, 24:1,
17-29, DOI: 10.1080/10304310903362767

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Published online: 28 Jan 2010.

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Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
Vol. 24, No. 1, February 2010, 17–29

Caché: Or what the past hides

Susannah Radstone*

School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of East London, London, UK

Michael Haneke’s film Caché (Hidden) (2005) has provoked a good deal of criticism
and debate, much of it focusing on the question of the ‘hidden’ to which the film’s title
refers. Responses to the film have tended to focus on Caché’s relations with colonial
history as trauma, aligning the film’s ‘hidden’ with the dissociated memory of France’s
‘dirty war’ against Algeria. The psychoanalytic theory of Jean Laplanche offers the
Humanities an approach to culture that diverges from the version of trauma theory
drawn on by many of Caché’s commentators. This essay takes up Laplanche’s ideas in
the context of a critique of trauma theory and aims to demonstrate their potential to
shed light not only on Caché but also on culture’s relations with temporality, violence,
and the enigmatic.

But, in the enigmatic signifier, there is not only an explicit message, but also an implicit
message, and the child cannot but understand that there is something hidden in it . . .
(Laplanche, in Fletcher and Stanton 1992, 22)
The key question that confronts Haneke’s film is the following: what, exactly, is caché?
(Khanna 2007, 237)
What might it mean to speak of the ‘hidden’? If Michael Haneke’s provocative and much
commented upon film Caché (Hidden) (2005) invites speculation on this theme, much of
the film’s criticism has responded by naming, locating, identifying the ‘hidden’ to which
Caché is understood to refer. But can the ‘hidden’ be named? Can it be found? Can it be
located? And if so, in what sense? These are questions that, if we descend from the abstract
to the more concrete, can be seen to bear forcefully on those debates about history, memory
and representation that have been inflecting humanities research for some time.
Particularly in the field of trauma theory,1 the quest to find traces of lost and hidden past
experiences – lost and hidden, on this account, because too terrible to be directly recalled –
has animated much recent research. In film, literary and media studies, as well as in
branches of history, sociology and elsewhere, research has been transformed into acts of
bearing (secondary) witness to testimonies that only the dialogics of reading or spectating
can begin to interpret (Felman and Laub 1992; Caruth 1992, 1995). This critical turn has
radically altered understandings of what texts and criticism can and ought to do. At stake in
these interpretative projects is a model of temporality in which past traumatic experiences
are considered to belatedly make their presence felt, an epistemology that holds that past
experiences of trauma can, if only with difficulty and to a degree, pass from the
unknowable to the knowable, from the inchoate to the specifiable, and from the hidden to
the light, and an ethics that deems it a critical duty to bear witness to the sufferings of

*Email: s.radstone@uel.ac.uk

ISSN 1030-4312 print/ISSN 1469-3666 online

q 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/10304310903362767
http://www.informaworld.com
18 S. Radstone

the past. But, as I’ve already begun to ask, does ‘the hidden’ bear belated witness to the
traumatic past? Can it be located, named, interpreted? And is the quest to bear witness
and to speak of the hidden, understood in these terms, either realizable by, or a duty of,
criticism?
Caché is a film that makes great play of what is, and remains hidden – to its characters,
to its camera and to its spectators. This formal and thematic motif extends from Caché’s
much commented upon opening credits sequence – a long shot of a house, seen (but by
whom?) from across a Parisian street, to its closing frames – another long shot, again from
across the street, of children on the steps outside their school, from which ‘crucial plot
information was apparently hidden within the background activity of the image’ (Cousins
2007, 223). The film, in the apposite words of Libby Saxton, ‘turns on a series of attempts
to uncover the identity and motives of a hidden presence who observes, films and even, in
a certain sense, directs the action from beyond the frame’ (2007, 7; emphasis added). But if
this presence, and more besides, remains hidden beyond the temporal and spatial frames of
Caché’s closing shots, the comparatively precipitate revelation of other story information
only contributes to the film’s inscrutability. Caché is not a film that can adequately be
summed up, then, nor does the provocation of its final shot bring its story to an end. This
radical openness, though it stretches beyond the film’s formal ending, can be foreclosed or
redeemed, however, by a criticism of ‘the hidden’. This essay explores how criticism
might acknowledge what remains hidden in Caché and seeks to demonstrate why such a
critical turn might matter.

Trauma and the hidden

Haneke’s much awarded film Caché is not a work that lends itself to easy generic
categorization or summary. That, indeed, is the point, in a sense, of what I want to go on to
say. Part art movie, part thriller, Caché concerns itself with a couple, Georges (Daniel
Auteuil) and Anne (Juliet Binoche) who, as the DVD jacket has it,
live the perfect life of comfort and security in modern day Paris. They have a teenage son and
Georges hosts a popular literary review TV programme while Anne works in publishing. One
day, they start receiving packages on their doorstep that contain video surveillance footage
shot secretly from their street, accompanied by disturbing drawings. (Dendy/Madman 2005)
As Caché unfolds, it begins to seem that these tapes – although authorially ‘unmarked’
and altogether lacking definitive signs of their origin or meaning – may be linked with
Georges’s temporary adoptive step-brother Majid, whose apartment appears in one of the
deposited tapes and who Georges eventually visits and aggressively confronts. Majid, the
child of Algerian parents murdered in the Paris massacre of protestors demonstrating for
Algerian independence in October 1961,2 was, so Georges reveals, taken in by Georges’s
parents after the massacre, but was subsequently expelled to an orphanage on the basis of
Georges’s fabricated accusations. It was he, Georges discloses, who turned his parents
against Majid by persuading him to kill one of the family’s chickens and by falsely
claiming that Majid was coughing up blood – a sign of tuberculosis. Georges ultimately
confesses something of this guilty past to his wife Anne, before going once more to
Majid’s apartment at his request, whereupon Majid, after insisting that the tapes were not
his work, slits his own throat with a knife, sinking to the floor before a motionless Georges,
who, after heading to the cinema,3 returns home to what appears to be an increasingly
disintegrating life.
Much of the literature on Caché returns to the theme of France’s war with Algeria. But
Caché was made and released in the year of the ‘banlieu riots’, that uprising of protests
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 19

against racism and unemployment that shook Paris, and then France, in 2005 and in which
at least two North African youths lost their lives. It’s not hard to propose that, with its
closed-in camerawork, its aesthetic and narrative concerns with surveillance, its
claustrophobic interiority, its defended, or even barricaded domestic mise-en-scène, and
its scenes of explosive conflict between Georges and a North African cyclist, Caché
‘describes’ those tensions – critically perhaps – from the point of view of the privileged
and anxious white middle class.
The linearity of Caché’s narrative is punctuated by what appear to be temporally
unplaceable and ambiguously motivated short sequences and shots of a boy, sometimes
with bleeding face – and by shots of strange, childish drawings of a bloodied face and a
bleeding chicken that accompany some of the videotapes. These shots and sequences,
which later become placeable as still ambiguously motivated flashbacks relating to Majid
and the killing of the chicken, have led critics to take Caché as a trauma film4 belonging to
the history of a French and Algerian cinema ‘punctuated’ by the trauma of the Algerian war
(Austin 2007, 529). Martine Beugnet has proposed, for instance, that those critics who have
‘account[ed] for the effect of the disincarnated presence . . . that the film’s apparatus
creates, merely in terms of the sadistic inclination of a demiurgic filmmaker intent on
manipulating his audience’ (Beugnet 2007, 228) disregard the trauma embedded in the film.
Though the theme of the hidden – inflected, as it has become, by the paradigm of trauma
theory – permeates Caché’s voluminous criticism, a range of political and theoretical
imperatives have informed commentators’ responses to the question of what it is that is
hidden in, or by, the film. Focusing on audience conversations prompted by the film, Mark
Cousins diverges from the majority in suggesting that the film’s concern with colonial guilt
hides its provocation – for middle-class privileged audiences at least – of more abstract and
philosophical anxieties about the apparent meaning of its narrative and the trustworthiness of
its narration. Far more commonly, and in line with trauma theory’s focus upon victims,
perpetrators and the injunction to remember the wounds of the past, Caché’s ‘hidden’ is read
in relation to the trauma of violence perpetrated upon the colonized and the guilt that now
ought rightfully to be acknowledged by the colonial power. Paul Gilroy expresses a minority
view when he argues that Caché’s apparent censure of colonialism hides its ‘horrible
accommodation’ (Gilroy 2007, 233) by means of an equation of colonial atrocities with the
childish acts of a six-year-old (235). More frequently, critics have read Caché’s concealed
cameras, its ambiguous points of view, its embedded videos and, for some, its complex
imbrication with childhood, as strategies through which the hidden traumas of colonial
violence begin, after what is commonly agreed to have been ‘a long-lasting silence’
(Beugnet 2007, 227), to make their presence felt or, relatedly, to make visible and to confront
spectators with colonialism’s amnesic modes of disavowal (Beugnet 2007; Saxton 2007).
For Martine Beugnet, it is the video images themselves that inscribe trauma into the
body of the film (2007, 228). This is a trauma hidden by the apparent comfort of Georges
and Anne’s comfortable-looking house, itself ‘partly hidden behind a thick privet hedge’
(227), and, like the set for Georges’s TV review programme, ‘cloaked’ by walls of books.
Recorded by ‘a mysterious, hidden observer . . . an enigmatic presence’ (229), the video
image ‘does not so much “puncture” through this cloak, but rather weaves itself into it, and
reveals it for what it is’ (230) – a screen hiding the traumas of colonial perpetration and
victimhood.
If, for Beugnet, it is video itself that becomes, in Haneke’s vision, ‘the obstinate witness
to the everyday denial of intolerable realities and memories’ (Beugnet 2007, 228) and the
transmitter, by means of its enigmatic recording presence, of the hidden, or even purposively
forgotten agony of the oppressed (231), for others it is the link between the video footage –
20 S. Radstone

or, in one case, the drawings – (Austin 2007) and a child’s eye view that lifts the cloak. On
this account, Caché’s ‘other’ emerges, not as the victim of colonial violence but as ‘the
Child, who remains the ultimate locus of knowledge and judgement’ (Mecchia 2007, 132).
This ‘child-director’, is not, as has also been suggested, Haneke as ‘concealed sadistic child
playing with images’ (Rehm, qtd in Beugnet 2007, 231). The child-director acts, rather, as
the bearer of ‘the implacable gaze of a relentless and scandalously innocent onlooker, this
time hidden behind the mechanical eye of the camera’ (Mecchia 2007, 132), and serves as
what Mecchia, following Rancière, terms a ‘restorer of appearances’. Under the watchful
gaze of a child-witness who hides within all of us (140), Caché’s child-director reveals, on
Mecchia’s account, truths of colonial guilt – truths that might otherwise remain concealed
by the ‘adult world of prejudice and deception’ (131, abstract).
If, for Mecchia, Beugnet’s observing yet enigmatic presence becomes the much less
enigmatic child-director, the hidden truth that both find revealed by the video camera’s
look is that of traumatic colonial violence and guilt – a guilt and violence indissociably
linked with the after-effects of France’s dirty war and, in particular, the October
massacres. On these accounts, this is a ‘hidden’ that can, if only with difficulty, come to be
located, named, known.
Other readings of Haneke’s work and of Caché place greater stress on the viewing
positions opened up by his particular manipulations of the camera, the image and the look.
Lebeau’s recent essay on Haneke directs our attention to that formative relay of looks
exchanged between mother and child. Following the psychoanalytic theory of D.W.
Winnicott, Lebeau proposes that within this process of exchange the reflected image of
both mother and child may be too present or too absent, creating a deadness in place of life
(2009). Lebeau’s suggestion that Haneke’s work attempts to acknowledge and address a
pathology within contemporary regimes of looking which might be equated with a
foundational and primary pathology of the visual, sustains an association between
Haneke’s work, childhood and looking while embedding this within a psychoanalytic
frame. But, even though Lebeau alludes to Haneke’s concerns with violence – ‘violence’,
she suggests, ‘is never far from Haneke’s screen’ (Lebeau 2009, 42) – in this universalist
approach to the psychoanalytics of the visual, relations between historical violence, visual
culture and the negation of ‘coming to life’ (37) remain obscure.
Focused, too, on the spectatorial relations opened up by Caché, and upon the ‘enigmatic
look [that] is at once the origin and the blind spot of the narrative’, Libby Saxton’s (2007)
discussion of the film moves on to contemplate the enigma posed more generally by Caché’s
play on what remains hidden in off-screen space, suggesting that it ‘emerges as the site of a
historical trauma’ (9). Yet as Saxton goes on to point out, off-screen space remains a
‘repository of latent meaning’, provoking the film’s spectators to acknowledge their blind
spots (15). But can off-screen space be resolved as a site of historical trauma, while
remaining replete with latent meaning? Can that which continues to remain hidden be
specified in this way? And is that ‘hidden’ to which Caché’s commentators and trauma
theory have addressed themselves best understood as the trace of a traumatic past? The
writings of the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche can help us to explore these questions.

Enigmatic signification and the hidden

Laplanche’s psychoanalytic theory has not been drawn on as extensively as it might have
been by trauma theorists. Yet his work offers the opportunity to reconfigure trauma
theory’s understandings of temporality, history, culture and, in particular, the role of the
critic. Laplanche’s radical re-thinking of Freudian psychoanalysis overturns previous
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 21

understandings of the constitution of the unconscious, of trauma, and of the transmissions

that constitute culture and the earliest and most formative of infantile experiences. These
insights provide us with new ways of understanding what might be meant by ‘the hidden’
in culture, in the unconscious and, not least, in Caché.
For Laplanche, the unconscious is constituted from the residues of attempts to translate
enigmatic signifiers embedded within messages addressed to us by the other.5 The
Laplanchian other refers not to Lacan’s abstractly formulated ‘Other’ but to that actual
other, primarily the earliest caretaker, with whom the infant shares its foundational
experiences and from whom the infant receives its first communications. If we think of the
example given by Laplanche of a child feeding at the breast, a dimension of this
experience screened by earlier psychoanalytic understandings, but stressed by Laplanche,
is the formative nature for the child of its experiences of the sexuality and desire of the
breast-feeding mother or nurse. Aspects of this scenario and this experience remain
enigmatic both for the child and for the mother, argues Laplanche. As Fletcher explains:
[t]he messages directed towards the infant are enigmatic, not just because the infant has no
access to a code to determine their meaning, or because they outstrip its capacities for
understanding, but because, compromised by the unconscious wishes of the other, they are
opaque to the adult as well. (Fletcher 1999, 12)
Laplanche’s description of the process through which the child becomes caught up with
these enigmatic messages as a seduction (Laplanche 1989; Fletcher 1999; Fletcher and
Stanton 1992) signals the absolute relevance of his writings for trauma theory. Purposively
conversing with and revising both the Freud of recovered memory and the Freud of the
seduction fantasy, Laplanche’s ‘seduction’ refers neither to the child’s actual sexual abuse
by a parental figure, nor to the child’s repressed sexual fantasies concerning the parent but
to the infant’s entanglement with those enigmatic messages to which it is passively
exposed and that it struggles to translate. That these translations will always remain partial
and incomplete is a premise of the seduction theory that begins to converse with and
unsettle trauma theory. Laplanche introduces us to a world of interminable translation –
interminable because, as Fletcher explains, ‘the child’s attempt to substitute a signifier or
signifying sequence of its own, for the enigmatic signifier or message of the other, always
leaves something untranslated; . . . the à traduire, the yet-to-be-translated’ (Fletcher 1999,
16). The Laplanchian unconscious is formed neither from the traces of inadmissible sexual
fantasies nor from the imprint of unacknowledgeable encounters with actual adult
seducers; it is constituted neither from fantasy nor from dissociated reality but from what
remains untranslatable in the enigmatic messages it receives from the other. For
Laplanche, the ego is formed in this process of translating these earliest messages (Caruth
2001, 36). Later traumas (where Laplanche uses the term) come to be experienced from
the perspective of these enigmatic messages. But this is not to say that the meanings given
to traumas are derived simply from the past. Laplanche’s concept of ‘afterwardsness’
(Fletcher 1999, esp. 261ff.; Fletcher and Stanton 1992, 217 – 27; Caruth 2001) describes a
process of translation that brings forwards and refers back to the earliest residues of
translation, continuously attempting to re-translate the untranslated in revised terms.
At a stroke, Laplanchian seduction theory – Laplanche frequently substitutes the term
seduction, where an interlocutor has referred to trauma6 – destabilizes trauma theory’s
sometimes problematic7 understandings of temporality and experience. If trauma theory
posits a traumatic temporality of belatedness or latency, suggesting that trauma holds the
present captive to a dissociated or unrepresentable past, seduction theory posits, rather,
a temporality of afterwardsness – a synthesis of deferred action with ‘after-the-event’
22 S. Radstone

understanding (Caruth 2001, 11 –23) prompted by those enigmatic messages from

the other, and by ‘what is radically not known, both at the beginning, and later’
(Caruth 2001, 18). On the question of traumatic experience, seduction theory moves us
some way from trauma theory’s emphasis either on the actuality or on the experienced
actuality of traumatic events. ‘Why do I speak of translation and not of interpretation?’
Laplanche asks, before responding that ‘[i]nterpretation may mean that you interpret some
factual situation. Translation means that there is no factual situation that can be translated.
If something is translated, that’s already a message’ (Caruth 2001, 108). That this
understanding extends even to those experiences that are regarded, by trauma theory, as
overwhelming and unrepresentable traumas is confirmed when Laplanche, responding to
Caruth’s direct questions about how he conceives of traumatic events, takes up the
example of the recent Mexican earthquake, commenting:
I mean that, ultimately, a trauma like that may be – and this is very strange – in consonance
with something like a message. After all, even an earthquake could be taken in as a message. Not
just something that is factual, but something that means something to you. (Caruth 2001, 51)
Emphasizing, as he does, the formative impact of those first messages from the other,
the temporality of the translations and re-translations that, for Laplanche, constitute the
essence of psychical life, confound our binaries of past or future orientation. ‘I see the
translation drive’, Laplanche explains,
as the root of the temporalisation of the human being, and I consider its driving force to lie not
in the translator but in the internal, non-temporal, simultaneous disequilibrium of the
enigmatic message, which supplies the force of a ‘to be translated’. (Fletcher 1999, 190)
Laplanche’s theory of enigmatic signification radically revises psychoanalytic under-
standings of temporality by eschewing both a radical determinism of the present by the
past and the radical relativism of hermeneutics’ construction of the past by the present.
With its emphasis on even the ‘primary moment . . . as a proto-understanding’ (Fletcher
2003, 7), and on the equivalence of traumas to enigmatic messages, Laplanchian theory
opens the door to a new approach to ‘the hidden’, understood not as the trace of a past
traumatic event or experience but as the à traduire, the signifier of an otherness that
remains opaque both to the sender of the enigmatic message as well as to its addressee.
This ‘hidden’ resists localization either to a past of primary seduction, or to those present
agitations of re-translation (even this formulation risks too temporally linear a
representation of the interweaving of deferred action and retrospection constitutive of
Laplanchian translation). It is a ‘hidden’ that resists, also, as we’ve seen, the interpretative
strategies of classical psychoanalysis. What, then, can Laplanchian seduction theory
contribute to our understanding of Caché’s ‘hidden’?
As several critics have noted, Caché was one of those films that ‘gets you talking, and
keeps you talking for days afterwards’ (Cousins 2007, 223; see also Ezra and Sillars
2007a, 211; Gilroy 2007, 233). The film’s plotting and narration provoke the spectator to
countless acts of revision, as it prompts, in subsequent scenes or shots, ‘re-translations’ of
the story the film has previously seemed to tell. Take the opening and much discussed
credits sequence, for instance. A long shot, objective motionless camerawork framing an
urban scene – a house, faint sounds of street life match diegetic sound with space,
through certain sounds – a door closing? – seem to belong to an interior, rather than an
exterior shot. A cyclist crosses the camera’s field – a woman leaves the house. To all
intents and purposes an establishment shot introducing the spectator to the film’s fictional
world – not ‘classical’, for the shot is of markedly and discomfortingly longer duration
than might be expected, and the sound a little too ambiguous – perhaps an ‘art film’, we
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 23

might think. And on the sound track: ‘Alors? [Well?]’, asks a male voice, to be responded
to in the irritated tone of a female interlocutor with ‘rien [nothing]’. Then – ‘where was
it?’ and the response – ‘in a plastic bag on the porch’. And a cut to the same house at
night – a man coming out and looking around, a woman emerging behind him – before
back to the house in daylight. But then, in mid-frame, the familiar distorting lines across
the screen of a fast-forwarded video-tape disrupt our understanding, prompting us to re-
translate what we had been lulled into assuming was the opening up, by an apparent
establishment sequence, of the diegetic space of an illusory ‘real world’ that we now re-
translate as the screening of a video.

Secrets, intromission and the hidden

‘I hate this word “applied”’, exclaims Laplanche (Fletcher and Stanton 1992, 34):
applied means you find all the information somewhere and you just apply it like you apply
something to skin . . . psychoanalysis ‘outside the walls’, or outside the cure, should have the
ambition to have findings of its own: that is, to find other methods, for, as I have said, the
main method you don’t have, because you don’t have a person to give you free associations.
But you have many other ways: for instance, trying to define the effect of the work . . . This
is not just applied, because after all you have to invent. (Laplanche, in Fletcher and Stanton
1992, 34 – 5)
Thus Laplanche challenges and assists cultural theory. But he goes further still,
overturning our previous understandings of the relations that psychoanalysis constructs
between individual psychical life and culture. In place of an approach that ‘applies’ to
culture a psychoanalysis rooted in clinical work with individuals, Laplanche proposes that
culture might best be conceived of itself in the terms of enigmatic signification. ‘One of the
major dimensions of the cultural domain’, suggests Laplanche, is
this provocation by the enigma of the other. The cultural message, the artistic ‘creation’ is
situated beyond a purely pragmatic aim . . . It is in its depths, provoked by the ‘nameless
public’, ‘scattered into the future’, who will receive (or not) this message in a bottle. (Fletcher
1999, 111)
Speaking of the relation between clinical and cultural analysis, Laplanche goes further,
suggesting that clinical analysis may be, in a sense, secondary to the analysis of culture:
We wish to transpose the model of clinical transference onto what lies beyond it . . . but
maybe transference is already, ‘in itself’, outside the clinic. If one accepts that the
fundamental dimension of transference is the relation to the enigma of the other, perhaps the
principal site of transference, ‘ordinary’ transference, before, beyond, or after analysis, would
be the multiple relation to the cultural, to creation, or, more precisely, to the cultural message.
(Fletcher 1999, 222)
If culture in its entirety is constituted by Laplanchian theory as a field of enigmatic
signification, then I want to propose, provisionally, that Caché might be regarded both as a
film about and as a film of enigmatic signification.8 If we say that the process of enigmatic
signification, translation and re-translation is figured by the characters’ responses to the
intrusions and provocations of those video-tapes and drawings, then we can say that Caché
is literally ‘about’, or a metanarrative of, Laplanchian seduction theory. If we wanted to
substantiate this claim further, we could point to Georges’s job as a TV literary review chat
show host and Anne’s as a literary editor – there is a surfeit of evidence to support a
reading of Caché as a film about the attempt to translate and re-translate enigmatic
signifiers. But if we focus on the enigmas surrounding the subjectivity or objectivity of the
video-camera and the film’s final shot’s apparent suggestion of a friendship between
24 S. Radstone

Majid’s son and Georges’s and Anne’s son, another perspective emerges. The
foregrounding of those aspects of the film that have provoked spectators into that endless
talking ‘for days afterwards’, as commented upon by Cousins and others, produces a
differently nuanced account of Caché. From this perspective, Caché emerges as a film that
is both ‘of’ as well as ‘about’ enigmatic signification – a film that literalizes, perhaps, the
agitating properties of the enigmatic signifier, initiating the spectatorial quest for that
which the enigmatic signifier ‘hides’.
But I said that I’d only provisionally propose that we read Caché as a film that is both
‘of’ and ‘about’ enigmatic signification. Now – true to the spirit of Laplanche, and
provoked by all that my initial proposal leaves untranslated, I find I must re-visit the
enigma that Caché poses for me.
If culture is a field of enigmatic signification – its messages addressed to a ‘nameless
future public’ – what does it mean to find oneself drawn to discuss a particular film in the
very terms of enigmatic signification – what does it mean to read Caché as
enigmatography? I’ve said that there is almost a surfeit of evidence to support this
reading but there is also much that remains to be seen. Attention to those elements that
remain redundant to a reading of Caché as ‘simple’ enigmatography may help us to remain
alive to what remains hidden in Caché.
In the opening sequence, this redundancy extends through a range of filmic elements.
At the level of mise-en-scène, it includes the scene’s bleached-out tonality and colour,
Georges’s and Anne’s dowdy appearance and baggy, ill-fitting clothes and Georges’s
slumped posture. In the field of performance, elements that fall outside my previous
reading include the staccato and inexpressive delivery of dialogue, together with a sense of
conversation ‘going nowhere’, of stalling, and of the frequent recurrence of ‘unresponsive
responses’ such as ‘alors?’ or ‘quoi?’, accompanied by shrugs of irritated, impatient
incomprehension. Overall, the impression this scene – and much of the rest of the film –
conveys, is one of interruption, stagnation, immobility, stalling. Though we might read all
of this in terms of Caché’s evocation of an anxious middle class, claustrophobically
barricaded within a postmodern, postcolonial world of inescapable surveillance, surfaces,
screens, and, one might add, affectlessness, what is most striking is the contrast evident
between the endless conversations prompted by the film and its evocation of deadlock,
impasse, blockage – of a certain deadness. A surfeit of evidence first drew me to associate
Caché with enigmatic signification. But perhaps that surfeit was itself symptomatic –
perhaps it is only when a machine goes wrong that it draws itself to our attention.
Included in Laplanche’s account of psychical life as the translation and re-translation
of enigmatic ‘signifiers’ is a discussion of the more pathological variant of these processes:
Implantation [of enigmatic signifiers] is a process which is common, everyday, normal or
neurotic. Beside it, as its pathological variant, a place must be given to intromission. While
implantation allows the individual to take things up actively, at once translating and
repressing, one must try to conceive of a process which blocks this, short-circuits
differentiation of the agencies in the process of their formation, and puts into the interior an
element resistant to all metabolisation. (Fletcher 1999, 136)
Laplanche’s account appears to describe a process affecting the very formation of the
psyche – a process that must therefore be taken to occur in early infancy, rather than one
that can be located within culture, conceived of as acting upon, or acting ‘like’ an already
‘formed’ psyche. Yet Caché’s ‘arrested’ dialogue, with its blockages, its ‘alors?’ and its
‘riens’, its multiply static qualities of camera and of bodies, its colourlessness, its lack of
‘life’, make me wonder about the film’s – and culture’s – relations with intromission
rather than, or better, as well as, with translation.
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 25

Can intromission, understood in Laplanche’s terms, be associated with the cultural?

Or is the concept’s use to be restricted only to processes occurring in early childhood?
As we’ve seen, at points, Laplanche’s account of the psyche/culture relation seems to
overturn the psychoanalytic view of culture as a secondary field within which the primary
processes of infancy are repeated, revised, or worked through. Laplanche announces, for
instance, that
[t]he biological individual, the living human, is saturated from head to foot by the invasion of
the cultural, which is by definition intrusive, stimulating and sexual. How has analysis been
able to lose sight of this truth, which was ready to emerge alongside the theory of seduction?
(Fletcher 1999, 225)
As we have also seen, Laplanche has advised the cultural critic, particularly where the
effects of a text are in question, that ‘you have to invent’ (Fletcher and Stanton 1992, 35).
Taking courage from Laplanche’s own counsel, I will step further, allowing my intuitive
sense of Caché’s intromissive qualities – of mise-en-scène, of performance, and more – to
lead me to my own response to the enigma of Caché’s ‘hidden’. For, if we allow that
something akin to intromission may bear upon culture,9 then Laplanche can help us to see
that what is ‘hidden’ in Caché – or, perhaps better put, the absence around which Caché
pivots – is that of ‘the hidden’ itself.
In his sharply argued dismissal of Caché, Paul Gilroy has reminded us that: ‘[s]ince
Fanon, we have known that colonialism brings out the worst in everyone it touches’
(Gilroy 2007, 235). For Gilroy, Caché fails because ‘it offers precious little beyond that
simple insight’ (235). Contrasting Caché’s aestheticism, and even its colonialist collusion
(234), with an imagined cinema that might do better justice to the dead and to the
complexity of postcolonial politics, Gilroy comments that:
When the Majids of this world are allowed to develop into deeper, rounded characters endowed
with all the psychological gravity and complexity that is taken for granted in ciphers like
Georges, we will know that substantive progress has been made towards breaking the white,
bourgeois monopoly on dramatizing the stresses of lived experience in this modernity. (234)
As we can see, though Gilroy acknowledges the ‘horrible shallowness of the adult
Georges’ (235), Gilroy’s hostility (233) towards Caché is provoked by the film’s silence
concerning Majid’s motivations, its depthless view of his character, its refusal to grant him
an inner life. What would it mean – what would it do to our understanding of Caché – to
re-read Gilroy’s critique in Laplanchian terms? As we have seen, for Laplanche, coming to
life is constituted through the attempt to translate enigmatic signifiers – signifiers that
come to us bearing the hidden and untranslatable traces of the otherness of the other.
In place of ‘deepness’ and ‘roundedness’, the Laplanchian lexicon would refer, rather, to a
‘hollow[ness] in the object’ (Scarfone 2003, 76). Referring to the mother, and speaking for
the infant, Scarfone explains that what seduces
. . . is that other thing which emanates from her, but which isn’t her and which troubles me.
The source object of my drives, the object of my desires, is what is beyond my mother; it is
what makes my mother hollow, which makes her other, which gives her a complexity, a
thickness, or a depth; which makes her psychically real. This is a reality posed from the
beginning in its negativity. (72; final emphasis added)
As we have observed, Guy Austin’s analysis of Caché linked the child drawings with the
belated emergence of Georges’s trauma and guilt, before concluding that ‘what remains
almost entirely unspoken . . . is the trauma suffered by Majid’ (Austin 2007, 534). When I
first read Austin’s conclusion, I knew that it simply didn’t come anywhere close to my
own sense of the film but I knew I needed to return to Majid and my sense of there
26 S. Radstone

being something that I had yet to understand about the uncompromising aspect of that
suicide scene.
Discussing with a friend my own stalling around Caché’s relations with enigmatic
signification and intromission and my sense of this being linked with colonial and
postcolonial violence – the dirty war, the banlieu riots – as well as with Majid and that
terrible suicide scene, enacted before either Georges or the spectator can in any way
prepare themselves for it, my friend said ‘that’s it – Majid’s suicide – it’s in your face’.
And that is ‘it’ – the violence of France’s colonial past, re-translated in continuingly
violent times with its unmetabolized kernal not ‘just’ borne, here, by the body of the
‘other’, Majid, but violently and desperately enacted in Georges’s and in the spectator’s
face. But what does it mean for something to be ‘in your face’ and how might this be
linked with Caché’s ‘hidden’?
Critics of Caché have associated the violence of France’s Algerian war and, in
particular, the October massacre, with a ‘hidden’ (Ezra and Sillars 2007b, 215) or ‘public’
(Khanna 2007, 240) ‘secret’: the tapes, argue Ezra and Sillars,
appear to show little more than the unexceptional surface of their everyday lives, yet they
serve to unlock a secret from the past, a hidden story of colonial suffering – and in doing so
expose the structures of oppression and complicity on which their lives are built. (215;
emphasis added)
In this way, criticism points to the state’s disavowal of the brutality by means of which
colonialist dominance is maintained. In an elaboration of Laplanche’s concept of
intromission, Dominique Scarfone explores how Laplanchian psychoanalysis might
approach the idea of the secret. In the primary scene, enigmatic signification involves the
sending by the adult to the child of a message described by Scarfone as ‘compromised’.10
An important feature of this process is that ‘the adult of the compromised message must
also be the adult who allows a compromise-formation . . . “translat[ing] for the infant”,
while transmitting to the child that which is destined to remain enigmatic’ (Scarfone 2003,
73). It is through this process that the reality-testing to which Scarfone refers – ‘a reality
posed from the beginning in its negativity’ (72) comes into play. In contrast to this process,
Scarfone describes a scenario where ‘there are things about which the future psychotic is
not allowed to exercise his autonomous thinking’. But, continues Scarfone, ‘for this
prohibition to be effective, the forbidden things cannot be identified’ (74). This process,
associated by Scarfone with that of intromission and with the transmission of signifiers
that are ‘enigmatic certainly, but without compromise’ (73), is constituted through the
violence not of the message but of its sender (74). If implantation produces, in the receiver,
the capacity to metabolize ‘the hidden’, and, in so doing, to touch upon the ‘negative
reality’ of the otherness of the other – a reality that can be sensed but not translated – in
intromission, by contrast, ‘[A] void is . . . created in the subject’s thinking, soon filled in
by delusional thoughts’ (73 – 4).
Scarfone’s account of the delusions and paranoia resulting from the violence of
intromission brings us back to Caché. Describing the effects of violent intromission in
terms that could constitute an account of the film’s aesthetics, its themes and its central
couple, Scarfone states that:
[p]aranoid hypervigilance seems to me to translate this state of affairs. The feeling of
transparency in relation to others, the delusion of observation . . . maybe as a direct
expression of the non-differentiation of the psychical agencies . . . or else as a projection of its
own permanent observation of the movements of the always menacing other. (75)
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 27

With that latter possibility, Scarfone opens the door, I suggest, to a reading of culture –
and of Caché – in the terms of intromission. But what is the difference between a
colonialist ‘public secret’ and colonialist intromission? This is a difference that hinges on
the question of violence and ‘the hidden’. If the colonial ‘public secret’ can be specified, as
we have repeatedly seen, in the terms of a guilty violence associated with the hidden
traumas of its perpetrators and its victims, intromission’s violence is of a very different
order, for what its message without compromise forecloses – what it hides – is what is
hidden within and by the enigmatic message: ‘the reality of the other as other’ (Scarfone
2003, 76), both to themselves and to ‘us’.
Caché fails, Gilroy tells us, because it offers little beyond the insight that
‘colonialism brings out the worst in everyone it touches’ (235), but colonialism’s effects
upon others are hardly uniform or equal. This is a reality that we can take from the
message without compromise of Majid’s dreadful suicide – a suicide that constitutes, on
the terms I have been proposing, a tragic but powerful response to colonialist
intromission’s effects on the colonized. But perhaps the film goes further, offering the
spectator something more than this disturbing vision. With its paradoxical evocation of
all that cannot be felt or known, Caché transmits to us a sense of what happens when the
hidden is hidden, but also the beginnings of a glimpse of a hidden, the absence of which
has, one might say, animated the film; a hidden destined never to be known. Perhaps this
is what we begin to talk about, but also fail to see, when we seek out, as so many have
done, what it is that Caché ‘hides’: we, Caché’s spectators, are provoked not by a hidden
that can be known, located, specified, but by the glimmer of an à traduire, an intimation
that could animate a different future.

Acknowledgements
With heartfelt thanks to Amal Treacher for sharing with me her profoundly helpful insights about
Caché at critical moment in the writing of this paper. I am also very grateful to Magdalena Zolko for
drawing my attention to Laplanche’s explicit use of the term ‘hidden’ and to John Fletcher for his
encouragement and for pointing me in very useful directions. The research drawn on in this article
was made possible by an award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK)’s Research
Leave Scheme, for which I am very grateful.

Notes
1. For a longer discussions of trauma theory, see Radstone (2007) and Hodgkin and Radstone
(2003). For a thoughtful and provocative recent essay collection on theories of trauma, see Ball
(2007).
2. On 17 October 1961 a peaceful demonstration by supporters of Algeria’s National Liberation
Front (FLN) was violently put down by the police. Many of the protestors were murdered, and
their bodies flung into the Seine. Jim House and Neil MacMaster’s recent book Paris 1961 (2006)
explores the memorial legacy of this atrocity and Libby Saxton’s essay on Caché (2007) also
engages with the film’s relations with this event.
3. A scene that has been associated by one commentator with Haneke’s acknowledgement of
cinema’s inevitable limitations as a ‘process of thought’ (Beugnet 2007, 231).
4. For useful discussions of trauma cinema see Kaplan and Wang 2004 and Walker 2005.
5. For a clear introduction to Laplanche’s writings on enigmatic signification, see Fletcher (1992,
1999).
6. This is particularly noticeable in his interview with Cathy Caruth (2001) in which Laplanche
often responds to Caruth’s questions about trauma by elaborating his theory of seduction.
7. Elsewhere I have written at greater length on the question of trauma theory’s blind spots and
problematic aspects, see particularly Radstone (2001, 2007).
28 S. Radstone

8. Here we need to distinguish this approach from film theory’s routine designation of the questions
that propel narrative forwards, provoking spectatorial curiosity or suspense as ‘the enigma’. Here,
we are dealing with an enigma that provokes but cannot be defined – or analysed – in these terms,
an enigma that may extend to the ontology of the image.
9. I am aware that this proposition requires a fuller elaboration than space permits. A longer version
of this essay will appear in my forthcoming book, Getting over Trauma.
10. Scarfone refers to several linked meanings of the term compromised: the message is a
compromise between two parties, as well as being compromised by the unconscious of the adult
(Scarfone 2003, 73).

Notes on contributor
Susannah Radstone teaches in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of East
London. Recent publications include: The Sexual Politics of Time: Confession, Nostalgia, Memory
(2007); (ed.) with Katharine Hodgkin, Memory Cultures (2005); and (ed.) with Katharine Hodgkin,
Memory, History, Nation (2005). With Bill Schwarz, she has recently completed a large edited
volume on approaches to memory research, to be published by Fordham University Press in April
2010. She is currently completing a project on new approaches to trauma, to be published as Getting
over Trauma.

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