Trauma without a subject: On Malabou, psychoanalysis and Amour

This chapter explores the relationship between the unthinkable and the un-representable in Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012), through an engagement with Catherine Malabou’s dialogue with psychoanalysis in The New Wounded. There, Malabou identifies what she sees as new forms of post-traumatic subjectivity that necessitate “the complete theoretical reinvention of psychopathology”. My approach will come from an avowedly Lacanian orientation, but I will be considering what sort of questions Malabou’s concept of “destructive plasticity” poses for psychoanalysis – and for psychoanalytic approaches to trauma – and wondering whether Žižek’s riposte to Malabou – for example – in Living in the End Times is sufficient to meet her challenge. My approach will also be that of a film theorist, and in this chapter I will be seeking to ask what contribution the cinema can make to this dialogue on “cerebrality” and “plasticity”, and – equally – how this dialogue might help us to approach the depiction of trauma in Haneke’s film. Could Amour constitute a fictionalised, cinematic version of what Malabou (after Luria) refers to as a “neurological novel”, where “Anne is no longer Anne”? After all, Malabou herself refers to literature and theatre in her work, so – I will suggest – why not the cinema? As she says, “narrative work is a clinical gesture”, and so this chapter will explore the possibility – through Amour – that the cinema could stage for the psyche knowledge of a trauma that the psyche itself cannot know. By focusing on Anne, I will attempt to explore the subjectivity of the new wounded and approach, from a Lacanian perspective, the post-traumatic subject’s experience of, for example, inhabiting the same body but in a radically different way.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable: From Culture to the Clinic on 20 September 2016, available online: http://www.routledge.com/9781138954977
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