All Too Human Violence: a Psychoanalytic Reading of Michael Haneke's Glaciation Trilogy - Violência demasiadamente humana: uma leitura psicanalítica da Trilogia da Frieza, de Michael Haneke

Jessica Samantha Lira Da Costa

Affiliation: Federal University of Pará, Belém, Brazil

Keywords: Psychoanalysis, Cinema, Violence, Glaciation trilogy, Apathy

Categories: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, Demetrios Project

DOI: 10.17160/josha.11.5.1007

Languages: Portuguese

The present study focused on the notion of violence in Freud's work, here thought of in a possible articulation with Michael Haneke's cinema - more specifically, with the director's entitled Glaciation trilogy, composed of the films The Seventh Continent (1989), Benny's Video (1992) and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994). In this sense, avoiding the pretension of carrying out interpretations of a reductionist and/or merely pathologizing nature, its objectives can be divided into four central parts: 1) to approach the construction, development and nuances of the notion of violence in Freud's thought; 2) to carry out a theoretical-conceptual rescue about the relations between psychoanalysis and cinematographic art; 3) to scrutinize the specificity of Hanekian cinema and the filmography analyzed here; 4) to carry out a psychoanalytical reading of Haneke's Glaciation trilogy. To this end, the methodology adopted here consisted of a bibliographic review, privileging, as suggested above, the Freudian theoretical framework, and film analysis, privileging, as reported, scientific methodological rigor, so that we could contemplate the Hanekian works, from the decomposition of its elements. Regarding the results, we came to understand that the greatest violence represented by Haneke's cinema is the violence caused by human apathy. Considering that after the incursions made, we noticed that the manifestation of the death drive, in the form of apathy, contributes to a kind of psychic implosion and that, consequently, leads to the annihilation of human psychic activity. It was concluded that there is a peculiar type of symbolic and silent violence transmitted through Michael Haneke's cinema, violence so overwhelming that it drives man to the radical abyss, that is, the overly apathetic violence that we work on in the thesis. Indeed, if there is hope to combat this relentless evil, such a fight can and should also be employed through the word and listening, where psychoanalysis is summoned.

---

Leave a comment