MICHAEL

HANEKE
KO GUSSA
KYON
ATA HAI
how evil is
enough evil or
the riddle
of the biopic

SEASON
TWO
representation
sovan tarafder
 MICHAEL
HANEKE

HISTORY KO GUSSA
SEASON TWO
KYON
ATA HAI

FACT
REALITY

and thus
SPECTACLE
spake
haneke
FICTION
COMMODITY
 MICHAEL
HANEKE
SEASON TWO KO GUSSA
what adorno wrote KYON
ATA HAI

cultural criticism finds itself today faced with the final state
of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. to write poetry after
auschwitz is barbaric. and this corrodes even the knowledge of
why it has become impossible to write poetry today.

theodor w adorno, culture critique and society

perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a

tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to
say that after auschwitz you could no longer write poems. but
it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after
auschwitz you can go on living — especially whether one who
escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed,
may go on living. his mere survival calls for the coldness, the
basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there
could have been no auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt put on him
who was spared.

theodor w adorno, negative dialectic

 MICHAEL
HANEKE
SEASON TWO KO GUSSA
KYON
ATA HAI

leni riefenstahl
HISTORY
MICHAEL
HANEKE

FACT
SEASON TWO KO GUSSA
KYON
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 PROPAGANDA
MICHAEL
HANEKE
SEASON TWO KO GUSSA
KYON

SIMULATION
ATA HAI

the simulacrum is never that which conceals the

truth --- it is the truth which conceals that there is
none.
the simulacrum is true

to simulate is to feign to have what one hasn’t...

but the matter is more complicated, since to simulate
is not simply to feign:
someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed
and pretend she is ill. someone who simulates an
illness produces in herself some of the symptoms

thus, feigning leaves the reality principle

intact --- the difference is always clear, it is only
jean baudrillard masked.

whereas simulation threatens the difference between

true and false, between real and imaginary.
because the simulator produces true symptoms, is he
or she ill or not?
 MICHAEL
HANEKE
SEASON TWO KO GUSSA
KYON
ATA HAI

the simulator produces true symptoms

truth claiming truth truth
itself as positioning manipulating the
unitary and itself as audience via
irreplaceable spectacular humane emotion

if so, then what about the reality principle that seeks to

maintain the dividing line between the true and the false?
 MICHAEL
HANEKE
SEASON TWO KO GUSSA
KYON
ATA HAI

oliver hirschbiegel’s film has been criticised for humanising

hitler. it does precisely this - and makes him seem, in
consequence, far more grotesque and sulphurous than any
of the dozens of picturesque newsreel documentaries on tv.

it restores to him evil’s banality, in hannah arendt’s phrase,

and its silliness and cheapness.

any movie which removes the great dictator from the

horrors of the camps and places him in a situation which he
is history’s biggest loser, risks conferring, if not tragedy
exactly, then the pathos of a cut-price götterdämmerung
(twilight of the gods)
peter bradshaw guardian, , 1 april 2005
 MICHAEL
HANEKE
SEASON TWO KO GUSSA
the controversy KYON
ATA HAI

does the notion of the banality of evil

trivialize the outcome of evil? or, is it an
insight into the commonplace motives of its
perpetrators?

the answer
at the end of a six-page letter to gerhard
scholem, arendt wrote:

i... no longer speak of radical evil…

hannah arendt
coined the term banality of evil
while covering the 1961 trial of
adolf eichmann
it is indeed my opinion now that evil is
never radical, that it is only extreme,
and that it possesses neither depth nor
any demonic dimension...
it is thought-defying, as i said, because
thought tries to reach some depth, to
go to the roots, and the moment it
concerns itself with evil, it is
frustrated because there is nothing.
that is its banality. only the good has
depth that can be radical.
 MICHAEL
HANEKE
SEASON TWO KO GUSSA
KYON
ATA HAI
tragedyfarcetragedyfarcetragedyfarce
hegel remarks
somewhere that all great
world-historic facts and
personages appear, so to
speak, twice. he forgot to
add: the first time as tragedy, the
second time as farce.

karl marx referring respectively to

napoleon I and to his nephew
louis napoleon (napoleon III)

the eighteenth brumaire of louis

napoleon
 MICHAEL

READING
HANEKE
SEASON TWO KO GUSSA
FOR FURTHER
KYON
ATA HAI

A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation

Deborah Cartmell (ed.) 2012; Wiley-Blackwell
A Companion to Literature and Film
Robert Stam, Alessandra Raengo 2004; Wiley-Blackwell
Untying the Text: A Post-structuralist Reader
Robert Young (Ed.) Routledge and Kegan Paul
Foucault Reader Paul Rainbow (Ed.) Penguin
For Beginners (Comic book -- Postmodernism and Deconstruction) By Jim Powell
Dictionary of Critical Theory (Penguin / Oxford)
Mythologies, Roland Barthes, vintage classics
Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings,
Mark Poster (ed.); Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988
Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices
Stuart Hall. Sage Publications & Open University
thanks
sovan tarafder
sovan.eisamay@gmail.com